Each one of us is pulled in 1000 different directions each day. If we are not careful, we will set out to do one thing and end up doing another. It is crucial in these busy times to remember The Point.

What do I mean by The Point? I mean the primary reason we started out to do what we are doing: our original motivation.

For example, my husband and I decided to homeschool our children because we thought it was the way they would get the best education. It wasn’t to save money. It wasn’t to protect them socially. It was to teach them to learn how to learn and to grow them into thinking adults who are able to handle any situation life throws at them. As it turns out, they have been protected socially, and the price of homeschooling them is cheaper than the private schools we looked at sending them too, but we keep that original goal constantly before us and measure our success against that metric.

As another example, when I was in nursing school I knew that my goal was not to become the best career nurse ever; I wasn’t training to be Florence Nightingale Jr. It wasn’t even really to help others, though hopefully I did plenty of that, too. My goal was to get an education as a safety net because I might need it someday. I always planned to get married and be a stay-at-home mom. When I had graduated and was working as a nurse, my goal was to add extra income to Steve’s so that when we started our family we would be better positioned financially. Those dollars we socked away to make a bigger down payment on our house are still helping us every month as our mortgage payment is lower than it would have otherwise been. I could have easily gotten distracted, but I’m glad I didn’t.

I read an article in the paper a while ago about a school system that was considering closing down their all-day kindergarten. They were going to return to the original system of half-day kindergarten. The parents who were interviewed expressed no concern about it affecting the education of their children. Their comments were related only to what an extra burden it would put on their personal budget to have to provide these children day care for the extra half day. They had totally forgotten that the original goal of all-day kindergarten was to provide a better education for these children, or maybe their goal was never the same as the one stated by the school system.

As we do things in life, it’s easy to get distracted; we start out to do one thing and end up doing something entirely different. We start out trying to make some extra money to help our families, and we end up being dominated by our jobs and careers to the detriment of our families. Or we start out doing something because we know it’s a good thing to do, but we don’t have a specific goal in mind and end up not accomplishing as much as we could have.

We can always change our goal, but until we’ve intentionally thought it through and done so, let’s stick to the original goal.

So as we go through life, let’s ask the question, “What’s The Point?” That doesn’t mean that we can’t do several things at once, but we’ll get where we’re headed a lot better if there is a primary goal to each of the major chunks of our life and we keep it front and center in our minds.