Day 12 - Growth, Focus and False Beliefs

“Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for fewer problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom.”
- Earl Shoaf


Sleep is just a killer for me.

I wish I could survive on 6 hours a night, like so many others do.

The extra 2, 3, even 4 hours could help me be so much more productive .



This is what we call a false belief.

It's not false because it isn't true. I probably would be more productive, albeit slightly, if I had an extra 4 hours to use every day.

It's false because it is blocking the true root of the problem: which is that I'm not maximizing the time I already have. What's to say I would use that extra time wisely.

No the problem isn't in how much I sleep, that's necessary for me to be at my best. The problem is making effective use of the time I have. That's what I need to work on.

The desire to create more time by sleeping less is just a cop out. 




Of course the issue is too often in our lives we come across a problem and we focus on the cause that is the easiest to admit to and that's what we try to fix.

Just because a solution is easy doesn't mean it's right.

In fact when it comes to personal growth and introspection, quite often it's the difficult answer we choose not to face that is the one we truly need to deal with.

Growth is a process not a step. It doesn't stop with the effort you put in when you begin. But if you push hard enough eventually it feeds and compounds on itself. And the inertia you build up will enable you to one day wake up and realize that it no longer takes any effort to grow.




Finally, I have to give a shout out to my fellow Mt. Lebonite Christina Cindrich. I just found her on twitter last week, and I have to admit I like her.

She's smart, driven, successful and a good communicator. You can check out this article by her on the 5 DO's and DON'Ts of staying focused. It is very good and hits on a lot of things I've been talking about here.

It's also on a website called Pushydreamers.com.which I'll probably talk about soon.

Anyway Christina I wish you all the best.

Day 2

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware ~ Henry Miller


It’s probably a good idea to try to explain some of the origins of the blog.We'll call this part focus and time management.

You my whole life I’ve had a problem with focus. Part of it is because I’m very eclectic; I have a wide range of interests and hobbies. And that in and of itself would be fine except I never fully follow through with pursuing any of them. Instead I jump from interest to interest like I have a bad case of ADD.

The second part of my lack of focus is worse though. If it was just varied interests, I wouldn’t have as much of an issue, but its not. I let myself get distracted by far less important things. Television, facebook, the internet, all these new technologies, and some older ones, that were created to occupy our time are doing just that, and more, for me. They’re hijacking my time.

Too often I wake up and turn the TV on, check my email on my cell phone, scroll through the last 50 or so tweets on my feed, all completely worthless tasks. I've realized before how much time I wasted on all these things but like a true addict I couldn't stop. I was sacrificing things I actually wanted for re-runs of 90's sitcoms, Sportscenter and the random thoughts of other people.

So that’s resolution #1 for me. Some steps I take along the line will be drastic, others not so much. This one falls somewhere in the middle.

I vow not to let worthless media dominate my life. I’m not going to watch TV when it’s not returning its value to me. I’m not going to spend a half and hour going from facebook, to twitter, to ESPN, to Yahoo! to twitter, to facebook, to ESPN, to facebook…in a ridiculous, draining cycle.

I already started working on this yesterday and I have to say: I wasted much less time than I normally would have. That’s a start at least. (Though I have to admit I scrolled through some tweets this morning when I woke up, I can’t believe they named Mike Green as an alternate captain for the NHL All-Star game!) (If you want to hear more about that check out thelegendandthelaw.blogspot.com later this week, it’s my former blog that I will probably post on a couple times a week with more sports related content.)

In the meantime I want to hear how new media affects your life, positively or negatively. You can leave a comment on the blog, shoot me an email, message me on facebook, and yes I realize the irony present in the diverse ways you can respond to the question.