“Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy, your search for happiness will never end.” – Bob Marley

Everyone seems so busy these days. Busy running towards some imaginary destination that you can’t even define for yourself… So many of us live in the future in our minds, while trapped physically in this never-ending rat race… How many times did you catch yourself saying, “I will do what I like once I make X amount of money,” “I will take care of myself, when I have more time,” “I will live my dream life in X amount of years, after ____.” These are just a few examples how you lie to yourself daily.

I remember when I was in college barely making ends meet, I was telling myself, “If I can just make an extra $200/month I will be good!” Then when I graduated and started working, the script changed, “If I could only make an extra $1000/month I will be financially free.” This went on, until I started making a 6-figure salary to just find out how UNHAPPY I was; and money was NOT going to fix it… Sounds familiar?

Are you too busy to do the things you love? Do you even know what you love at this point? I challenge you to put your life on PAUSE, pull out a blank sheet of paper and write down this: “If money wasn’t an issue how would I live my life?” See what comes up and write everything down.

Before you start jumping into giving me the cliché “I would live in a castle with a prince/princess” or “I would travel the world” or “I would just do nothing”, I challenge you to PAUSE again, and imagine what that REALLY looks like… not for a month, not for a year, but forever…Can you tell me what your daily life looks like after you got all the superficial Disney dreams of yours out of your system; like buying an island and laying on the beach for days on, or waking up every day in a different country (which by the way can be somewhat tiring and homesick)? No matter what you did, sooner or later you would circle right back into your dysfunctional pattern of misery and something will always be missing until you are ready to do THE WORK…

You see, no money in the world can bring you closer to yourself, no matter how far you travel you can’t run away from yourself, and no matter which prince charming you marry, you will never be happy if you haven’t met yourself.

So now on that blank sheet of paper, write down what your ideal day, week, month, year looks like, if you didn’t have any time or money restraints. Chances are you have plenty of time and money to do everything on your list that makes you genuinely happy, but you simply never made yourself a PRIORITY! 

Yours in prioritizing YOU,

Ava Mucikyan