Leveraging Your Life

• SA Engages

August 28, 2020

“Buy Local” billboards bombard downtown areas where small businesses dwell. Local performance venues are rolling out new promotions of local artists that they encourage you to listen as part of supporting your community and loving your neighbor. Your significant other needs to be invested in all while also supporting your friends in their interests. Life seems to be pulling you a million different ways and it seems nearly impossible to support all the people and causes that you want to while also keeping your sanity. For this reason, learning how to leverage your life to support the things you care about is an essential skill to learn. You must utilize having what you invest in support the other things you want to invest in.

            For example, let’s say you are dating someone. A study by a team at the University of Virginia found that “…people who spent quality time with their partner at least once a week were 3.5 times more likely to report being ‘very happy’ in their relationship compared to those who didn’t.” This speaks to the dire necessity of investing in relationships, but with all the other things and people you want to invest in, how can you devote your time to making your romantic relationship thrive? The solution is as simple as investing in them while supporting others. If a friend owns or works at a restaurant, take your significant other out on a date there. Got friends in a band? A lovely concert date. Not only would you then be supporting your friends but you are investing in your relationship, making memories, and contributing to the local economy.

            Musicians need streams and concert gigs to make a living. By listening as you drive around, sharing songs and albums on social media, and going to concerts you are helping them advance in their career. For YouTubers and other internet personnel, subscriptions are needed in order to build a larger audience. It costs you nothing to hit the subscribe button on YouTube or Spotify, which builds their numbers, presence, influence, and support.

            If you work in a mentorship or youth ministry organization but you have friendships you want to stoke or relationships you want to kindle, then your solution is to take your friends or significant other to events and businesses the kids you are pouring into are at. Stopping by an ice cream place one of “your kids” is at after going to a musical one of your other kids is a prime example of how you can leverage hanging out with your closest circle while supporting those in your investment circle.

            For the student who values hanging out with friends, perhaps the best way to leverage your life is to study with your friends. That way you not only invest in your academic life, but you build friendships as well. Friends who struggle or thrive academically alongside each other tend to stay together because nothing unites people quite like a common struggle.

            Lastly, you can support certain missions and organizations just by going about your normal life mindfully. Companies like Kroger have a rewards system in place that gives money back to a non-profit as you buy your groceries. Amazon started Amazon Smile in order to give a portion of purchases to non-profits. Thus far, they have raised over $100 million dollars for charities and non-profits, all because people mindfully went about life as usual.

            There are a million different ways to have the things you love to pour into support the other things you love, you just have to think through how you can leverage the one to support the other. Priorities can feed into the things of secondary importance if you play your cards right and live a leveraged life.

Sources

https://www.psychologies.co.uk/love/life-lab-experiment-love-7.html

https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/amazonsmile-has-raised-100-million-for-charity/

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