The Pineapple Chicken Blog

Hi Everyone,

I spent the weekend in Porto and only managed to return to London in the early hours of Monday morning. It was an opportunity to take a much-needed recovery period, I was proud that I did not check my emails on Friday and just immersed myself in the lovely town of Porto and catch up on reading. I will write about Porto another day, once I have sorted out my photos! For now, I recommend to make a hot drink and settle in for a particularly long post 🙂

Priorities

With a lot of time to reflect during the holiday, in this post I wanted to look back on what was discussed in my life leverage post; as I have been thinking about this a lot and this is partially a response to what my boyfriend wrote in his blog.

In Life Leverage, the book asked the reader to write a priority list of 10 items. This is saved on my phone with an alert to ensure that I review it on a daily basis. It is important that the list stays relevant and up to date. I have found this process quite distressing at times because it is very difficult to put things in order. Regardless, it has proven to be a very important exercise. In the spirit of transparency and openness, my list is as follows:

1. Health
2. Wealth
3. Freedom
4. Knowledge
5. Self Confidence
6. Family & Close Friends
7. Entrepreneurship
8. Travel
9. Creativity
10. Communication

Having just completed Michelle Obama’s new biography – “Becoming“; she also touches upon priorities as well. For those who have not read this yet, I highly recommend this book! It was very enlightening and also empowering at the same time. This post will not give it the full attention it deserves, but look out for future posts where I would give a more thorough review and discussion.

* SPOILER ALERT* Stop here, if you have not read the book and don’t want to know more! 

In this post, I will touch on items: Wealth (#2) and Family & Close Friends (#6). Health is pretty self-explanatory and why it is top of the list, so I won’t delve into this further. Others will be touched in future posts (or you will be here for hours!)

Returning to Michelle Obama – in her book she asks her mother whether she should give up her high flying career as a corporate lawyer for a role that she believes would have a bigger and better impact on society. She struggled with the right balance and who she wanted to be. This is touched again when she balances life in politics with Barack and creating a life of normality for her children.

Wealth

I think a lot of us will face this dilemma in our lifetime and I definitely empathised with her struggles, as a lot of the questions she asked herself I continue to ask myself to this day. Certainly, with regards to career, my parents had the same thinking as her mother – make money first and then worry about impact later. This is a very “older” generation of thinking, but I have been partially swayed by this argument. From my experience, frustratingly nothing seems to happen without necessary capital (i.e wealth) to make it happen. This explains why wealth is so high on my list of priorities. For an individual that is in her late twenties reaching 30 soon, creating the necessary foundation for the life I want and the environment I want my family to grow from, I can’t escape that my level of wealth is a key focus and driver of other things in my life.

Family & Close Friends

I am very fortunate at my current stage in life, I do not have to worry or spend a lot of time building the relationship with family and close friends. They are forever important in my life but that does not mean they will always be my number one priority. I am sure this will change significantly over time, especially when I have my own family/children. However, the current top 5 priorities are where they are because I want to be able to focus and prioritise how I can grow at a person to support my relationships and networks.

This list is obviously personal to each individual person and there is absolutely no right or wrong answer. Most of them are self-explanatory, though for some, similar to what my boyfriend mentioned – family and close friends are lower than where most people would probably put it, or maybe not? I would be interested to know!

Do you think this exercise is helpful? Would you try it for yourself? As always, would love to hear from you! On that note, I hope you all have a wonderful week ahead.

With Sweet & Sour Love,

Pineapple Chicken