A fulfilled life inevitably comes down to focusing on 3 domains: Health, Happiness, and Freedom. And, within those 3 domains, you’ll need to evaluate what your own “big rocks” are that you need to prioritize and safeguard. Pretty simple right?
I purposely oversimplified this categorization to make it easier to grasp what can be focussed on and prioritized, but it’s not a rigid structure. For instance, it’s likely that something makes you both happy, healthy, and freer at the same time.
Putting work into your health is the clear winner when selecting the highest return on investment for bettering your situation. Being healthy and energetic inevitably makes you happier and also gives you a larger capacity to work on your freedom and happiness.
I define happiness here as being satisfied and content while at rest, not as the emotion of joy which is often short-lived and unsustainable. Usually, people experience this happiness when what they find important in life is sufficiently present.
Freedom is doing what you want, where you want, when you want, with who you want. Acquiring wealth is probably the most common way of becoming “freer”. The more wealth you have, the fewer demands on your time a job has, the more you can choose what you do with. However, when you specifically target what freedoms are most important to you, you won’t need to earn an extravagant amount of money to be free.
In the 7 habits of highly successful people the author Steven Covey tells a story about how you have to fit in your major priorities (big rocks) first, or else you’ll never be able to get them in at all. Think about what your big rocks are. For most people it would probably look a bit like this: