You can't help but see why so many of us collapse into exhaustion when we crawl into bed at night. When you look over your list of shit-to-do, how much of your life is being directed by outside forces? Are everyone else's priorities competing with your own?

It's tempting to live as though life will go on forever. When goals are our sole focus we forget to appreciate each and every moment. The hourglass gives us a false sense of time, in that each grain of sand will drop one by one and we'll always know how much time we have left. In reality, life spills through our fingers like sand from a smashed hourglass. It's why we're willing to put off calling our Mom, or quick to cancel on a friend because we had a long day at work. We're willing to sacrifice now for some distant fantasy future where we have time to do all the things we want. You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. The days can be long, but the decades are blurs.

That book you wanted to write, the side hustle you wanted to take full time, the website you wanted to create? It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Now, weeks or months into it, you’re playing whack-a-mole with all the damn commitments you have in your life. You don't have the luxury of sitting in a cabin to write uninterrupted for days at a time. Your side hustle isn't making enough money to pay the mortgage, keep the lights on and eat more than ramen noodles. It seems like every time you finish a task, two more pop up in its place. You're starting to feel like the more you do, the more there is to do.

You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. Don't let the simplicity of this statement fool you into thinking it's just a clever play on words. The man who wrote those words had his first book rejected 39 times before it was published in 1975. Zig Ziglar's See You At The Top, went on to sell over 1.6 million copies and is widely used by corporations, schools, government agencies, and correctional institutions-wherever motivation and self-improvement are major goals. The scariest part of an idea is starting because entrepreneurs like you dream big. You probably have a larger than life vision of your idea that seems almost impossible. The secret to turning the impossible into possible? You need an idea of where to start and what to focus on.

Do you ever feel like you're trying and trying and trying and nothing's happening? You feel like you're working so hard, putting in the time, making a heroic effort, and yet, you're not seeing results. Part of why it takes so long for change to happen is avoidance of facing the harshness of the present moment. The feelings that swirl around when you give it your all, but don't see results is soul-crushing. It's like wolves eating and spitting out the bones in the midst of a feeding frenzy. Not as violent, but just as raw.

You can achieve more while working less. But to make that possible, you have to make sure that the less you do matters more.

Every year has an inescapable date that carries a not-so-subtle reminder that life is going fast and you're one year older. And in a society that's driven by speed and doing, life begins to blur as we mistake busyness for importance. We forget what it's like to sit in peace, without chasing down our next project, idea, or task someone needs from us.

We look at someone with a bursting-at-the-seams schedule and assume they're thriving. But are they really?