The easiest framework (by far) to improve your life

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The Health Growth Letters is a weekly publication of tips, frameworks, and lessons to help you build a more balanced life based on faith, health, and wellness. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.

What’s on the agenda:

• A Verse

• A Lesson

• A Puzzle

• A Optimization

A verse:

Matthew 20 gives us the story of the workers in the vineyard.

The story begins with a Vineyard owner who wants to hire workers to to tend to his vineyard. He goes out in the morning and finds some guys to work and offers them a denarius. They agree and come to work.

Around midday, the Vineyard owner decides to hire more workers for the same daily wage.

In the late afternoon, he does this again.

When the day is over, the owner of the vineyard pays everyone a denarius, but the workers who started in the morning say that it’s unfair, that they worked longer and harder than the others, and should be paid more.

The vineyard owners responded and said, “Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” - Matthew 20:14-15

Staying grounded in the blessings we’re given

I think about the times I’ve taken a new job and been so excited about it. The new opportunity, the increase in pay, and the exciting new adventure.

That lasts for a while, but eventually it fades. We see other people making more or doing something different and become discontent with what we have.

This happens in work, but this happens in life too. We are so incredibly blessed, yet we often look at Gods blessing on others as a curse upon ourselves, but it couldn’t be further from the truth.

We are loved, cared for, and blessed.

Work from a place of blessing, and nothing will be kept from you.

"For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away." - Matthew 25:29

This doesn’t mean the lucky get luckier. It’s a self-fulfilling promise that when we see we have much, we realize how much more we are given, but when we focus on what we don’t have, everything seems to be taken away.

Takeaway Question:

Who are you, are you the person to “has much and to whom much is given” or are you the “have not, that gets everything taken away”?

It’s your decision, and it will change the trajectory of your life.

A lesson: A simple optimization framework

This week's lesson is short and sweet, mostly because it is so simple that I can’t make it any longer.

It’s by far the easiest life optimization framework I’ve ever seen. Here it is:

This framework cuts to the heart of life's biggest struggles:

• Consuming vs creating our building

• Isolating vs spending time with others

It also builds to the epitome of what life is all about: creating and building things with others!

If you’re struggling, feeling like you’re in a rut, or just unhappy with where you are in life, take a few minutes to fill these buckets and identify ways to shift them into a more positive or uplifting category:

“Bad”, things like scrolling social media, watching tv, eating and drinking, doing Duolingo: Finding ways to either make them creative outlets, like building a social media following or writing a story in a new language. Or, find ways to do them with others. I have a show I watch with my wife, and nothing is quite as uplifting as going out and sharing meals with friends!

Finally, look for ways to take your creative and building activities and find ways to connect them with others.

Building a business, find someone to do it with.

Going through life, find. a lifelong partner to commit to doing it with

Getting in shape, find a workout buddy.

Working on becoming more like Jesus, find like-minded people to encourage and uplift you!

These are the activities that make life full of meaning and worth.

A Puzzle:

A rebus is a puzzle that uses pictures, symbols, and/or letters to represent words or parts of words. The challenge of the puzzle is to decipher the hidden meaning behind the symbols and solve the puzzle.

Here’s this week’s puzzle:

The answer will be given in next week’s letter.

The answer to last week’s puzzle was “Excuse Me”.

An Optimization:

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