What If You Don't Want That Life?

I love golf, it's easily my favorite hobby and a game I have been playing for 30 years. I started playing with my Dad when I was 8 years old and I hope Cooper will enjoy playing with me someday. I love the challenge, being outside, spending time with friends, and having no real responsibilities for a few hours.

So when I came across a post on Friday that started with, "Hey guys, leaving your wife and kids for 4 hours of golf every weekend is unacceptable," it really pissed me off, but not for the reason you might think.

I rarely golf on weekends and the biggest reason for that is that I have a family who I’d rather hang out with instead. Most weekends we're doing something together, whether that's going on a family outing or just hanging out at home. That's how I prefer to spend my weekends, and it's a choice I've made intentionally based on my priorities.

So why did this post fire me up if I essentially make the same choice myself?

It's that somewhere along the line, maybe in the social media age, we've decided we get to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable for everyone else. People have always had opinions about how others should live, but 30 years ago we weren't exposed to hundreds of those opinions every single day. Maybe we got some critical feedback from a friend or family member, but we weren't constantly being told how to live by complete strangers.

Now all we have to do is open our phones to find hundreds of people telling us the exact way to live, as if there's only one right way and, conveniently, it's their way.

I think this is part of one of the biggest problems we're facing today. In a world of influencers and constant access to other people's lives, we've started wanting things we don't actually even want.

We see someone building a multimillion-dollar business and suddenly feel like our own business isn't successful enough. We see someone traveling the world and start questioning whether we're experiencing enough. We see someone talking about what a great parent or spouse should do and start wondering whether we're doing it wrong.

At some point, we start measuring our lives against standards we never actually chose for ourselves.

I also think society has become so eager to justify their own choices that they want to give advice and tell people what they should be doing that we forget to ask one really important question:

What do you actually want?

Not what your friends want, what someone on LinkedIn thinks you should want, or what society has decided success is supposed to look like. What do YOU want?

For me, golf is a great example. I love playing, but I also love spending time with my family, and Saturday and Sunday are prime opportunities for that. So I've built my schedule around both.

In fact, this Monday I was able to get my work done in the morning, play golf in the afternoon, and still be home to spend time with my family that evening.

Does that schedule work for everyone? Of course not, some people don't have that flexibility, and others might not even want it.

That's exactly the point. What works for me doesn't have to work for you. The business I want to build, the amount of money I want to make, how I spend my weekends, and what I prioritize in my life don't have to look anything like yours.

There's nothing wrong with listening to other people's perspectives or learning from their experiences. The problem comes when we start treating their opinions as instructions for how we're supposed to live.

If you're a Dad who loves golf and wants to play every Saturday, and it works for your family? Tee it up and let it fly.

If you'd rather spend every Saturday with your kids? That's great too.

Neither one is automatically right or wrong.

I think about how easy it is to spend years working toward something because it's what we're supposed to want. A bigger business, a nicer house, a certain lifestyle, or even being the type of parent someone on the internet says we should be. We can become so focused on getting there that we forget to ask whether getting there would actually make us happy.

The goal isn't to build a life that everyone else approves of. It's to build one that you and the people who matter most to you actually want to live. That takes knowing what matters to you and being willing to accept that someone else might choose differently.

Which makes me curious, what's something you used to think you wanted, but eventually realized you didn't?