Welcome to NOvember, a series of short, simple reflections on the art of saying no.
The Cheshire Cat was right.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.
We live in an aimless age, partly due to a disordered view of priorities.
The word “priority” comes from the Medieval Latin terms prioritas or prioritatem, meaning “the state of being earlier or first in rank, order, or importance.”
It entered English in the 14th century as a strictly singular noun, denoting the single, most important, or earliest thing.
For 500 years, it remained singular. Then, in the 20th century, we decided that if we changed the definition, we could finally do it all. Modern business culture and management jargon popularized the plural form, “priorities.”
Magic!
No wonder we struggle to juggle all of our “priorities.” There’s no such thing!
When everything is a priority, nothing is.
Having multiple priorities is like not knowing where you’re going.
If you haven’t decided where you want to go, any road will get you there.
And if you haven’t decided on what matters most, the urgent always wins.
Urgency makes everything feel like a priority, leaving us aimless. And exhausted.
The solution is simple. Once you choose a true priority, one path becomes clear, and all others become irrelevant. When you decide what to say yes to, it becomes easier to say no.
When you’ve decided to go to China, you don’t need to worry about how to get to Chile or Chattanooga.
Simple, but not easy. Because you actually have to make a decision.
What matters more…Your career or your family? The bigger salary or the shorter commute? This world or the next?
Simply saying something is a priority is easy, but meaningless. Your true priority is what you do, not what you say. When you have to choose one thing over another, which do you choose more often?
That’s your priority.
In his book “Choosing to Cheat,” Andy Stanley suggests, “Because of our proclivity to veer in the direction of things that stroke our ego, we tend to cheat at home. We give an inordinate amount of our time, energy, and passion to our work.”
We get awards at work. Special parking places. Better offices. Fancy titles. Respect from our peers. Oh, and we get paid cash money.
In contrast, let’s take parenting. It’s a job we do for free. There are no awards, fans, or fancy titles. It’s hard to tell if we’re doing a good job, and we often feel like we aren’t.
These difficult choices require us to sacrifice something we desire, maybe even something very good. Which is why we turned “priority” plural and delude ourselves into we can have it all.
When you feel overwhelmed trying to balance all of your “priorities,” cut yourself some slack. You are awesome, but you can’t do impossible things.
You get one priority. One.
Say yes to that.
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