If you want to eliminate obstacles in your life you need to attack them one at a time. You will never do yourself any favors by dividing and diluting your efforts. We make the most progress in life when we focus our fire on one singular pursuit.
Does this come at the cost of other pursuits? Absolutely. But it also comes at the great gain of allowing you to make rapid progress on your singular pursuits. this is important if you want to make any noticeable progress on the things you are doing in life.
I – Identify all the things you want to change i your life.
It is impossible to concentrate fire if you do not have a target to fire at. Creating targets come from making a list of all the things you want to do, or all the things you want to stop doing.
Once you have them all written out, take a good look at them. Cross out any goals or desires that are coming from external sources. The previous week’s article talked about the difference between internal and external desires. When you are wanting to be intense and make a significant difference in your life, the desire has to come from inside you if it is going to last. External desires fade quickly. Once you run into a moment of difficulty, the desire will be gone.
So make sure everything you want is what you truly want. Cull your list until you have a handful of major, critical things you want to change in your life
II – Prioritize these items based on their value.
Identify the changes that would make the biggest difference in your world and rank them from greatest to least. You can make changes in any order you want, but it only makes sense to first target those changes that will make the greatest difference in your life.
Once you have ranked the changes you need to make, select the top change and break it down into its fundamental units.
Break down the change until you have identified the smallest measurable unit of action. This action should be so small that it seems silly to take it. But it is actually going to make all the difference in the world when you take it. Because that one action, no matter how small, does something incredibly powerful for you. It gets the ball rolling
We fail so many things in life because we are not able to get the ball rolling. We don’t get the ball rolling because it seems like it will require a herculean effort to do so. By breaking down the goal into its smallest parts, you remove the mentality that it must require a herculean effort to get started. This allows you to take action and start moving, which is the most powerful of all things.
III – Once the ball is rolling, slowly add effort- Focus Fire
I’m a believer that effort should be built over time. that one should start small and improve his efforts from there.
If you start out requiring too much from yourself, you will burn out. You have to build endurance in your mind just like you would build endurance in your body. Do too much before you are ready and you will damage yourself, and then require far more time to recover than is necessary and slow your progress. But start small and work up and you will adapt to the new healthy demands you are placing on yourself and you will improve. Maybe you won’t get the results you want right off the bat, but you are building up the strength of the “take action” muscle. This muscle is weak in the majority of people. Start strengthening it with a little bit of work each day and improve yourself from there.
Do not push yourself to improve your work endurance too quickly. Our primary goal is to develop day to day consistency with the new self.
Increasing the workload of what we are doing is a secondary goal. It is a very important goal, but it will not profit us anything if we cannot even be consistent day-to-day.
This is why it is more important to develop consistency in small goals than to be sporadic with large efforts. Small efforts can be increased over time. But you cannot do anything about sporadic large efforts until you develop consistency. And the person giving large efforts will have a harder time painting those large efforts day-to-day as opposed to a person who is already used to day-to-day consistency and just had to increase his total daily work volume.
Consistency will always be the key to anything in life. From investing your money, to fitness, to learning. A small effort repeated in clear intervals will always provide more of a reward than the occasional intense effort. So learn to focus your fire on one task at a time and you will make progress.
