How much do you want what you want?

Prioritization is essential to living an aligned life. Prioritization is an extremely effective way to better use the resources you presently have for greater meaning than you presently have. While you can make changes to increase the resources available to you, these changes typically require time to bear fruit. Changes to how you use the resources you have can be made immediately.

You can’t have everything, but prioritization ensures that whatever you have is the best you can get. Everything you seek has a price denominated in what you go without in order to do so. Whatever you want will require the sacrifice of other things—either what you already have, what you could have instead, or both. Prioritize what you want, and ensure that what you prioritize as the highest carries over to the short- and long-term decisions you make. Sacrifice all lesser things to all greater things and give your best effort to what is most important.

The greatest things carry the greatest cost. The greatest things in life can only be obtained by those who seek them with their full heart, mind, and strength. Anything that can be obtained with less than full purpose of heart will necessarily be less than the best available to you. In order to obtain the greatest things in life, you’ll have to decide that you want them more than anything else.¹ You will have to prioritize everything that has value, and decide what you want the most.

As you improve your prioritization of what is most important, you will experience drastic increases in the quality of outcomes you experience in life, their duration, and the meaning you experience along the way. Surprisingly, this rarely if ever requires radical differences in what you do. As you more intentionally prioritize your life, you will find that most things experiencing a downgrade in priority still get done, and those that don’t are always replaced by much more important things that more than make up for their loss.

A substantial treatment of prioritization, including practical strategies for organizing your short and long-term plans based on what is most important, can be found in the author’s book Joy on Purpose.