Too many things to fix? How to decide where to start

The question: Someone has 8 to 10 things about themselves they want to fix, and feels frozen because they can’t see where to start. They have enough savings that they don’t urgently need a job, and they asked: how do you decide what to work on?

When you have so many things to do and you don’t know where to start, it’s often because you’re standing inside the picture. From in there, it’s very hard to see what needs doing. Sometimes you need to step back, so you can look at everything again.

Think of someone on a journey. If they only look at where they are, there are so many directions they could go that they freeze. But once they also know where they want to get to, it becomes much clearer which way to go.

The bigger questions

So before choosing between your 8 to 10 things, it’s worth asking yourself some bigger questions:

• What’s your outlook on life?
• Where do you want to get to?
• Why is improving yourself so important to you? Is it that you have issues and want to heal from them? Or is it more about growing and working on yourself?

Finding your mission

Every person has a mission. Every person is created in a way that they like doing certain things, even without being paid for them. That’s their nature, and that’s their mission. When they do it, they become happy, because they’re doing what they’re meant to do, and their life has meaning.

When you’re on your mission, you start to feel happy and alive. And when you feel alive, obstacles become much easier to handle, because you can see how big each one really is: how much it holds you back from your journey.

Why all 10 things feel urgent

If you’re not going anywhere, every obstacle looks the same size. That’s why all 10 things feel equally urgent. But once you’re focused on where you’re going, some become big and some become small, depending on how much they stand in your way. Many will simply drop off the list.

What about work?

On work: you mentioned you have enough savings that you don’t urgently need a job. Whether that matters depends on what fills your day. If your day is full of things that make you feel alive, that is your work. But if you have a lot of free time and you’re mostly busy with yourself, maybe that’s part of the problem: too much time to think about all your issues. Maybe you need to find something worth doing, so you can get on your journey.

So let’s look at work from a different angle. Every paid job is really helping someone; otherwise nobody would pay for it. And work doesn’t need to be only about money. Everyone has something they’d still love doing even with all the money in the world. When you find what you really like doing by nature and start doing it, you often end up in the right place. You become happier, a vision starts to form, and once you have a vision, everything else starts falling into place. Then you can see clearly which issue is the priority.

Look after the pounds

You don’t need to fix everything first. There’s a saying, “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.” I think it works the other way too: look after the pounds, the bigger picture, and the pennies will look after themselves. Start going in your direction, and things will fall into place.