First Think of What You Want to do Then do What you Have to do.

First Think of What You Want to Do Then Do What you Have to Do

First Think of What You Want to do Then do What you Have to do.

I think I’m going to have to go back to the Chinese take Out place where I bought these fortune cookies because they rock for my FortunateBluFrog posts.

Think of What you WANT to Do

There will always be things that you WANT to do. Call in sick to play Wii all day long on a rainy day. Eat an entire container of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby ice cream during a Buffy marathon. Buy that expensive car, take out another credit card or tell people what you REALLY think. However, each one of those things is going to bring down a world of hurt on you, maybe not immediately but eventually. You’re not going to be able to always do what you want to do.

Then Do What You HAVE to Do

When I think of this part of the fortune I equate HAVE with NEED. There are things that you NEED to do in life. You need to earn money to support your family so calling in sick to often might lead to loss of income. You need to watch what you eat and also need to exercise to maintain a quality of life. People always say that you have to exercise to live a long life. I’m not so thrilled with the prospect of a long life if that means shuffling around the nursing home waiting for death.

However, I’d like to have a good quality of life, I’d like to maintain a healthy body so that I can continue to function without debilitating disease. Of course now that I’ve been living with diabetes for a while hindsight is 20/20. Your mind goes to the place of, could I have prevented this, why are people who are much more unhealthy than me not affected by this disease? But you can’t look at things that way either because it will just make you more angry and upset. So you do what you NEED to. You eat better, you watch your sugars, you learn about the disease and you exercise.

What does this fortune mean for Bloggers?

You might want to head right to twitter or facebook when you start out your day rather than work on that post that you need to complete. You might want to spend time playing facebook games instead of reading blog posts and commenting. You might want to put off moving to WordPress when blogspot works just fine. All of these wants aren’t going to move you forward to success. If you have a task to complete then you need to shut out all distractions and complete it, first. We all know how important keeping contact with people on twitter and facebook is to social networking but it can consume you and take time away from writing the bests posts you can write. It can rob you of time spent visiting other blogs and interacting with other bloggers and their posts. You need to complete those things first that will bring you success. The rest can be done after.

For the season of Lent I gave up facebook games. I would spend hours playing them. I neglected some blogging while I did so and I certainly needed to stop. So for 40 days I gave up playing. No Mafia Wars, no Street Racing, nothing. And you know what, I feel more creative and less like I need to spend forever playing catch up with the blog.

Are you doing the things that you NEED to do so that you are able to do the things that you WANT to do?

6 thoughts on “First Think of What You Want to do Then do What you Have to do.”

  1. I need to take that advice to heart. I’m such a procrastinator. Then I stress out. You’d think I’d learn by now. One thing I have been doing though is making a schedule of where and how long to spend my time online. Step one and working on more…

    Connies last blog post..The Twitter Technique

  2. Connie,
    A schedule is a great thing especially if you are working solely online, it is easy to get tripped up into going all over the place and wasting time.

  3. Hello Producer,
    Facebook games really suck you in. I even went so far as to accept every single friend request that came in so that I could get over 700 members in my Mafia Wars Crew. Yes, it was that bad. Being away has been tough but if and when I go back I can budget my time better.

  4. Excellent post, Drew, and very timely for me, especially the diabetes part of it.

    Mike has Type 2 diabetes, but he has to take insulin. Only I found out, the hard way, that he wasn’t taking it every day. He developed something called diabetic ketoacidosis. Look it up on WebMD, it’s pretty scary. We didn’t know that this is what it was, we just knew that he was very sick and had to get to the ER. He was in the hospital most of last week, just got out on Saturday. He is doing much better now, is planning to return to work on Wednesday.

    But now he may have to pay the price for not doing what he had to do, and not be able to do what he wants to do. Two weeks from Wednesday is the NH Fisher Cats Opening Day, and we have tickets and a hotel room booked. The room looks right out onto the ballpark…I love that place! Only now Mike may not be able to go, because his boss may not want to let him take the time off, after taking time off for being in the hospital.

    He brought this onto himself; if he had just been taking his insulin as he was supposed to, none of this would have happened. He WANTS to go to ball games and stuff, well, first he HAS to listen to the doctor, take his insulin and other meds every day, in order to be healthy enough to be able to do those things, and not waste all of his paid time off in a hospital bed.

    I think Mike has learned his lesson from all of this, but I still should print out this post and stick it on the fridge for him to see. Excellent message! 😀

    Christines last blog post..Childhood Food Trauma

  5. Christine,
    I’ll take Mike’s tale as a very cautionary one indeed. All of what you said is exactly what I am trying to avoid.

Comments are closed.