focus

Your most scarce resource is focus.

Your most scarce resource is focus.

The world will conspire to distract you. Your phone, email, text messages, instant messenger, social media, and more will all pull you away from what you should be doing.

Many people wake up and instantly look at their phone. They check messages, check email, check various social media. That’s a huge mistake—the only thing that’s waiting in your phone is someone else’s agenda. If you check your phone or your email right away in the morning, you’ve lost control of your agenda. There will be emails and messages waiting for you to respond, and once you start responding you’ve lost control of your day.

You should start the day by focusing on your highest-value activities before you get caught up in other people’s agendas for you. What are your highest-value activities?

Keep Your Eye on the Prize

Tom Bilyeu:

As the saying goes, people overestimate what they can do in a year, and underestimate what they can do in 10.

I went from “naughts” to “yachts” in 5 years, you can do even better.

But you’ve got to have your eye on the fucking prize. Because it will not happen by accident.

It takes a level of maniacal focus that will surprise you, but it is possible.

Just remember, not a damn thing is going to change in your life if you don’t change what you’re doing.

So build a crystal-fucking-clear vision in your mind of what you want to accomplish – including a detailed breakdown of HOW you’re going to get there and then systematically execute against that plan. That’s it.

And it will all happen just as fast as you’re prepared to move. No short bursts, this is a marathon sprint, baby.

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Concentration of Power

Tony Robbins:

I learned to harness the principle I now call concentration of power. Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all our resources on mastering a single area of our lives. Controlled focus is like a laser beam that can cut through anything that seems to be stopping you. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better. One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular. In fact, I believe most people fail in life simply because they major in minor things.

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Michael Simmons:

When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, their host, Gates’ mother, asked everyone around the table to share the single most important factor to their success. Gates and Buffett both gave the same one-word answer: “Focus.”

Rainer Zitelmann:

In the words of Bill Gates Jr.’s college roommate, Andy Braiterman, “Bill had a monomaniacal quality […] He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing.” One of his ex-girlfriends described him as being extremely focused and intolerant of distractions. He didn’t own a television and had even dismantled his car radio. She elaborates: “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour’ turnaround—meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours.”

And:

Warren Buffett, too, had focused on a single goal for decades. According to his biographer, Alice Schroeder, even as a child, his dream was to become rich and he had devoured a book on One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. “Opportunity knocks,” the reader is told on the very first page of Buffett’s favorite read. “Never in the history of the United States has the time been so favorable for a man with small capital to start his own business as it is today.”

When he was 11 years old, Buffett announced that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 35. At 16, he had already saved up $5,000 from various enterprises. In today’s currency, that money would be worth about $60,000—not bad for a 16-year-old. His prediction was only off by five years. He made his first million by the time he was 30.

And:

Recent scientific research has shown that most successful musicians and athletes owe their extraordinary success not to talent as was previously thought, but to a lifetime of dedicated practice or training from early childhood. Many people who haven’t managed to achieve the success they were hoping for blame their bad luck, lack of talent or lack of connections. The truth is that some people are more successful than others mainly because they are better at focusing their mental resources.

Thomas Carlyle:

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.

Bruce Lee:

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

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Attention

Steve Pavlina:

The attention-worthiness of any particular concern is relative to other items you could be choosing instead.

Will you watch TV or read a book? Will you go on a date or work on your Internet business? Will you get up early and exercise or sleep in late?

Whenever you give your attention to one concern, it means you’re withholding your attention from all other possible concerns. This entails a hidden cost of the potential value of the items you’ve declined to pursue.

If you had used your time differently during the past 5 years, you could have an extra million dollars in the bank. Another path might have led you to travel through dozens of different countries. And still another path might have you looking at a very fit and sculpted body in the mirror right now.

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