Getting to Focus

This post is not about picking apart each person’s foibles and acting like, in correcting them we will become wealthy supermen. This post asks you to question, not what your purpose is here on the third planet from our sun, but what you would like to accomplish in the roughly 30,000 days you have spinning through the universe. The amount of intellectual firepower within the walled confines of Durland is staggering and with that power comes the obligation to help the people who are less blessed than us. The question then becomes, in what manner do we help people? This, in my meandering way, is the gist of the remainder of the post.

Focus is a powerful tool, that when controlled, becomes a way to accomplish what we want. The question is: how do we get to focus quickly and consistently? How can we instantly become “locked in?”[i] Further questions then become: am I choosing the best route to becoming focused? Can I become more focused?

Focus comes, in my experience, when you have a clear goal of the outcome you would like to achieve. When you combine this outcome with the manner in which you want to help people, it becomes very easy to become focused. If you can understand how your current task will help your end goal, completing it becomes easier. As an example, I will use one of my life goals. I would like to be the head of a university endowment. Why you may ask? I believe that education is incredibly important and that dedicating my life to it is a worthwhile occupation. There are many routes to helping education and becoming a professor would seemingly be the best one. I considered the path of professorship but in the end decided that although I love teaching, my skills, innate and otherwise, lay down the path of numbers and calculation, rather than clarity of speech or writing. The next coach in my thought train was: how do I use numbers and calculation to further education? If I could use the math in finance to help pay for multiple professors’ salaries, then I surely was doing more than I ever possibly could as a lone professor.

Clearly my result using such an approach will be wildly different than everyone elses, but I believe that going through such a process can clarify how you want to help people. The following is a more step by step process for getting to focus.

1.     What do you believe is most important to give to others?

If you can identify what you believe is the most important thing in life, you can use this as a jumping off point for where you want to go next. While working to complete something for yourself can be potent, it is nearly impossible to give everyone what you have received. In this manner I believe that doing things for others will always be more potent than doing them for you; there are always more people to give to.

2.       Is your belief something that can be continuously given to others?

If your goal is something that can be crossed off or can be completed it will not be as compelling as something that you continuously do. Life is not about how many tasks you completed or being able to tally how many “life stats” you accumulate. Disappointment will rear its ugly head when at 65 or 70 you reach your goal and find out that it was an unworthy goal all along. Perhaps the Blue Scholars put it best with “Now this here's for those who choose fights whose fruits might never ripen until after their life.”[ii]

3.      How do your individual talents interact with this belief?

This is perhaps the trickiest area. Your occupation could be congruent with your end goal or totally tangential to it.  If I wanted to provide scholarships for people to go to college, I could go directly into the finance related track of how do my investments return $5,000 a year to make a sustainable scholarship or a more oblique route where I become a CEO where I earn a whole bunch of money and just give $5,000 out of paycheck a year to the scholarship. This step will require some thought and is perhaps the most rewarding as two people will rarely come to the same exact conclusion.

4.      What is the first step to starting down the path towards giving to others?

This becomes the more occupational level of the approach where you really begin to identify what you would like to do on a daily basis for the following years. This doesn’t mean that you never come back to this step, but that every couple of months, you take some time to recognize what is the most important next step to moving down the path.

5.      How does my current task relate to my belief?

If you can figure out how your current task relates to your end goal, focus will come quickly. In the end, this is how we get to focus quickly and consistently. When your current task aligns with how it will affect your belief, focus will come easily as it gives you the why you are doing a task.[iii] If your current task is aligned with your belief then becoming focused should come quickly and such questions as, can I focus quicker or in a better way, become irrelevant because everything you do should be aligned from the start and provide motivation to propel you to the next task.

Hopefully, this was a little illuminating and I look forward to seeing what beliefs people choose to spend their lives working on.

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[i] P Diddy, 4:25, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU8KksjGB8s

[ii] Blue Scholars, Opening Salvo

[iii] Simon Sinek, Ted, 2:10, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA