Hey guys! In this post I’m going to talk about pruning your life. This means cutting back the things that you don’t need to do so that you can put more focus on the things that will help you to reach your goals. I know that you’ve experienced this too, that point you realize you’re crazy busy with life and it doesn’t seem like you’re making the kind of progress on your goals that you want. When you hit this point it’s time to do some pruning. So, what does pruning mean and how is it going to help me?  This is the question that I will be answering in this post.

I grew up out in the country near acres and acres of apple, pear, and cherry trees and every winter work crews would work their way through each tree pruning off the excess growth. Someone might ask “Why would you want to prune branches that are going to bear perfectly good fruit”. The answer to this question in one word is: quality. If a fruit tree grows unpruned it’ll likely grow a tremendous amount of fruit, which might sound like a good thing, however, it isn’t, simply because the tree actually grows too much fruit. An apple tree for example is going to grow more apples than it has nutrients to grow into quality fruit. The fruit on the unpruned tree will be very small because there are so many pieces of fruit on the tree sharing the nutrients that the tree provides. So, by pruning back some of the tree it creates fewer places that fruit can grow. By doing this, the apples that do grow will have a higher amount of nutrients and will grow to become big, plump, beautiful apples.

In life it can be easy for many of us to find ourselves over committing, trying to do too many things, and not giving our goals the appropriate amount of time and resources required. After some amount of time goes by we look at our lack of progress with these goals and then wonder why we’re not getting anywhere. If this happens to you, it’s time to start doing some pruning. If you find yourself saying yes way too often and then becoming distracted from reaching your goals it’s time to start saying no. Saying no to one thing means that you get to say yes to something else. Therefore, saying no is a form of pruning.

When it comes to health, wealth, and happiness, pruning can help you to focus more time and resources on your goals in these areas. One of the biggest reasons I tell myself that I’m not going to the gym is because “I’m too busy”. As we all know, this is totally a bogus reason for not going. I need to be better at prioritizing my time and if you find yourself slacking in health, wealth, or happiness because you “don’t have the time”, then you need to do a better job at prioritizing too. When we prioritize we simply look at the things that are most important to us and we make sure that we’re paying the right amount of attention to these areas. For the area of happiness, are you spending enough time with your family and loved ones? If you’re not, I can tell you that you’re going to regret it when your relationships start to suffer. Are you spending the proper amount of time to budget and plan for building wealth? If you’re not, your going to realize down the road that you wish you would have done a better job at this. For your health, are you spending enough time in the gym and making healthy meals? Or are you skipping the gym and eating junk because you “don’t have time”? The only way you’re going to be successful is if you make time to be successful and you make your goals priorities. Do you want to be a great husband and a great father or a great wife and a gre...