Living Without Regret in the Age of Distraction
It took us over a century to realize the changes and impact that the Industrial Revolution was making on our lifestyle, culture, economy, and educational system.
Technology has changed all of that again, but this time it took less than a decade.
Today, if we need advice on a topic, it’s as close as posting a question to Facebook or Twitter. If we don’t know an answer, we can Google it. If we want something, we can buy it from our phones and have it delivered to our house. If we have a moment of down time, our social network timelines guarantee we never have to be bored. And we have the world’s catalog of movies, music, and books available to us from our living room.
Nobody in the history of anything has ever lived like this before.
It’s fantastic. Also, it’s a little bit terrifying.
There aren’t any experts in these fields any more. We’re all guessing about what’s next for education, the economy, communication, media, our jobs, our art, and our families.
Diligence, focus, art, parenting, marriage, priorities, work culture, and time management have always been moving targets. How much more now that we’re always connected thanks to the internet that lives in our pocket?
Do you have a vision for your life?
With time and focus being such precious commodities, it is all the more important to have a vision for our life and to run with it. Use it as a path for our creative work and as a guardrail for how we spend our time and energy.
So often I get this feeling that I can live however I want, in the moment, and over the long run everything will pan out for me. Something whispers to me that I needn’t worry about hard work, focus, planning, or diligence because one day my ship will come in and all the important things will just happen.
Alas, that is not how real life works. Those things don’t just happen all by themselves simply because I want them to. They happen through vision, planning, and a lot of hard work.
Benjamin Franklin wrote that “human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.”
Did you know that diligence is a skill?
The dreams of our heart will not come to be through magic or luck or by being picked by someone else. They are forged little by little, day by day. And it’s up to you to take ownership of pursuing them.
If you give too much attention to the big, long-term goals then you may end up despising the little daily steps needed to make progress.
But.. if you give too much focus on the granular, then it can be easy to feel like the “urgent” things are most important and to lose sight of the long game.
How do you reconcile these two vantage points?
How do you have an eye for the long-term while also focusing on what’s most important right now?
If you know what it is you’re moving toward, then you can slice that down into something small and actionable every day. Having a defined goal can help us to focus on actually accomplishing our idea and making it happen. A clear goal is a significant stimulator for creativity.
Looming, unanswered questions often lead to inaction and procrastination. We get frustrated at ambiguity and indecisiveness in the work place, so why do we tolerate it in our own life as well? Overcoming this is often as simple as taking time to define an end goal and then taking the first step toward that goal.
Another significant stimulator for creativity is diligence.
Some of us had a diligence instilled in us by our parents, some of us have had to cultivate it on our own…
What an awesome mindset!
Diligence isn’t a personality type. Diligence is a skill you learn.
And that’s why it’s silly to think a creative person should live without routine, discipline, or accountability.
Sitting around being idle while we wait for inspiration is a good way to get nothing done. (This, my friends, is why The Focus Course is so helpful. But more on that another time.)
When you have defined your goals and distilled them down into daily lifestyle practices, it can change your life…
Diligence, focus, art, and entrepreneurship are all moving targets.
You need a tool — a secret weapon as it were — to help you hit those targets and have fun in the process.
The Super Awesome (and FREE) Focus Workshop
What: A one-hour Focus Workshop that I’m hosting online
When: Thursday June 15, at 3pm Eastern
Get the behind-the-scenes, foundational ideas that I’ve lifted right from my flagship product, The Focus Course.
You’ll learn about:
- The 5 components of a focused life (and the fact that everyone has them, even if they don’t realize it).
- The single biggest productivity misunderstanding (and why you don’t have to be a nerd to be “productive”).
- How to find balance between all the areas of life that matter to you (without having to learn a new “system” or memorize a new type of methodology).
Also, there will be live Q&A, so you can ask me anything about time management, goals, prioritizing, focus, creativity, making coffee, the tools I use, snowboarding, Kansas Cit BBQ, etc…
And we will be recording this workshop and making a replay available. So even if you can’t make it to the live event, you should still RSVP below and we’ll send you the replay video for you to watch on your own time.
RSVP to the Focus Workshop here…