Focus focus focus. The more I hear about focus the more I realize that it is the missing ingredient to most people’s “success recipes.”
What do I mean by that? We all start out (most of us anyway) with ‘I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up’ and that thought lasts a lifetime for many people. The scatter-brain effect derails most people from accomplishing their dreams. I’ve spoken before of the 10,000 hour rule as proposed by Malcolm Gladwell. The world class talent has one thing in common – 10,000 hours worth of focus.
This ends up applying whether you want to be a nuclear scientist, a writer or a musician. (Or anything, really)
I have this ‘curse’ that is shared by many of my friends and that is that I really enjoy doing a wide variety of things, but I can’t figure out why none of them are really working for me (meaning generating income.) I focused on doing improv comedy for a few years and really enjoyed it, but quickly realized, fun as it was, the odds of making a full time career out of that was pretty slim. There are many folks more talented than I who are trying this path and still not succeeding. But maybe for them (or me) it is ‘just’ focus.
(Sorry for my overuse of quotation marks here. I just realized how much I am using them. Eh, whatever. That does bring focus to the remark if not overused, but .. I have to stop over analyzing and just keep typing. gah! )
The reason this came to me was because I am learning to play the bass and one of my instructors just did a video on focus. Really seriously learning one scale all over the neck will show more growth than trying to learn ten things at once, and without seeing results we tend to lose interest, whether that’s in writing, music or whatever.
So all that being said, I need to focus on one of my writing projects and put the others on hold. This will work for me and keep me in the game. Perhaps it could work for you.
Food for thought.
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