Raising standards
I thought I couldn’t have what I most wanted out life. That was silly.
Over the years, I got really used to not knowing how I was going to make it to the end of the month.
It was a terrible financial habit that became a bit of a superpower in terms of learning to manage anxiety. When I had no choice but to keep going despite the uncertainty, I learned to deal with the uncertainty and work around it. This has proven to be a useful skill lately.
On the other hand, I’m no longer willing to compromise the financial well-being of my business or household for further growth in this area. In other words, I wish to have a financial cushion that’s much bigger than I had in the past. That is challenging me to make all kinds of decisions that I would not have made a few years ago, like living a few more months with the worn-out, creaky hand-me-down couch we bought for $100 from the estate of the couple that lived in our house from 1959 to 2019.
Of course, a couch like that was just fine with me when I was 24. My standards for furniture have increased, too. So have my standards for how I wish to feel when I wake up in the morning, how warm my feet need to be in the wintertime, and how I wish to be treated in my relationships.
Some of these standards have gone up naturally and gradually. I eat a lot less candy than I did as a teenager and I go to bed earlier than I did in my twenties. But some of them did not budge until I consciously, intentionally recognized that I was allowed to raise them. I have made a game out of identifying these areas in which I want to make a change and figuring out a plan that allows it.
Often, this boosting of standards is contagious: I see someone else who has a different standard, and then I realize that I can elevate my own in the same way. Some are interesting but not relevant to me—I’m never going to be a person who gets my nails painted every week—and some, I steal (like my mother’s commitment to consuming chocolate every day).
Inevitably, as in my “couch vs. financial security” example above, standards can come into conflict with each other. What’s important to me is not to try to resolve this in the moment, but in the long term. The standards are not a prison of requirements—they are goals to aspire to. They help me to see how my life could be. What am I accepting that I didn’t even realize I was settling for? What do I want that I haven’t acknowledged to myself? The beauty of life is in that continual growth and discovery, even when we can’t have everything we wish for right this second.
There are so many times I’ve suffered as a result of my own choices without even seeing that I had another option. I could have adopted standards like, “No work on the weekends,” “spend time on a body of water every week,” or “always have a fresh bag of Utz potato chips on hand” in order to find more joy and happiness in life.
However, that’s actually missing the point. Part of finding more joy and happiness in life is discovering and implementing these standards as we go. In doing so, we can find a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that is far more powerful than it would be if we had the same life all along. We get to move up. We get to grow and change. We get to figure out who we are and who we want to be. I wouldn’t trade that for all the potato chips and chocolate in the world.
