Do You Feel Dissatisfied?

Experience Fulfillment—Live as You Like

Fulfillment comes only when you’re aligned and at peace. Multitasking your day away may appear productive, but at what cost? Seems to me like stress, burnout, and depression are a high price to pay.

You might wonder, Who isn’t busy these days? Realize this—DJs aren’t! Here’s how their pace compares with Day Jobbers:

	Day Jobbers’ Pace	Dream Jobbers’ Pace
	Undisciplined	Intentional
	Focused on activity	Focused on accomplishment
	Busy	Bold
	Stressed	Significant
	Flustered	Fulfilled

Intentional, NOT Undisciplined

DJs choose where to invest their time and therefore they multiply their impact. Day Jobbers simply add more things to their calendar. This strategy subtracts their overall impact.

Focused on Accomplishment, NOT Activity

DJs accomplish much more because they show up filled up. They contribute comprehensively, unlike Day Jobbers who are frazzled because of overactivity.

Bold, NOT Busy

DJs aren’t swayed by the popular opinion of being overcommitted. They’re willing to be different because they choose impact over acceptance.

Significant, NOT Stressed

Day Jobbers live from their leftovers. DJs make life their main course. DJs become significant as a natural result of their choices.

Fulfilled, NOT Flustered

DJs live as they like because they control their time. Day Jobbers have no time and therefore they have no control.

Your New Friend Named Margin

DJs naturally stand out because they prefer fulfillment over activity. This bucks against popular thinking, because most mistake relaxed for laziness and busyness for achievement.

Tim Ferriss, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, explains the fallacy of such thinking. “Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.”[1]

Hmm . . . sounds sort of counterintuitive:

Do less to accomplish more.

Develop a strong core so you can be selective.

Do the best thing and cut out all the other noise.

Many Day Jobbers are still working mentally even when they’re off the clock. They never turn it off or shut it down. Margins do both. They help you create space for life to catch up with you.

Have you ever tried reading something without margins? I have. Not fun. I remember back in graduate school, before the days of ebooks. For one of my classes I occasionally photocopied a few pages from a massive twenty-pound reference book. I’d shrink the text to fit the oversized page onto an 8½ by 11 piece of paper.

When my photocopies came out, I struggled trying to read the small font that ran off the edges of the page. In no time at all, my eyes would jump lines and I’d end up losing my place. Frustration would set in and the entire process proved unenjoyable at best.

This describes Day Jobbers perfectly. They keep trying to squeeze more into their schedules. Without any margins, they struggle and lose their place in life. Frustration sets in and their lives are unenjoyable at best, hardly a picture of fulfillment.

What’s the solution?

If you want fulfillment, you must create something every DJ has in their life—margins!

Margins Create Space For

Laughter: You can’t laugh if everything is serious.

Generosity: You can’t give if you have nothing left.

Memories: You can’t remember if you weren’t present.

Prayer: You can’t pray if you’re self-sufficient.

Dreams: You can’t dream if you can’t imagine.

Love: You can’t love if you’re self-absorbed.

Exercise: You can’t exercise if you don’t value yourself.

Creativity: You can’t create if you’re merely a machine.

Experimentation: You can’t experiment if you don’t have time to fail.

Reflection: You can’t reflect if you don’t value rest.

Spontaneity: You can’t be in the moment if you’re stuck in the future.

Rest: You can’t sit if you can’t stop.

Joy: You can’t pour out if you haven’t been filled up.

Peace: You can’t breathe deeply if you can’t catch your breath.

Friendships: You can’t expect to have friends if you fail to be one.

You can’t survive without food, water, or sleep. (College students might disagree with the sleep part.) Yet many people believe you can survive and even thrive without margins. Your Designer seemed to think otherwise by gifting you one full day of rest and recreation in every seven.

Recreate. I love that word. It reminds me:

We’re unfinished and still in process.

We’re alive and growing and in need of input.

We weren’t simply created to produce.

Machines, on the other hand? They’re created specifically for output. We place higher value on machines with a higher capacity for output.

Humans are different. We’re not machines. We’re a beautiful blend of:

Body, soul, and spirit

Sex, sweat, and laughter

Tears, hopes, and longings

Desires, fears, and dreams

You need rest and recreation. These two essential components fuel fulfillment.

Human Doings or Human Beings?

When you check out of life only to produce within the prison called your “day job,” something inside you dies. Busyness may mask the pain, but it certainly doesn’t eliminate it.

Consider this:

• Life is too short to spend tens of thousands of hours in misery.
• Life is too short to be living in chronic pain just to survive until another weekend.
• Life is too short not to make the maximum contribution with the gifts and abilities entrusted to you.
• Life is too short to hold on to a job for the sole reason of a paycheck or retirement benefits.

Steve Jobs understood this brevity. It served as a filter for his choices, including his employment ones.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.[2]

Easy to say but difficult to do, right?

But consider the unique time in which you live. For thousands of years humanity was, for the most part, stuck with their fate. Choices eluded us and we were locked into our lot in life. If your daddy or grandpa was a blacksmith, then likely so were you. If you were born into an agrarian environment, then you probably stayed there.

Not so today. Regardless of what you believe, you do have a choice. You can live as you’d like.

Fulfillment is the third benefit of joining the DJs. Because they’re fulfilled, they live as they like. They’ve exchanged activities for accomplishment and their day jobs for their dream jobs.

Now that you know the three benefits of the DJs (freedom, finances, and fulfillment), the better question is—When can you start?