Ok, we’re going to move on now to what is quite literally the most important part of this program. I wouldn’t recommend forgetting everything else that we talked about, but if you wanted to choose just one concept to remember, this would be it. The concept is: Focus.
Where you put your focus determines everything that’s important in your life. It determines how you feel, it determines what you think, it determines what your beliefs are, and the reasons why you have those beliefs…and those things influence the actions you decide to take.
Look, when it comes right down to it, you can have a head full of good ideas, clear visions and empowering beliefs, but they just can’t do you any good if you don’t USE THEM. And the only way for you to use, or access those mental assets is for you to focus on them. The same is true for mental liabilities. When you focus on something, you put your power into that thing. So, if we want to continue increasing the quality of our life, we’ve got to stay focused on the things that can help us do that…and of course, spend less time focusing on things that get in our way.
This is all simple enough to understand. But it’s not easy to do. We’re constantly being distracted.
And by distracted I mean: things that have no productive value whatsoever are constantly interrupting our minds. …Disturbing our focus and sending us off in directions that are just plain wasteful; at least wasteful for anyone who has a specific destination in mind. If you just want to bounce around on the waves of life and see where you end up, that’s fine. But if you actually have goals, or dreams and aspirations, you’ve got to stay focused…it’s just that simple.
And not to harp on setting goals, but here again we’ve got a great reason for writing things down. It just makes everything that much easier. Lets put it this way: It makes us take the goal more seriously when we write it down, it creates a clearer vision in our mind, and it certainly elicits more of a commitment from us but most importantly (this is where it makes it easier) it gives us the EXACT thing to return our focus to when we get distracted.
Now clearly there’s tons of things that can shift our focus away from a productive use of our mind. We’d be here forever if I tried to cover even half of them. …So instead, I’m just going to touch on a few that most people probably don’t even notice.
First on the list is Television:
More often than not, television is a needless distraction. Yes, on rare occasion it can be a resource for useful information, but for the most part its primary role in our lives is mindless entertainment.
I take that back, its primary role is to sell you something that you may or may not need and it does that by entertaining you in between commercials.
I know we need to “entertain” ourselves a little every now and then but the problem is; if we’re spending twice as much time focusing on entertaining ourselves than we are on expanding our minds or looking for ways around the challenges we face, we’re far less likely to gain what we need to overcome those challenges.
Think about this: During their lifetime, the average American will spend over 90,000 hours watching a television. If you turned those hours into normal workweeks, it would equal 45 years of full time employment. 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for 45 years.
What if we set just a little bit of that time aside for something else? Imagine how much you could accomplish just focusing 10 hours a week for one year on a worthy goal. …What could you get done in 5 years?
Instant gratification is not all bad, but neither is investing a little bit more time into things that actually build in value as time passes instead of just those things that lose value as soon as they’re consumed. And keep in mind, you can always tape your favorite TV shows…that gives you a chance to do something productive while the show is taping, and it also gives you the ability to fast forward through the commercials. Over the course of a month, that could easily add up to 20 hours worth of commercials that you didn’t have to watch.
OK, so TV is a pretty common distraction that we have at home. How about a common workplace distraction? Something that takes place, eats up your time, but doesn’t really achieve anything worthwhile.
I’m sure there’s plenty of things that come to mind, but the first one I think of is Gossip.
What a horrible waste of time this is. Of all the things we could focus on that would actually help us improve who we are, or improve what’s “Right” about us, we instead choose the easier task of pointing out what’s wrong with somebody else.
Well let’s do the math:
Joe number 1 spends two hours a day talking bad about other people, which probably means he’s spending about four hours a day thinking angry and defensive thoughts about them.
Joe number 2 makes a conscious effort not to waste any time doing this. He realizes that focusing on everybody else is far less productive than focusing on what he needs to get done.
Right off the bat you can see that Joe number 2 has a huge advantage. He’s got an extra four hours a day AND he isn’t carrying around all the defensive, angry, paranoid nonsense that goes along with being a person who constantly gossips. And if it’s a huge advantage over the course of just one day…what does that add up to over the years? More than we can probably imagine.
Ok, one more that definitely affects most of us at some point in our lives: Aggravation.
We’ve all been in situations where something that takes about 10 seconds to happen, ends up distracting us for hours or even days on end.
You get cut off on the way to work, or you spill some coffee on your shirt. …Maybe you’re out in the yard having a good time and you step in something that you wish you hadn’t. The list of potentially aggravating distractions is limitless.
The point is, the aggravation itself somehow “glues” our mind to the event. So instead of just being something that’s over and done with, it goes on, and on, and on in our brains…the same scene playing over and over again in our mind. We focus on it, we get aggravated. We focus on it again, we get aggravated again and this goes on indefinitely which just makes everything else we need to get done that much more aggravating.
So, really, what’s the big prize for not letting these things go? We waste hours of perfectly good focus and energy on a fleeting event that has little if anything to offer us.
So, just a word of advice on this one: If you find yourself focused on something aggravating (especially something that you can’t really learn anything from or use to your advantage) just ask yourself this question: How does focusing on this benefit me?
If the answer is: “It doesn’t,” then do whatever you can to move on. Put a pillow over your head and scream at the top of your lungs, write a hostile letter and burn it, go work out, take 10 deep breaths…Look, do whatever you’ve got to do. Sometimes we’re going to get mad and that’s fine. But what really matters here is, we KNOW that there are more valuable things that we should be focused on and there is much more to gain by not giving that situation so much power over us.
To sum this all up, it’s extremely important for us to keep an eye on how we’re using our minds. To really look at how much of our time is being spent focusing on things that aren’t useful to us.
When we take an honest look at this, it’s not uncommon to find huge amounts of time, energy and focus that could be better spent.
Spent on things that could actually increase us in some way: Mentally, physically, spiritually, creatively, financially…
Like anything that’s worth having, acquiring good “focus skills” isn’t easy, but there’s so much to gain…so much to gain from learning to recognize what’s truly useful and what isn’t that its well worth the effort. And before long, it becomes hard for us NOT to notice when we’re wasting our resources.
This isn’t about us becoming “too serious” and losing our sense of humor. Becoming so focused on what we’re focused on that we forget how to relax and have some fun.
It’s really the exact opposite…it’s about discovering the fun in making easier and easier strides towards what you really want in life; trading things of minimal or zero value (that used to hold you back) for things of enormous value. –Things that are not only more rewarding, but are actually capable of keeping you moving in the right direction.
If you remember anything from this program, remember this:
Your focus determines where your power goes.
Your mind will nourish anything that you focus on whether it’s good or bad. If you feed something with your focus, it lives and grows. And if you just so happen to be feeding a weed, that weed is going to deplete the resources available for other things…those other ideas, and beliefs, and visions and ultimately actions, that are truly healthy and can bring you something worth having.
Once we learn to pay attention to what we’re focused on, we move forward with less and less effort because more of our power is going into things that are actually productive.
Before long, you instinctively know better than to starve something that’s good and growing, just so you can feed something else that can only deplete you.
Moving on now to the final chapter in this program on successful thinking, it’s time for us to talk about money.
