One way to approach living your life or achieving any form of success is to think of yourself as having 7 buckets that need to be filled:

  1. Your Energy: Essential to all else is your physical and emotional wellness; healthy habits are the power grid for all of your life.
  2. What You Know: Your Knowledge Base, Your Education, formal and informal/self-taught.
  3. What You Can Do: Your Skillsets and Abilities. 
  4. Your Network/Your Relationships: Who You Choose to Spend Time With: in many ways, you are the sum total of the 5 people you spend the most time with.
  5. What You Have to Work With: The Resources you have accumulated: Life Planning and Financial Literacy play major roles here.
  6. Your Track Record: Your Reputation/Your References: Have you Delivered? Kept Your Promises? 
  7. Your Values/Purpose/Principles: This is both the Final bucket… and the foundational First bucket of your Waterwheel circle as well: your ethical beliefs shape and form your character, it is your integrity and conscience that will draw the best of the best into your orbit.

One certainly can and should work on filling all simultaneously however the natural order of life is that there is a rough sequence: the more you know, the more you can do, the more you do, the more and higher qualifications of the people you tend to meet and so on. The waterwheel concept is important for each bucket supports, fills, and empowers the next bucket in a never-ending compounding cycle.

Closing Quotes:

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin

“A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” – Confucius (Attributed)

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” – Mark Twain

“Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it… he who doesn’t, pays it.” – Albert Einstein

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. Take care of your soul. It’s the only thing you take with you.” – Jim Rohn

As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier

Note: Every effort has been made to properly source any 3rd person material. I am, however, a voracious reader. If anyone finds any unattributed material, pls let me know asap and I will be delighted to give credit where credit is due.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832