Lately I’ve noticed that it’s easy to live our lives everywhere except where we actually are. I usually wake up thinking about tomorrow’s tasks and goals, instead of thinking about what I need to do today – and more importantly – how I can enjoy the moment.
It’s tough right, we think about tomorrow even before today starts. This is one of the problems we face as people who are motivated and driven, sometimes we just want to achieve more and more, that we forget to live in the moment – and sadly, we let life pass us by without any ability to enjoy where we are and the moments we have in front of us.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how I can make my life more intentional. That’s right – intentional.
What does this mean? Well it means that I want to be deliberate about what I spend my precious time on. It doesn’t matter whether I’m at work, or at home, I only want to be doing things that are going to be furthering my purpose, and moving me towards my goals.
Choose one task and complete it
On any given day, I’m usually juggling at least five different things that need to get done that day, or very soon after. This often means that I need to care out time during the day to focus on all tasks, in between trying to do what I need to do at work, and then also balancing my personal life.
This can be draining and I’ve been thinking about how I can improve my approach. Enter task focus.
What is task focus? It’s simply the notion that we should focus on one task at a time (even if it’s running concurrently with others) to ensure that we can devote all our creative and physical energy to that task and complete it to the best of our ability.
This has been a real game changer for me. Since starting to also focus on my fitness – I’ve noticed that my ability to plan and execute singular tasks has increased immensely. Not only am I more present, but I seem to be able to operate at a higher level – it’s a different feeling to anything I’ve felt before.
I don’t feel constrained, I don’t feel like I’m limited in the impact I can have, and I don’t feel like I have a cap on my energy or motivation. Since watching this motivational video a few weeks ago that talks about if you only thought you could achieve something – you could achieve it, I’ve been able to quickly and rapidly move through my task list, one at a time, and I’m now at a point where things don’t feel laborious. They don’t feel forced, and I don’t feel like I need to do anything.
I’ve reframed this as “I get to do this”, rather than “I need to, or must, do this”.
This is a game changer for the way I view my work and the world.
Use the life you want to live a year from now as your motivation
While what we’re talking about has so far been about not thinking about tomorrow, it’s useful to frame the long term opportunity or goal as your motivation. I use my constantly fixation on the future, the eventual place I want to be – as my fuel to help get me through whatever I’m going through.
On this blog, I talk a lot about visualising your future state – the life you want to live, and using that as the catalyst to push you forward. What future state resonates with you? Where do you want to be in a years’ time? What goal do you want achieved? Is there somewhere that you wish to be? Is there something that you don’t wish to be? (This can be equally important).
A great way to do this is with a Vision Board. If you don’t know about what this is, it’s essentially a big board that you pin up with pictures and images of the things that you wish to have, achieve or relish in – to use as motivation as you go through the day (see an example below). I’ve been vision boarding lately and while I still have to complete mine, I’ve found that it’s been a great way to visualise the life I want to live – and in fact, the live I want to live in the present and not some far distant future time.
To go a little deeper – I want to be unrecognisable in a years’ time. I want to not only transform my fitness and get down to as close to single digit body fat % (it’s in the 20s which is not ideal, but I’ve got a plan to get it down). I’m also charting a course to be free of working for someone within the next year – not that I don’t enjoy working for others, but because I want to take more control of my time and attention, and to be able to divert it to the things that are going to maximise achievement of my goals, and my ability to accumulate wealth, success AND happiness along the way.
Experiment with different tools and business models
So how do you achieve it you ask? Well there are some practical things you have to do. We’re now living in a time where the barrier to accessing knowledge and information is so low that anyone with access to electricity and an internet connection has no excuse not to leverage it to make money.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is accessible to anyone, and you should be experimenting with it to find out how you can use it in your everyday life. This includes your job and career. There’s an article from Matt Schumer that’s gotten about 80 million views on X.com recently – on why we’re now at the tipping point of the AI revolution, and how all of our jobs will simply cease to exist in the next five years.
I have a much more optimistic view of the future. I truly believe there will be two classes of people:
- those that are able to leverage AI and use it to their advantage, and
- those that fail to leverage AI and are either directed by it, or those that wield it’s use
You want to be in the former category. Make sure that you are experimenting with the use of AI tools that are freely available out there online such as:
I believe that the people that can use these technologies in their day to day life, and find a way to integrate them into their workflows, will actually come out ahead of everyone else. We’re truly living in the last years where the average person can use AI to their advantage and as their competitive advantage. There are still larger swathes of the population that don’t know how to use AI – either they don’t know how, or they simply haven’t bothered.
Don’t be one of those people – you want to be the person that takes advantage of every single hour of time you can with AI and technology. Make it fun, find a way to gamify to the use of AI. I’ve been experimenting with using Claude to research blog topics and articles that I want to write for Life Success Factors.
I’m also using AI to help code and design a suite of websites that I will then use to create content and leverage the use of internet traffic to generate PPC income through various advertising networks. It’s all part of the funnel to ensure that I can continue to make money while I’m asleep. Everyone should be doing this – we should all be finding ways to increase our expertise, knowledge and ability to generate a passive income online.
Another tool I’ve been using is Open Claw. It’s amazing what this can do when you give it access to your system. A word of warning however – there are significant risks associated with local use of this model if you give it full access to your file system. You might find that it accidentally deletes a large number of files, or even worse – deletes the entire contents of your hard drive.
Invest in your skills and knowledge
Going hand in hand with experimentation, is that you need to invest in your skills and understanding of your chosen craft. To be able to live in the moment, and to be able to do the things you want to do on your terms, you need a reliable skillset to fall back on when you need to earn a living.
