If you are brave enough, take a bit of an audit of what is of greatest importance to you. Look at your typical day and where the time goes. What is it that you spend money on? What do you find yourself talking about? If you don’t like what you find, make some changes. 

I love to read. In theory, I like to read literary fiction, and when I am relaxed and not too tired, I still do. Give me a good Russian novelist or a Booker Prize winner and I am pretty sure I would enjoy it. Yet, if I am honest with myself, I am often not so relaxed and pretty tired when I have time to sit down and read. I cannot concentrate on reading Salman Rushdie or Dostoyevsky when I am not at my best. So I reach for the easier spy novel or easy read. I have a theoretical taste in quality literary fiction, but most of my fiction consumption is of the much easier to read variety.

I think I’m not alone when it comes to having a certain practice in theory and a rather different one in reality. Think about the food we eat. It is easy to have an aspirational goal to eat healthily, and even to purchase a full range of lean meat and salad ingredients and put them in your fridge. Yet, when it comes to preparing a meal after a busy day at work, the aspirational contents of our fridge might not be so attractive. We might order fast food, which we (in theory) don’t want, yet is what we actually eat more of.

We see our real priorities in what we do, not in what we say, or in what we think our priorities are.

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