Break Your Routine

Something I'd like to do in life.

I’m a pretty big baseball fan.  I have been since I was pretty small.  I used to look forward to little league practice the way I look forward to a day off work now.  Only five more days until practice!  When we’d have a rain out, you’d have to pry my heart off the floor.  In the major leagues, sometimes when a team is losing, they’ll fire the manager.  They’ll still have the same players that lost all their games, but a new manager will bring with him a new way of doing things.  Maybe you practice at a different time, or he plays different players.  Sometimes it seems like the players play harder to try to re-earn a place in the new coach’s heart.  In any case, sometimes a team is in a rut, and the organization just feels like they need to change something.

In a lot of ways, I think I was sort of in a rut recently.  Before we moved to St. Louis, I had sort of fallen into a routine.  It wasn’t a bad life.  I would come home from work each day, eat dinner, turn on the tv and write my blog on the couch.  A lot of the time I had my wife beside me.  We went out sometimes, though a lot of the time I sort of dreaded going out because it was so much easier to stay in.  We had people we liked to go out with, and I’d have fun once I was out, but I’d have to sort of force myself to go, because I was so ingrained in my routine.

I’ve used moving to St. Louis as an excuse to try to change things I’d like to change.  For instance, there are some basic things that I’ve always wanted to do.  There are also some things that I used to enjoy that I haven’t done in a long time that I used to really enjoy.

In some ways, I used the move as a crutch.  I put some things off that I probably should have been doing all along, telling myself that I would start when I got to St. Louis.  When you do that, you sort of put your life on hold, and I shouldn’t have done that.  You have to live right now, because who knows what’s going to happen.

Some things I’d like to do:

Buy a bike (and ride it!), have a weekly poker game at my house (I just had the first one tonight – it was a lot of fun, and I met a new person), play more golf, take a martial arts class, improve on my guitar, learn a foreign language, get my CFA (just for fun and to be a better blogger;), run in the morning before work, pursue a particular business idea that I think is a good one, pursue a particular investment idea that I think is a particularly good one, join a charitable organization, be involved in my community (try to make something better), raft down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, play volleyball, and cook more.  That’s just a random sample, but they’re all things I want to do.  I’ve read before that when you write something down you’re more likely to do it.  Not only did I write it down, but I published it to my readers, which in a way is difficult for me, because I hate to admit not being good at things;)

If there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, think about how you could be doing it.  Write it down.  In fact, I’d love it if you left it in the comments or emailed it to me.  Do something!  If you’d like to take a trip, or learn a new skill, or do something different in your life – write down the path about how to get there.  It can be something small.  Decide how you can get on that path right now.  What is the first step?  What can you do immediately that will bring you just a little closer or prepare you to get closer to your goal?  I’ll try to pursue the things I’d like to do if you will.  Good luck and thanks for reading.

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Tagged as: be happy, do something, live well, try something new