⏱ The Best Minute: The easiest way to focus
💡 1 IDEA FROM ME
Commitment is the pathway to focus. If you commit to nothing, anything and everything will distract you.
When you commit to a spouse, you can focus on building a deep and meaningful relationship
When you commit to a goal, you can focus on building practices and rhythms to hit that goal
When you commit to calendaring out your day, you can focus on each task as your calendar instructs
When you lack commitment, you lack focus.
When dating, you may spend time with many different people, but can only go so deep while keeping your options open
When spending time on various amounts of semi-interesting activities, you can only gain a certain low level of proficiency in any of them
When you leave your workday to a task list with no pre-plan of action, you’ll likely pick the easiest things to do first and procrastinate on the deeper (and typically more important) work, making everything take longer than it needs to
Focused people do not leave their options open. To get things done, you must select your priorities and be comfortable ignoring everything else.
Everything will distract you if you commit to nothing. The first step to increasing your focus on anything is to make a commitment to it.
What do you need to commit to today?
💬 2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS
I. Morgan Housel on getting what you really want:
“Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.”
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II. Writer Joyce Carol Oates on how motivation often follows action:
“One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. … I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes … and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”
💯 1 THING I RECOMMEND
If you do any sort of daily journaling or writing by hand, I recommend buying something you would enjoy writing with. I use this pen every morning for my Bible reading and reflections. If not this exact pen, get something you would look forward to using yourself.
🤯 1 INTERESTING FACT
Grasshoppers catapult themselves into the air.
If humans could jump the way grasshoppers do, we would be able to easily leap the length of a football field. How do these insects jump so far? It's all in those big, back legs. A grasshopper's hind legs function like miniature catapults.
In preparation for a jump, the grasshopper contracts its large flexor muscles slowly, bending its hind legs at the knee joint. A special piece of cuticle within the knee acts as a spring, storing up all the potential energy. The grasshopper then relaxes its leg muscles, allowing the spring to release its energy and fling the insect into the air.
Source: Thought Co
🤔 1 QUESTION TO LEAVE YOU WITH
What am I not spending enough time on or willfully ignoring? How will I feel about that 5 years from now?
P.S. Explain this to me.
