#onefocus

I’m happy. =)  <---- See?

Why? Well, it’s one thing to have ideas about the nature of success, it’s quite another to see them coming to fruition... fruition... huh....

When you plant a fruit tree, you want to make sure you have good soil and that it’s watered, and properly trimmed to allow it to grow big and have the shape you ultimately want it to have. However, you don’t freak out when you’ve been caring for it for a year and it still hasn’t given any fruit. It takes longer for the tree to mature and get to the fruit bearing phase of its life. I know, it’s simple. As simple as that is I just didn’t get it. I was itching to want to do something that would do something more than what I was doing but the reality is that I didn’t need to do anything more than I was already doing.

 See, when you have a goal then you have to do what’s necessary to achieve that goal. This means no less and no more than what you need to achieve your goal. Let’s take boiling water for example; water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Once water is boiling, can you boil it more? Will it be of any use to add more heat? No, it’ll just boil. There will be no further return on heat applied to the water. Now, I know that time dependent goals can get a lot more tricky, and that was exactly my issue. I had essentially set up everything to boil water as fast as I could possibly conceive of in my situation. My itch was to do something else, something more to make the water boil more. But that’s not the way it works.

That’s really it right there. I’m used to making decisions and creating effects right away. Usually this requires Herculean effort and focus that to be honest I’m way to lazy to keep up. So I burn out after having achieved something that was beginning to be really significant. Anyone who’s read The Dip by Seth Godin will understand the folly of investing so much energy in starting up without following through. Also, the reason I do that is because I’m impatient. I want things to happen now, like “N”, “O”, “W” now. This creates a tendency for Herculean efforts and burning out. Then there’s this other idea that we have to be “active” all the time. Busy is good, busy means your doing something, busy means you’re kicking life’s butt. Until you burnout and realize the only butt you were kicking was yours. These things tend to make me do two things: work way too hard on way too many things. Inevitably in anything we do there is some down time, the impulse is to occupy that down time with something productive but ultimately we just end up overwhelming ourselves with too many ways of measuring progress. 

We don’t know how we did each day because we have one million things going on and some are going forward, some are going sideways, others are going backwards, and some just straight up went off a cliff. How do you feel after a day like that? I would feel confused, frustrated, and somewhat helpless. 

I’m happy right now because I have a single metric for whether I should or should not be happy every day. Just one. That metric is not whether I’ve learned something new, whether I’ve developed spiritually, whether I’m more fit, whether I’m more sociable. I’m stable in all those respects, but by no means making progress. More often than not I may have regressions in one or all of those respects. It doesn’t matter though, because development in any one of those areas is not what’s going to provide me with the greatest leap forward for my nature as a whole. The one thing that’s going to better help me develop myself as a whole is financial independence. What does this mean for me? Well, for this year it means getting debt free and saving up 30K. The plan I set in motion to take care of my bills is taking care of them without me lifting a finger every month. That is why I am happy today. Furthermore, for the last two months I’ve been investing my time building up a potential nest egg opportunity where I could get a return in the tens of thousands of dollars by the end of the year. Everything thus far is going according to plan but I am particularly pleased today because the plan for surviving the next couple of months is proving effective.