Understanding the Power of Sacrifice in Achieving Your Goals

Understanding the Power of Sacrifice in Achieving Your Goals
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Sacrifice is a concept that we all know of but we often resist to practice. We live our lives like we don’t have to choose between life choices. We are sold by companies that you can take one magic product that can help you lose weight without giving up eating all the junk you eat. We are sold that if you make “X” amount of dollars you will be happy. We are told that you can have your cake and eat it it too.

What many of us miss out on is what we have to sacrifice.

If you’re like me, maybe you have big goals in life that others would not dare to strive for. Maybe you have small skills that you’d like to learn.

Have you ever started to learn something new and then season 2 of that show you liked on Netflix came out and derailed you from learning it?

You didn’t finish reading that book or watching that course because you failed to recognize what needed to be sacrificed.

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What Is Sacrifice?

When most people think of sacrifice they think about people who altruistically give something up and never ask for anything back in return. The part about sacrifice that most people miss is that they are giving something up for something that isn’t fully known to them for a better future.

It’s giving up the bird in the hand for the two in the bush.

We have to make sacrifices all the time in our day to day lives. When you take a job offer, you sacrifice all the other potential job offers that you could have had.

When you choose to date and marry someone, you sacrifice all the other people that you could have been with.

We have to sacrifice because of the limited time we have in our lives. There’s no way around it. So how do you know what you should sacrifice?

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness. — Napoleon Hill

Know Your Priorities In Life

You can’t have two things that are equal priority. It’s not possible. Something will always supersede something else that is priority so you must make a choice.

Today, I decided to sacrifice my morning workout to gain an extra hour of writing time. I am still going to do a short workout at my lunch break but I decided that writing is more important to me than getting two workouts in a day.

We often spend so much of our lives living in this anxiety to try to get everything done all at once. It’s impossible.

We want to find that perfect balance of sometimes eating junk food but also eating healthy. We rationalize that this piece of candy “doesn’t count” and we aren’t giving anything up in this moment.

Sacrifice doesn’t barter.

Sacrifice Is Freeing

When you consciously sacrifice something, it can be freeing. When you know exactly what you are giving up and why, the level of anxiety goes down.

It feels good to know that you made the choice to give something up and why.

You made the choice to give up the juggling act that you were trying to live with to do something that is more meaningful to you than anything else.

When you make that sacrifice, go all in. Don’t waste those opportunities.

When you don’t sacrifice something, you end up stretching yourself thin. It’s the mentality that you can build a side business, become an expert in shooting video from beginner, read 5 books a month, workout an hour a day and write a blog post daily all while working a full time job to go on top of it.

This kind of think prevents you from progressing in life. If our brain’s bandwidth is like a WiFi network, the more devices on the network performing high demanding tasks just causes the overall network to slow down. Our brains are even worse than a WiFi network due to our inability to multitask so all you end up with is one thing that moves slow while nothing else gets done.

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What Is The Price To Pay?

Many of us don’t want to make the proper sacrifices we need to progress in life. That’s okay as long as you know that is.

Often we will have to sacrifice a piece of ourselves to get there. We develop a sunk cost bias for our own selves.

Why would you want to give up on binge watching Netflix everyday for 5 years and write that entire time off as a waste?

That’s a huge blow to the ego. In fact, accepting these facts can rattle you. What do most people end up doing? They go back to what they were always doing to find that equilibrium.

Conclusion

Sacrifice is an alien concept to a lot of people today. All around us are advertisements and people telling us that we can have our cake and eat it too. Even though we are sacrificing our money to get said product and service.

When you decide to make a sacrifice in your life, it can be liberating. It’s liberating to make a choice and stick with it.

Sacrifice is all around us. There’s no getting around it. Every moment that you live, you are sacrificing your time from doing something else.

Ask yourself, what are the sacrifices you are making right now?