A better life is just a decision

That sounds too simple, right? OK, maybe its a series of decisions made on a daily basis.

One of the boys had dropped a dryer sheet in the hallway. For 2 days, everyone in the house walked over it. I wanted to see what would happen, but after 2 days I had to pick it up – for 3 reasons –

1. Its not the way I choose to live
2. Leaving it leads to more of the same. They’ll be leaving stuff all over.
3. You have to be the example

Most of us can master some motivation if it only takes a couple minutes and its not too hard. But somehow putting things off seems like the easier decision.

Say you ate out, so there’s not that many dishes in the sink. You choose to ignore it. But the next day the dishes had multiplied, and the food had dried on them. Now it will take 3 times longer.

The dryer finished up just as you were going to go to bed  You decide to ignore it.  Of course the next day when you go to grab a shirt, its all wrinkled. You throw it back in the dryer and turn the dryer back on and go to work. When you get home, the clothes are wrinkled again. It would have taken you 5 minutes if you did it in the first place and you would have saved yourself a lot of frustration.

You decided that this year you are going to put 10% of your pay into savings. But steaks are on sale. And those really cute boots ! You’ll make it up next week…right?

Here’s one I’m dealing with. I was doing good keeping up the weekly financial records. Some how after July it all fell apart. Now I have 6 months to catch up on. It only took a few minutes a week. Now it will take hours.

You’re in a hurry when you take your shower. Somehow the 20 seconds it would take to squeegee the shower seemed too long…until..a week later you are spending an hour trying to scrub soap scum and hard water stains.

You forget to plan dinner for tonight. You’ve got stuff going on. No time to run to the store and cook. It would have been nice to come home and throw something together and relax a bit, but no…Now it means spending more time out in the cold trying to figure out what to get and who wants what. What a pain!

So you see, its a matter of small decisions.

But really it comes down to one big decision. How do you want to live?

What are you willing to tolerate?

Once you make the bigger decision, its easier to make the small decisions.

Lets be honest. You’re never going to feel like folding laundry before bed. But you’ll be much happier if you do. Make sense?

Good. Now put it into practice!