$500,000 or Dinner With Bill Gates? Take the Money, Here Is His Advice.
How to not drive your life off a cliff in 2024
All over the world, as time counts down towards the new year, the hordes of goal seeking masses are awakening from their year long stupor to crack open their notebook and scrawl out a new set of resolutions.
Do you remember the childhood story of the tortoise versus the hare and how the tortoise won the race?
What is the lesson from that story? If you say ‘slow and steady wins the race’, you are wrong. So wrong.
It wasn’t about being slow, or the steadiness in the pace. It was about a skill that most people lack and so very few possess. And the few who possess this skill are cashing out like crazy and hitting the milestones their friends wished they could meet.
This 1 skill is perfectly encapsulated in this childhood tale.
It’s called Focus.
The lesson from the childhood tale of the tortoise versus the hare is —
You can be sh*t at something and still succeed if you stay focused.
And you can be good at something and still lose if you get distracted.
Distraction kills.
The number 1 killer of success is not procrastination, not laziness, not even poor skill.
The number 1 killer of success is distractions.
Skill will improve with time.
Laziness can be solved by working smarter instead of harder.
You can tackle procrastination by working on other minor tasks that build towards the main task.
But distraction is even more deadly. Distractions kills progress and guarantees failure.
Lose focus and all is lost
I personally think DUIs should be replaced by DWD. Driving while distracted is one sure way to cause an accident, whether you have a drop of liquor in your blood or not.
And the very same goes for our lives.
Get distracted behind the wheel of your life and you will run yourself off a cliff.
Staying focused is the key to success in any endeavour.
Imagine a marathon in which 1 athlete runs with perfect form and the other runs with a waddling gait.
Straight from the starting line, everyone is going to be rooting for the perfect-form athlete. He has the skills. The other one doesn’t stand a chance.
But if the perfect-form athlete gets distracted and leaves the trail, guess what? He loses.
If the waddling gait athlete stays the course, he wins.
It’s as easy as that.
So many people get discouraged because they don’t have the skill, meanwhile what they need is focus. Skill will come with practice. You can win against your opponent if you stay the course and don’t lose focus.
The eve before the New Year
The commonest new resolution for people in the UK is to improve their fitness. i.e. lose weight.
All over the world, as time counts down towards the new year, the hordes of goal-seeking masses are awakening from their year-long stupor to crack open their notebook and scrawl out a new set of resolutions. Of which, losing weight would be one of the top ones.
- Is their goal possible? Yes.
- Are the requirements to achieve this goal a secret? No
- But will they succeed? Doubtful.
Everyone knows how to lose weight — eat healthy and move more. It’s not rocket science.
The majority of people are going to do these very things. Watch as the gym attendance skyrockets in the first few weeks of the year. People buy more vegetables and try to cook more of their meals instead of eating out. These cyclical changes in behaviour show that people know what to do to lose weight.
Then how come next year, those very same people are going to be rewriting the very same resolutions to lose the very same weight? What happened along the way?
Focus on Focusing.
Losing focus along the way is one surefire way to fail at your goal.
This applies to everything — writing a book, running a business, saving money, losing weight, learning a new language etc.
You don’t need to be skilled to succeed. If skill was the clincher for anything, then every book out there would be a masterpiece. Yet people keep publishing. Not because of skill, but because those who stay focused and finish the writing go on to be published.
You can have the very best story idea, craft the perfect background, and imagine the flawless execution. But if you don’t stay the course, guess what? Your story ends up in the trash. Like it never existed.
We all need to be way less distractable and way more focused.
Back to the story of the tortoise versus the hare. The tortoise won the race.
How ridiculous. Have you seen how slowly tortoises move? The words tortoise and race shouldn’t be in the same sentence. At a run, a tortoise goes at 0.5 miles/hour. Max speed. Yet, the tortoise won the race.
Success does not care how slowly you move. Success is waiting for you if you stay the course. Whether it takes you one day or ten years, you are better off than the hare who got distracted minutes from the start line.
If there’s one commitment I want you to make to yourself in 2024, it’s the commitment to stay focused.
Even the billionaires agree
It’s hard to maintain focus on a task for any number of times. However, a conscious awareness that you need to work on your focus will help you intentionally build your focus muscle over time.
A secret recipe for success here is that, if you can move fast (like the hare) and stay focused (like the tortoise), you become a double threat. You become unstoppable really. Because someone who stays the course and moves with intention and speed gets to fail fast and learn fast and fail at the second hurdle even faster and then learn even better.
In no time, a snowballing effect kicks in and the growth becomes exponential. So while you work on focusing, you can also work on your speed. But focusing comes first, before speed.
If you do not agree, you don’t have to take my word for it. Let’s get two very successful men to tell you the secret to their success.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet once attended a dinner party together where they were asked what single factor contributed the most to their success and they both gave the same answer.
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