Do It Yourself

No, this is not a blog about home improvements.  Just self improvements!

"If you want something done right, do it yourself!"

Has anyone ever said this to you?  Do you sometimes say it to yourself?  This is one of those half truths that can be so helpful at times, but so dangerous at other times.

It is probably often true that you will put more care and attention into doing properly something that will affect you, especially if you are the only or main person it affects.  The original phrase is a rather liberal translation of a line in a French play written in 1809 by Charles-Guillaume Étienne.  A closer translation of this line would be "One is never served so well as by oneself".

Where I feel this particularly applies is when you are planning what exactly you want to do with the rest of your life.  This is not something restricted to a young person deciding what he or she wants to do as a career, although it also applies there of course.  But notice I have said "with the rest of your life".  We all have a "rest" of our lives.  We don't know how long that "rest" is, but we all have it.  Maybe it is 50 years (and even though I am over 60 I could still have another 50 years remaining), maybe it is 1 year, maybe it is only 1 day.  For any of us, today could be the last day of our lives.  So plan it well!  But also there could be many years remaining - you could achieve a great deal in those remaining years, so plan that well too.  Make sure you HAVE a plan!  Plan your day, each and every day, to get the best you can out of it for you and your family.  Plan your coming year (perhaps broken down by quarter) to achieve one or more of your short term goals.  Approach it the other way around, too - do some work on finding out exactly what it is you want to achieve, and then fit this into an appropriate timescale, rather than only looking at a day, week, year etc and deciding what you can achieve within this.  At the risk of having one quote too many for a short article, remember (as Jim Rohn told us) that "If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much."

Don't fall into the trap, though, of believing that nobody wants you to be happier, be more successful, and that nobody can help you achieve what you want to achieve.  There are plenty of people who will not want to help, and may even wish to hinder you, and some of those people may be hiding in the group of people you call your "friends".  This group of "negative" people will grow as you begin to become happier and more successful.  But there are also many people who genuinely want you to be happier and want you to be more successful.  Time spent finding out which group the people around you fall into is time well spent.  Keep your distance from the "negatives" and try to spend more time with the "positives".  Learn to take advice and help from those positive people.  Never let pride stand in the way of getting help.  Draw on that help properly and it will be like supercharging your journey to your goals.  Spend time searching out those who can and will help you in this way.  Including those who do it as a profession - for example good coaches.  Gratefully receive any free help that is available, but also be prepared to spend good money getting really good professional help.  Paradoxically, this particularly applies to your efforts to create the right plans for yourself, despite what I have said in the last paragraph.  Yes, you need to take the steps yourself to create the plans, and not expect anybody to do it for you, but certainly be ready to accept all the help you can get in doing so.  This will create tremendous leverage in your efforts to achieve whatever it is you really want to achieve.

Finally, don't fall into the other trap of thinking that if you are better at doing something then only you should do it.  This particularly applies in business, but it also applies in your personal life.  Learn to delegate.  Accept that you may have done the job better than the person you delegated it to, but also recognize that the benefits of the way you were able to use the time you saved by delegating it more than compensated for this.  Also, we generally get better and better at tasks the more we do them.  So even though you may now be better at doing it than the person to whom you delegate, eventually they may well become far better at it than you ever were.  This can be a hard lesson to learn, but it is a very important one.

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https://www.betterhelp.com/