Inclusively Goal-Oriented is a Deferred Life Plan

Anyone who knows me, well or not well, would list being a workaholic as one of the first things they think of when they think of me. Ever since I can remember, I have always been a go-big-or-go-home type of person.

Not thinking about it too deeply, I can definitely credit a lot of my (what I thought was) success to my extreme personality. I often find myself being the youngest person in any of my workplace, classes and so on. Even with all of these things that I was able to accomplish in a short period of time, I never really feel fulfilled. For as long as I can remember, I instead always find myself in a loop of going all in, burning out, chasing after the next big thing – without really stopping to ask myself why or what I really want.

I am living in what I recently came to understand as a deferred life plan.

I believe the original concept came from Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-hour Workweek. (Don’t quote me on this) I didn’t read the book. But I learned about this around four months ago when I started listening to my new favourite podcast, Not Overthinking. Taimur, one of the show’s hosts, explained deferred life plan as living in a mentality that you are constantly waiting to feel fulfilled or be happy after you have accomplished XYZ.

I have to admit that at first I totally misinterpreted this concept. I thought I was not at all close to living in a deferred life plan. I never said no to any opportunity that passes my way. I would go all in regardless of what I do. In other words, I thought I never deferred anything. There is no way I was living in a deferred life plan.

I never really thought about what this concept means again until recently when I slowly felt myself heading toward another big burnout crash. I spent days puzzling over why I could possibly be burning out when I just made huge changes in my life. I quit my jobs, started obsessing over time management, got rid of mentally-draining relationships and the list goes on. I thought I completely changed everything I needed to change.

The thing is, I just never realized that everything I did change was external factors. Not that these factors didn’t influence my huge breakdown in 2019, they without doubt had significant impact, but not more or less than how I was approaching my life.

I was in a big mess of a deferred-life plan.

I made my life all about accomplishing the end goal without really placing much value on what happens along the way – the mentality that I will feel fulfilled and be happy when all these things are done, all these goals are reached. All of this is the cause of what seems to be my big loop of consistently burning out.

It took me a long time to realize that being inclusively goal-oriented is a deferred life plan. Even though I was not postponing my responsibilities and tasks to the next day, I was deferring the most important aspects of life, which is being happy. As cliche as it sounds, life is all about the journey.

There is still a long way to go for me. There is still a lot to learn. But in 2020, I have made a promise to myself that instead of designing goals that I want to achieve, I want to design a journey, a life system, a long beautiful marathon, that will allow me to eventually reach the desired results while enjoying every step along the way.