“Always remember your focus determines your reality.”
George Lucas
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”
Bruce Lee
I know I have ambition. I’m chock full of it. But do I have the focus to practice what I need to? To make myself better than I need to for the next step ahead? Only time will tell, but I know that these skills will follow me for a lifetime if I can focus. Focus. Focus is what separates people. Being able to focus on what you need to and knowing what you want.
I can get distracted very easily. There are so many different things that can take up your attention. Social media is a big one for me and it takes away a lot of what I want to be
It’s easy to get distracted
To stop acting
Because everything around me is trying to get me reacting
And it’s all subtracting from how I want to be impacting
I want to change the world
But first I have to change myself
See myself as enough
I may be rough and a little gruff
But I will change
And someday the world won’t be as deranged
Distractions
“There are always distractions, if you allow them”
Tony La Russa
Distractions are hard to deal with. One thing I’ve been trying to learn is to just sit in the feeling of wanting to do something. This has especially helped with my porn addiction, to just sit in the lustful thoughts and not just hide them in a closet for later. As a kid, did you ever just put everything you didn’t want to deal with in a closet to deal with for later? Sending thoughts away is sort of like that. One day, you’ll have to deal with them and that day might be on a day when you’re not ready for it. To declutter your room and, thus, your mind is so important and if there’s something prevalent on your mind that’s distracting you from your work then do that and then come back to it, if it’s important. If it’s not important, sit with the feeling while trying to do your work and just let the feeling be. Your work might suffer for a moment, but the focus you learn from it will be so important down the road.
Distractions are fun and they give you a quick dopamine boost, but they’re not helping you build what you want to see in your life. Distractions are what play into our procrastination and I was reading a book called “Ultralearning” by Scott Young and he talks about procrastination. To help with our procrastination, we should look at what we’re doing to avoid what we actually want to do. You might get really productive on everything besides what you need to focus on and those are just distractions at that point. They might be things that you’ve needed to do for a while, but they aren’t your ultimate goal.
I was watching a video recently and he started to talk about focus and how the “woman in the red dress” would come to distract you. The woman in the red dress doesn’t mean a woman in an actual red dress (I guess it could but I digress). It could mean anything that distracts you from where you’re actually trying to go and just becomes a time suck. Go for what you want and be direct about it. A straight line is always faster than curving it and going to all these different places. I’m not saying to take shortcuts because that can come back to hurt you, but I’m saying that you need to be direct with where you want to go and be honest with yourself about what you need to do.
The Challenge
Everything is vying for your time. Everything takes up a little bit of your time. So I want to challenge you to record what you’re doing with your time. To challenge you to look at where your time and resources are going and if they’re not going where you want them to or if you’re spending too much time on things that don’t matter in the long run, to change. It might take awhile and you might get discouraged or distracted and it’s a natural part of the process, but one thing I learned in Counseling Psychology is that there’s an upwards loop and if you find the rabbit holes and start to fill them, then next time you’ll be better and you’ll do better. This challenge isn’t just for you guys either, it’s for me too. Getting your distractions under control is a pivotal part of life and so for this next week, I’m going to record where my time is going and how I can do better things with my time. At the end of the day, all we really have is time. I also want to challenge you and myself to focus on something for a prolonged period of time, not just leaving after a few weeks, but to actively try to get better at it for a year.
Conclusion
I want to learn a lot in my life. I want to do a lot with my life, but I think I’m too ambitious to the point where I want to do too much and I need to focus where I’m spending my time and not try to do so much that I can’t spend enough time on the things that truly matter. The next topic I want to touch on is doing something for a prolonged period of time and keeping up focus. I think that’s important and that is what separates a lot of the more successful people from those who aren’t as successful. There are a multitude of other factors as well that play into success and success is defined differently by everyone, but what you want to be successful in then you should put your focus there. Like if you want a successful family life, your primary focus should be on your kids and significant other. If you want a successful career, then your focus should be on that career and how to get further ahead. But success is defined differently by different people, so I’ll leave you with this: What does success look like to you and how can you focus so that you can be successful?
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