What's Your Priority?

“To choose is to renounce” — André Gide

New year, new resolutions. This time around, many look back to reflect on the time passed and adopt new goals for the coming year(s). As we’re starting a new year, I thought I'd share some essential findings about goal setting and prioritisation that have helped me a lot and changed my approach to personal growth.

1- Priority v.s Priorities

Etymologically “priority” comes from the latin prior which stands for “former”. In other words “the fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important than others” (see definition). It’s literally the one thing that comes before everything else.

Nonetheless, in the 1900s we progressively started pluralising the word priority to transform it into priorities. A sort of non-sense since there’s firstly no boundaries to the amount of priorities you can have and secondly no guideline to ranking them. This is where the new year’s resolution became resolutions.

No one illustrates this better than Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism The Disciplined Pursuit of Less: “Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things”.

I believe that in order to successfully achieving a goal, it is essential to understand where we come from. Not ending up with a miles long list of objectives and resolutions comes through getting back to the roots of prioritisation. A single objective, the one and only.

2- Cutting through the noise

There is a myriad of ways to organise yourself and manage your time efficiently. But we’re not looking at covering this here.

The difficulty we’re facing is the one of choice. We live in a world of unlimited opportunities where deciding on one means renouncing on others, and keeping options open is just procrastination’s best friend. This is how I ended up not achieving anything. As James Clear states it in his blog “if you commit to nothing you’ll be distracted by everything” and ultimately have a hard time moving on.

An interesting way is to set a “word” that would be the guideline for each year, a sort of catalyst for all actions and projects to come. As Dan Britton, Jimmy Page, and Jon Gordon explain in “One word that will change your life”, you can in 4 easy introspective steps, figure out what that word is for you. The latter becomes a theme guide for your actions and decisions at any given time. Check out this article that summarises it pretty well with examples.

It’s a great way to cut through the noise and stay focused on one objective, especially as it adapts to any circumstance.

All in all, your priority is not to be diluted in others. You can prioritise only if you’re able to narrow down what truly matters to you. And that’s up to you to figure out.

Even though your priority may change, you have to start by choosing one.

Happy new year, happy priority!

Youssef