You can do almost anything you want to do with your life. But you cannot do everything. Even if you had all the money and other resources in the world, your time and energy would still be limited, and you would have to make some difficult choices. So, how do you go about making those choices?
First, you must decide what is most important in your life. You probably have several important things and people. You might protest that everything is equally important, but you know it is not.
You might care about taking care of your family and advancing your career, for example, but one is more important right now. A few years from now, say when your children are grown, the opposite might be true, so it is a good idea to repeat the following exercise every few years.
This exercise works best when it is done the old-fashioned way, with a pen and a piece of paper. Take a blank, unlined sheet of paper and a pen and sit down somewhere quiet where you will not be disturbed. Write everything that is important to you down on the sheet. It can include your most important goals.
Do not hold back or judge right now. Treat this as a brainstorming session. Write down everything that comes to mind. You do not have to write things in neat rows, either. Have fun with it. Write things all over the page. Change the fonts. Write some words sidewise. This is not meant to be a solemn and serious exercise.
You will have a sheet filled with priorities and goals when you are done. You will probably have a dozen priorities and more goals than you could accomplish in two lifetimes. Your next step is going to be to look at this list and select the 3-5 items that are the most important to you right now.
If you have trouble with this, look for things you wrote larger than others, in fancier font, or that you may have inadvertently added to the list more than once. Circle each of your priorities as you decide on them. This is going to be hard. It is meant to be. To make progress, you must make these choices. There is no right or wrong answer to this exercise, only YOUR answer. No two lists are going to be exactly alike. You will be ready to go on to the next step when you finish.