You Can Do Anything, But Not Everything
Day 62 - 68 / 1000
There’s always one more thing on the list. One more thing to fix, learn, finish, and become.
This week is about what happens when the list never ends.
About family, living abroad, money, and the quiet question underneath all of it.
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
Overachieving
Devil’s loop of perfection
Paying visit to a family
Living abroad
Money, money, money
Values
1. Overachieving
What is the upside and downside of overachieving in life?
The best analogy I have for the downside of overachieving is a to-do list with no end.
That’s how I feel more often than I’d like to admit. It doesn’t mean I’m always 100% productive every day.
It’s more like you always have something on your mind.
There is very little or no time to rest because there is always something else to do which is more “important”.
And even if I choose rest, there are these thoughts haunting me that I could have used that time to work on something.
Don’t burn yourself out like this.
Nothing is more important than your health, and rest is part of taking care of your health too.
It is important to be able to recognize these patterns and find a way to control them.
Something that helps me is to go for a walk.
It helps especially when you are feeling overwhelmed by everything happening around you and the amount of work you have put on yourself.
The questioning will come:
Maybe I should be using this time differently.
Maybe I could have finished that task already.
Maybe I could go for a walk later.
Lean into your surroundings right now and let things go as much as you can.
You will return with clear thoughts, ready to finish whatever is left for that day.
What is the upside of overachieving then?
The answer is simple. Achieving more than you would imagine.
How does it look for you?
2. Devil’s loop of perfection
How do you improve yourself without getting stuck perfecting it?
I think it is an art to know when to improve yourself and in which area of your life to do so.
Self-improvement is a wonderful skill that helps you create the version of yourself you want to build.
There are countless ways to improve.
We can improve by reading books, by learning new skills, by challenging ourselves physically and mentally, or by facing our fears.
We all know and understand that if we want we can be better than we were yesterday. But it requires the willingness to do so.
As with everything in life, even self-improvement has two sides.
The positive side we all know.
It’s making us better in whatever we choose to improve ourselves.
The negative side of self-improvement is something less known.
Because there are infinite ways to improve, there is no end to this process either.
You can get stuck improving yourself all the time, which leads to feeling even less capable than before.
That’s the devil’s loop of self-improvement.
You keep perfecting things with endless improvements that lead you to the opposite.
You can do anything but not everything.
This counts especially for self-improvement.
Choosing in which area of your life you want to improve, and most importantly why, is the key to success before you even start with your self-improvement journey.
Without a clear reason and outcome, you can very easily end up in the loop.
Choose your path of improvement wisely.
In which area of your life are you currently trying to improve?
3. Paying visit to a family
How to deal with parents and not go crazy?
If you’ve ever moved out of your parent’s house and lived somewhere else long enough, you know how tough it can be to come back and deal with parents again.
I love my family and I’m forever thankful for all their support in my life. But boy, it’s hard sometimes.
You live your own life now at your own pace and by your own standards.
Once you come back home it’s like an instant flashback to childhood.
It feels a bit strange. It feels like there is this clash of realities.
One is your current reality and the way you live.
The other is the reality in which your parents live and all the memories, habits, and routines of the household.
Once these two mix, it can be really challenging.
Despite all of this, I believe keeping in touch with family and paying them a visit is very important.
Doesn’t matter how they might be sometimes. It’s still your family. They deserve it.
So how do we manage these visits or holidays without going crazy?
4. Living abroad
Why is moving abroad a life-changing experience?
Living abroad has been my goal since an early age.
The vision was heavily influenced by my dad, who was working in Austria back then.
Because he was doing it, it felt more natural to me as a path to follow.
I went to work abroad with my dad for the first time when I was 16, in 2014, during Christmas break.
Then the following summer again.
And then I never stopped exploring.
I worked and lived in different places with my entire life packed into one suitcase and a backpack.
During those years I spent most of my time in Switzerland and Copenhagen, with my early stops in Austria.
I spent the least amount of my adulthood in my own country. If the pandemic hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t spend any time there.
