One more thing?

Sometimes we just need to be happy about ourselves. We spend our lives trying to achieve something more (at least I do), one more task, one more event, one more dinner, one more friend, one more book, one more tv show, one more project, one more dream. It is hard to draw the line between dream and reality and say what you realistically are able to do and what you are just never going to get to. I have that with loads of different things - I keep thinking about all the friends I wish I spent more time with, about all the books I keep starting and not finishing (which never used to happen), about the business plans I want to start one day, about the places I want to visit for a weekend, about the things I should buy, about the plans I should be making, about the strategy focus I should have. Eventually, it gets to a point where all of these are conflicting and I do, as always everything last minute. Except when I accept that life is about choices and choices can actually help living your life better. The first day at Harvard they said schedule would be tight and there would be a lot of things to do at the same time, because that is how life was expected to be, so we should start preparing ourselves to make choices that same day (I may even have blogged about this before). I thought they were realistic, but from my perspective exaggerating it. After all, I was an M&A banker, with easy life of 18+ hours days while starting my charity on the side, as a junior analyst, organizing all the social events of my analyst class and still having time to do more volunteering and help out with mentoring at the Firm. I did not think it could get much harder and I was very much at ease with the choices I made - mostly it involved not sleeping and doing everything else. Looking back, I am glad business school told me that, not because I learned from it, but because it helps me feel more normal. To know that other people may be facing the struggle that I face every single day. Each day I go out for dinner with friends is a nightmare is 100+ emails from the charity that I leave for the next day, every Friday night I go out, means sleeping in on Saturday morning and not taking the 3 solid hours of work with no one around to do larger tasks for the charity, such as year end accounts, each flight I take to Portugal to see my friends is 2 more hours of work I can get not-interrupted but zero work at the weekend and no London friends to catch up with. Each night I do one more proposal for the charity is one more of my friends that may just give up on me and think that married life got into me. It is hard to win. On the other hand, it is also hard to just lose. Each of the choices brings up a gain, and we just need to sometimes feel happy about that. So today, I feel like I have achieved a lot, will stop doing my 2012 resolutions list and just live with it.