What if the way you calculate your life’s priorities is flawed?

I have fallen into a trap, over and over again. Linear, black-and-white thinking has betrayed me.

Years of self-help books trained me to chase goals. That mindset has led me astray. My European friends rightly laugh at my caricatured obsession with the American dream of overoptimizing everything in one's life.

An example: if my music goals require time, then I must create time through prioritization. Time is finite, and certain things like sleep cannot be compromised. So, reduce time with friends to have more time for music creation. Find a job that requires fewer hours of work to dedicate more time to music. More hours allotted = problem solved.

Or so I thought.

That's not actually how it works. We’re not factoring health and energy into the equation.

And it's not as intuitive or linear as you might think.

I’ve been thinking: maybe time isn’t the bottleneck at all. Maybe it’s energy. Maybe it’s joy.

A reflection: back in high school, I took on a lot of advanced courses. I wanted to get straight As, so I thought to myself: I'll cut back on socializing and focus. I did alright. I was also very stressed.

Come senior year, I had an even heavier load of advanced courses. But I say to myself, "hey, I don't care, I'm also gonna have some fun." Oddly enough, not only did I socialize much more—enough so that I theoretically wouldn't have had time to study properly—but I also got straight As.

I was shocked. I outperformed my hyperfocused study path. And I had so much more fun.

It didn't make sense to me. I spent fewer hours studying. I spent more hours having fun. How did the math work out in my favor?

Time is not the only vector. Energy and happiness play a huge role in our success and they deserve to be prioritized. They give us momentum—a wind beneath our wings to do more than brute force ever could.

I've been reconsidering this experience in my current day-to-day, where I've been forcing myself into work and habits that are "good for me" but not conducive to my happiness. What if I found ways to work that gave me energy? That made me excited rather than drained?

So here's my invitation: consider how you're spending not only your time, but your energy. Are you doing things to generate happiness, hope, and excitement in yourself?

When you factor energy and joy into the equation, the math starts to work out—just not in the way we were taught to calculate it.