Today, I speak three languages: English, German, and my native Slovak.
Plus Czech, which just happened to be my fourth language because of the similarity with Slovak and the fact that I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid in Czech.
It’s been a journey, and it has been a life-changing experience because it opened doors I never imagined.
Especially because I come from a small town in the valley between mountains in Slovakia which has barely 20 000 residents. A place people rarely leave.
You can probably imagine the mentality of people living in such small towns.
Anything new or out of the ordinary feels like a threat to people.
It takes a huge amount of self-determination and courage to go against the crowd and think differently. But if I could do it, you can too.
I want to encourage you to take the risk and leave your home town.
Doesn’t need to be forever, but go and explore the world first.
It will open your mind and your thinking in a way that your home town never could.
And it doesn’t matter if you are from a big city or a village.
Living abroad is one of the best ways to test yourself in life.
It will teach you how to take care of yourself in the toughest moments because they will definitely come.
But once you pass these challenges you will be so much stronger and confident in yourself because you managed to do something that your classmates didn’t even think of.
It’s the best school for life because it teaches you exactly the lessons you need in life.
That is a value which no money or school can outweigh.
Have you ever lived abroad?
I would love to hear about your experience and what it taught you in life.
5. Money, money, money
What is your relationship with money?
There are very few things in the world that have as much power as money does.
Money influences almost every single part of our lives.
It is one of the most significant relationships in our life because it determines how much power money is going to have over us.
But, this relationship is not purely on us to build. It comes from our parents first.
We are taught what our parents believe.
I see a lot of different groups of young people and their relationship with money.
Someone grew up with a clear understanding of what money is, what it can get you, and how to make money outside of regular work.
Someone sees money as something evil, something that does only wrong in the world.
Someone else was taught that money is made only by getting a stable job, and that rich people are just lucky and most of the time selfish and bad.
There are people who don’t believe in investing and don’t trust the banks, so they would rather save all their money under the bed.
And there are also people who grew up without any money and see in it the only thing that could turn their lives into a better place.
We all come from different backgrounds with different stories and different upbringings.
For each one of us money means something different.
For some time, I used to believe that money was the only solution to a better life.
Especially when I was younger.
I think once you start getting your first salary, what you want to do is experience the power of money.
You want to see for yourself how much you can enjoy this money you just earned, how many things you can buy, where you can go, and that can get pretty addictive, very fast.
This then brings you into a kind of rat race where the only thing you want is to earn more money so you can spend more money.
I was holding on to this belief for some time until I hit some financial struggles which were the best lesson.
Not only did those financial struggles teach me how to manage money better, but they also taught me that when you don’t have the money to spend on fun activities, you kind of need to find meaning and enjoyment in different things.
And since then... I started looking at money very differently.
I think it’s also an ongoing process where you learn more and more as you get older.
You get access to different kinds of money based on your job and your salary.
You start investing, you save up more, and you start diversifying your assets.
One of the best skills I learned about money is how to enjoy life fully without needing to expand your lifestyle and monthly spending.
What is your relationship with money?
6. Values
What core values guide your life decisions?
This is one of the questions we should be asking ourselves often, and not only on rare occasions.
But before I dive into that, I have another question for you.
How do we build our values in the first place? And how exactly do we define these values?
These are questions I’m asking myself right now.
Because so much of your life is influenced and built on top of your values, it is important to know what your values actually are.
And it doesn’t mean that you need to have a lot of them.
Values come from different places.
You have values which are purely yours and you have values which were instilled in you by your family, culture, or religion.
Your values change over a lifetime.
The values you had in your early 20s are very different from the ones you’re gonna have before your 40s.
That’s why it’s so important to find time to reflect on your values which are guiding your life.
What is irritating you, what are you envious of, what is the thing you wouldn’t trade for any kind of pleasure and always protect?
These kinds of things can reveal what is underneath.
What are the values which are guiding your decisions?
They’re not goals, they’re not about achieving.
Values are the compass guiding you on your journey.
What is your strongest value in life?
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over the past decade. As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
- Lukáš