All living beings pass through two stages in their lives, i.e., Birth and Death. Between these two stages, we, as human beings, encounter many choices that shape our lives. Among these choices that we encounter in our lives, three categories are the most important, i.e. 1) Health 2) Passion 3) Wealth. If we make hard choices early, then we will lead an easy life later, or the other way around. Hard choices need a little bit more control and effort than easy choices. It is too ambitious to have only hard choices and no easy choices. So we should give more room to hard choices by making them first and then spent on easy choices. Let’s see some real-life examples of each of these categories and decide our choices.

1) Health Choice:

Health is the most important thing in our lives. We can’t borrow or give our health away, unlike wealth. So we, and only we, need to take care of it.

To lead a healthy life, we need to keep an eye on two things: 1) what we eat and 2) what activities we do, as both need to be in balance.

If we have bad food choices in our daily routine, like more carbohydrates, oily and spicy junk food that tastes better and gives instant satisfaction, then we will see an adverse impact on our health in the coming years. Also, the quality of food matters instead of quantity. Because our body is a machine that processes food. If we process more quantity than required, then it will eventually degrade parts of the machine. And that leads to some other dependencies like regular checkups, adding supplements, etc.

Give preference to happiness over pleasure.

Also, we need to consider our daily activities when choosing food. If we are not doing many outdoor activities and spend more time monotonously on one activity, like sitting while working in the office, watching TV in the house, etc., then we need to consume required healthy food accordingly. Otherwise, we unbalance our health system with a combination of no outdoor activities and too much junk food. We can find many examples from the recent pandemic and its impact on our society.

So to lead a healthy lifestyle, follow good food choices like eating more proteins, vegetables, and fruits in the required quantity, along with some outdoor activities. This is the reason why Japanese people have a high life expectancy.

2) Passion Choice:

“The means of learning are abundant, but the desire to learn is scarce.”- Naval Ravikant

Nowadays, we have readily available information with respect to learning, entertainment, etc. at our fingertips. But it is important to decide what information to ignore, what information is useful, how to process and use it to reach our ambitions. Otherwise, digital consumption is like smoking, as these products change our habits with less control over them.

What is your Digital Well being Score?

Everyone has the same valuable resource, i.e., 24 hours in a day. If we spend our valuable resource on things with finite variability that give instant satisfaction, i.e., watching OTT contents, surfing social media, etc., we will lose the opportunity to improve ourselves. Also, the time we spend, which is captured in digital wellbeing, is an investment we are making unconsciously to make products more habit-forming (i.e. addicted) and distract us from the main goal. Instead, if we focus on infinite variability, like creating content, learning new skills, reading a book, etc., then benefits will compound over time.

Give preference to be a producer than consumer of digital world.

N.R. Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murthy, founders of Infosys, like to spend more time with books. In fact, they have separate libraries for themselves, and they have built many libraries across India.

Laszlo Polgar, Hungarian teacher, is well-knowned for his experiments that show effort beats talent and his role in raising chess prodigies, the Polgar sisters.

3) Wealth Choice:

Last but not the least, wealth is another important aspect of our lives. But we can’t enjoy it unless we are in good health, and we need to have it before dealing with it.

Compounding happens over time with less outward appearance, and it also brings freedom to give us control. No one becomes wealthy overnight. If someone does, then it is not sustainable.

It doesn’t matter how much we earn if we are spendthrifts. Rather, it is ideal to live a frugal life and being prepared for uncertainty with the right savings and investments.

Give preference to be wealthier than rich.

We can find many real-life examples of people who reached extreme ends with their money choices. Ronald Read, the janitor, lived a simple life with disciplined investing for a longer duration and was known as a wealthy investor. Similarly, many rich people have gone bankrupt overnight because of their bad habits like lavish lifestyles, expensive accessories, etc. Some other rich people went down in pursuit of getting more.

From birth until death, we encounter many choices in our lives with respect to different categories like health, passion, and wealth. Hard choices take time but end up with an easy life, while easy choices happen overnight but end up with a hard life later.

We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.