The last thing you want to do is to have to be constantly thinking about how you will make your next rent or mortgage payment. This is why investing in your career in the early days is incredibly important. It acts as the foundation and gives you a platform to earn more, so you can turn that earning capacity into lifestyle and more importantly, to be able to channel that into investments and assets that will appreciate over time.
The best way to increase your earning capacity is to upskill. You upskill by investing your time and money into developing new skills that make you more attractive and employable in the job market. It also helps to boost your confidence as this comes from competence. Competence is the thing you get paid for, not for anything else. If you are competent, and you can demonstrate that competency then you’ll have no issues with finding a job or staying employed.
No matter how the job market is faring, employers are always on the lookout for good people – and good people are hard to find at the best of times. Make sure you are one of those good people by staying employable and having the skills and competence to back that up.
Using artificial intelligence to your advantage
When it comes to staying employed in 2026, you can’t ignore the rise and availability of artificial intelligence in its ability to keep you employed. As I said earlier, we all should incorporate AI in the ways we work and live – it’s an inevitable fact of life now that the people that can leverage AI will be the ones that have the leverage. Make sure you are one of those people if you’d like to achieve outsized outcomes in your career and investments.
You don’t have to spend anything but your own time if you want to learn more about AI. There are amazing resources out there that you can tap into to learn more about the technology, but also to use it to help you generate a passive income online. There are people that are using AI to automate their Twitter posts, or to help create designs and artwork that they sell online, on sites like Etsy.com and eBay.com
The opportunities to monetise AI are endless. There are also people that are using AI to create fully faceless YouTube channels with videos that they don’t need to narrate or use their face in. It truly is the iPhone moment for this generation of technology – the moment that changes everything in the way we create and even consume content.
As Gary Vee once said, be a creator of content and not a consumer. If you are a consumer, you’ll forever be stuck in the cycle of consumption and you’ll never be able to leverage your own unique skills to monetise and sell them to the marketplace. I’m a firm believer that we all have something unique to add to world, to the market place, and to each other. In fact, I know this is true because we all have a job and are paid for our time for the service we provide to our employers (or if we’re self-employed, then directly to other businesses, the public and the market).
Get a mentor or coach to help you through the difficult bits
The other aspect to living in the moment, is that together with competence we all need help and people beside us to help with learning new things and ups killing ourselves.
There’s so much information out there in today’s day and age that’s it’s sometimes impossible to take it all in, and action it. How do you know what’s true and what’s not? This is true especially if you don’t know a lot about a particular subject or you’ve never sought to understood an area of the market in any real depth before.
That’s where mentors and coaches come in. They can help guide you through the particularly difficult parts of picking up a new skill, or getting yourself ready for a big new challenge. I’ve recently decided that I want to improve my fitness and I said to myself that every time I tried to work on it before, I always failed. I failed not because I didn’t want to get fitter, or lose weight. I lost because it was hard to wade through the almost endless information out there about diet, weight loss and fitness.
This is where you just need someone, like a coach, to tell you what you need to do. They help to cut out the noise, and to tailor the information to exactly what you need. What I’ve done is get a coach to help me with my fitness. I’ve joined a gym call Body Fit (BFT) where there are structured classes every day with coaches that tell you how what you need to do to reach your fitness goals. It’s a foolproof way to ensure that you achieve all of your fitness goals through a structured process.
In the same way if you wanted to improve your ability to learn and absorb new information, you might engage a mentor or a coach who knows a lot about the subject that you want to learn. That coach can then guide you through a structured series of lessons or sessions where you start with the foundations, and then progressively move to working on more advanced and complex concepts – that build on what you learned before.
You can also apply this to your investments. Say you want to be a better investor, you can enlist the help of people who manage money for a living to give you a perspective of the markets and of the different asset classes in there. However, I personally would never outsource the decision making – as that absolves you from accountability in the outcome – and you are the only person that is going to work 100% in your own best interests.
Always come back to gratitude
Finally – the best way to live in the moment is to be grateful for what we have. We will always want more – to be bigger, stronger, faster and richer. However, that takes time and no matter how much we want it, or how much we rush, there will always be a new goal that we want to chase. We’re just wired that way as humans.
Rather than working against our own nature, we sometimes we need to sit in the stillness and be grateful and thankful for what we have in the moment, to not skip ahead to the place we want to be, but be happy for the time we have now.
As I’m writing this post, I’ve just learned that a friend’s mum has passed away. It is a very real reminder that at the end of the day, the reason we do what we do is so that we can provide a better life for ourselves and our families. Family is everything at the end of the day, there is nothing more important than that and it’s a big wake up call for those of us that sometimes work too hard at the expense of spending time with the people we love and care about.
It has really started to make me change my perspective on life and about the things that matter to me. While it is important to work hard and chase your goals, it’s equally if not more important to spend the limited time we have on this earth with the people that matter to us. They are the ones that give meaning to our lives, and while our relationships are tested at times, there is nothing more important than those relationships. I encourage you to audit your relationships and ask yourself the question – what am I doing today to nurture the relationships that matter to me? Am I moving my relationship forwards, or backwards with this particular person? Every action counts – no matter how big or small.
Wrapping up
There’s a lot that we covered in this blog post about how you can live your best life. It all centres on being true to yourself and ensuring that you are looking after your skills and career, and also focusing on the things outside of work and career that give you actual fulfilment. These are the things that actually matter – at the end of the day there’s no amount of money that will satisfy you if you are devoid of quality, meaningful relationships that bring you joy.
With this, I wish you all the best on your journey as you progress towards leading a more fulfilling and successful life – however that looks for you. Until next time, peace and see you there.
Craig
