Ten values.Five priorities.
All of this came out of one assignment. Work out who you actually are before somebody else decides for you.
Who I am when nobody is grading it.
I am a high school student. I lift, I read, I go to church, and I spend more time on my phone than I would like anybody to know. That last one is the part these projects usually leave out, so I am putting it near the top.
What I actually care about has not moved much since I was twelve. I want to be somebody my family can count on. I want to still be strong in thirty years. I want to be useful to people who cannot pay me back for it. The rest is details, and I am fine with the details changing.
The reason I bothered writing any of this down is that I noticed I was drifting. Not badly. Slowly. Good days were happening by accident and bad days were happening by default, and I could not have told you what the difference was. Putting the values on paper made it a lot harder to pretend I did not know better.
Where most of the week goes.
The Ten Values
In no real order after the first twoFirst, or none of the rest of this list holds its shape.
The people who get the real version of me, not the edited one.
Doing it right on the days the grade does not depend on it.
I am slow to make friends and slower to drop them.
I am not the smartest guy in most rooms and it costs me nothing to say so.
Motivation shows up late. Discipline is already in the car.
Strong in thirty years beats impressive right now.
Give before it is convenient, because it is never going to be convenient.
Say the awkward thing early. It only gets more expensive.
Three things every night. It works, which is annoying.
This order, on the good weeks.
Everything else gets ordered by this one, or it gets ordered by whatever is loudest that week.
The people I want still sitting at the table in thirty years.
The body is the thing carrying all of the rest of it around.
Not the point of my life. Definitely the training ground for it.
Last on purpose. Enough is a real number and I would like to know mine.
To live on purpose instead of on autopilot. To trust God further than I trust my own read on a situation, because my read is about seventeen years deep and it shows. To build a body, a mind and a name that are useful to the people around me. And to leave every room, team and family I am part of a little better than I found it, whether or not anybody notices that I did.
ZackSixteen years from now.
This is the profile the assignment asked for. I wrote it in one sitting, then went back and cut everything that turned out to be a wish rather than a plan.
- Married, and easier to live with than I am right now.
- A house that people want to come to on a Friday night.
- In the gym five mornings a week. Same hour, older knees.
- In the Bible before I am on my phone. Every day, not most days.
- Enough money that it is not the first thing I think about in the morning.
- Known at my church for showing up, not for talking.
- Dressed like I care, because I do and I am not going to apologise for it.
- The person my friends call at two in the morning when it goes wrong.
Are my current habits leading me toward the person I want to become?
Mostly yes, and I did not expect to be able to say that. The gym points the right way. So does the reading, and so does most of what I do on a Sunday. The phone does not. Four hours a day is a part time job I never applied for, and if I do the arithmetic on what that costs me by thirty I would rather not finish the sum.
So the answer is yes, with one loud exception, and the exception is the entire reason there is a habits page on this site.
The parts I have not figured out.
I am impatient. I compare myself to people whose highlight reel I am watching at one in the morning. I told myself my screen time was two hours for about a year before I bothered to check. None of that is on the rubric, but leaving it out would make this a brochure instead of a profile.
