Is it just me, or do we all find ourselves having more and more
things to delete these days?
Emails, junk mail, text messages and voice mails that pile up
each and every day in the inboxes of our lives require us at some
point to just delete, delete, delete.
Just as Staples has their “easy” button, our computers and
phones come with the delete button or key, which also makes it easy
or simple enough to delete what we want and when we want to do it.
But seriously every day it just feels like I am adding more things
that need to be deleted in my life or receiving more communications
that need to be erased or wiped out.
Then there are the things in life that I need to get better at
not deleting such as time with my family, time spent in prayer, and
my time in the gym.
When it comes to things I need to delete the first one at the
top of that list are my excuses. I need to delete the excuses that
keep me from fulfilling the areas of my life that are really so
important. It is easy to make the excuse that I have more work to
do and can’t spend time with my family. Or it becomes easy to make
the excuse that I am just too tired to get to the gym. Or I have
found myself justifying my time away from prayer and meditation
because I allow myself to schedule an early morning conference call
or convince myself that I have to immediately get to work a little
earlier as I have so much to do.
Delete, delete, delete.
What else should we be deleting from our lives? Bad habits, bad
influences, and poor choices come to mind. Some habits are really
hard to break, an “easy” button or delete button would be
tremendous if all we had to do to break a bad habit was point and
click. That delete key would come in handy if we didn’t have to
confront the bad influences in our lives, just stroke the delete
key and away they go. But since we don’t have that “easy” button
for these harder to deal with issues, we have to strive to
consciously make the decisions to delete the bad habits, bad
influences and poor choices that are torpedoing our lives.
Maybe a better way to say it is simplify, simplify, simplify.
Just think about the things and situations in your own life that
you need to delete or simplify and then identify those other really
important and meaningful things and people you want to preserve or
save in your life.
Just like our computers and email inboxes come with junk
folders, so do our lives. When was the last time you cleaned yours
out? I would love to hear all about it at gotonorton@gmail.com because your
emails are important to me, and those never get deleted. Let’s
delete, delete, delete and simplify, simplify, and simplify and it
will be a better than good week.
Michael Norton, a resident of Highlands Ranch, is the former
president of the Zig Ziglar organization and CEO and founder
of www.candogo.com.
