How to Cut The Bullshit & Focus On What Matters The Most
People "waste" 625 hours of their life every year.
It's not all their fault. Everything is designed to suck your attention into a vortex of wasteful crap that doesn't matter. It's meant to tickle your brain while slowly extracting meaning from your life.
Dreams are crushed because people focus on the wrong things.
According to research, "The average person's thumb travels the equivalent of two marathons (52 miles) a year scrolling through sites like Twitter and Instagram."
Waste is a disgrace. The body benefits from great exercise, not just the thumb!
Think of what you could accomplish if you got back one month of your life each year.
You invested time developing an essential skill.
You spend more time being present with loved ones.
You took on a new project that motivates you in a purposeful way.
Your time on this planet is finite, so where your focus goes, everything else flows.
Time is Your Master
As we age, we view time as something we control.
As if time is a resource to be used. We then become pressured to use time wisely and criticize ourselves when we waste it. And waste we do.
"When you're faced with too many demands, it's easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer...instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable," writes Oliver Burkeman.
Your self-worth becomes tightly wound up in how you use your time.
"It stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control if you're to avoid feeling guilty, panicked or overwhelmed."
Instead of simply living our lives as it unfolds in time, we put pressure on every second of the day.
But, it backfires.
It wrings us dry from the present moment, forcing us into the perpetual future, "worrying about whether things will work out, experiencing everything in terms of some later, hoped-for benefit, so that peace of mind never quite arrives."
The problem with trying to master your time is time ends up mastering you.
Productivity isn't your problem; your priorities are.
Productivity is simple.
If you focus on everything, you focus on nothing, so focus on what matters the most and ignore the rest. I won't become the next productivity charlatan with this advice because it's so damn simple—on paper.
But that's it.
You won't have time to do everything you want in life, so you have to choose what's most important.
You have to ruthlessly say no to most things, so you'll be free to say yes to the most important priorities.
People will try to force or tell you what's important, but you have to decide and resist the urge. This is your life, not there's.
Don Miguel Ruiz calls it human domestication.
As children, we're taught to live and believe a certain way. We live in a dream; "the dream of the planet includes all of society's rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays."
Through domestication, we learn how to live and how to dream.
Over time, "the information from the outside dream is conveyed to the inside dream, creating our whole belief system." We then lose ourselves, becoming something we're not. "We become a copy of Mamma's beliefs, Daddy's beliefs, society's beliefs, and religion's beliefs."
We continue to domesticate ourselves according to our belief systems, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Learn to think for yourself and put your priorities above everything else.
Life is short, so spot the bullshit.
It's sobering to remember that you die a little more with every second that passes.
Death is at your doorstep, ready to claim its prize. So, why would we want to give all the fun to our thumb? We deserve a little piece of the action, don't we?
Think of all the greatest moments in your life, and you'll realize they're nearly all experiences.
The new car, the new shoes, the comments on Twitter, everything materialistic and fake, never makes people happy.
As Paul Graham says, "The things that matter aren't necessarily the ones people would call 'important.' Having coffee with a friend matters. You won't feel later like that was a waste of time."
Spotting bullshit is easy:
It starts with knowing your priorities.
What's important to you?
What are your values?
What do you want to make meaningful progress on?
Anything that doesn't align with your answers—CUT THEM.
If you ever think life is too short for something—CUT IT.
Another simple exercise is to ask yourself if you'll care about it in the future; if not—CUT.
Trimming The Bullshit
Most people don't act.
They talk about the future dream that one day they'll be "free," and that day never comes. This happens for three reasons:
They think happiness is a future destination.
They're chasing pleasure.
They don't say no to the things that hold them back.
Spotting crap is a good start, but you must ruthlessly cut them from your life.
Here's how:
Follow your guiding values.
Without values, you become a pawn, easily manipulated and persuaded by someone else's plan.
To succeed, you must establish life values that guide your every decision. This is also essential for every business.
But not all values are created equal.
When they are, "then the one that wins out—especially at a time of crisis—is the one that is most mimetic," writes Luke Burgis.
Rank your values based on their importance. "When all values are the same, nothing is being valued at all. It's like highlighting every single word in a book."
Create a value system that has a clear hierarchy and ranks values of importance.
When in doubt, ask yourself these powerful questions.
Questions are your guide to the right answer.
When you ask the right questions, it helps you filter out all the bullshit, so you can focus on what matters the most.
Here are a few of my favorites from the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals:
Where in your life or work are you currently pursuing comfort when what's called for is a little discomfort?
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing?
How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
What actions—what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future—might it be meaningful to undertake today, if you could come to terms with never seeing the results?
Here are some other great ones:
The big picture question: What's my one thing? Business and life.
Is this bullshit?
The small focus question: What's my one thing right now?
What is the single most important strategic objective or idea that, if your entire team rallied fully behind it, would have the biggest positive impact on helping your company thrive?
What's my ROT (Return On Time)? Am I ROTTING Away Today? What activities will have the greatest impact?
To successfully trim bullshit, ask yourself these questions repeatedly.
Invest your time into the things that matter the most.
People are lied to about hustle.
You can work hard on the wrong things. I see it daily with employees, business owners, and my mom. Shit, I still do it! We work on the things that don't matter—bullshit.
To understand what matters, think of what you're doing on a value matrix.
James Altucher calls it the 50/1 rule:
The 80/20 Rule says that you will spend 20 percent of your time on projects that create 80 percent of the value.
For example, if you have a team of 10 salespeople, 2 of them will drive 80 percent of the revenue. Or 20 percent of your customers will generate 80 percent of your revenue.
When you 80/20 the 80/20, you get 64/4.
4 percent of your work gives you 64 percent of the value you create.
"It turns out that roughly 1 percent of the work will give you 50 percent of the value."
"How can you find the right 1 percent of activities so that you generate 50 percent of the value you are currently generating while using 100 percent of your time?"
When you focus on everything, you focus on nothing, so focus on the 1% of things that matter the most.
Be a disciple of discipline.
If you don't have discipline, you'll always get trapped in life's fleeting moments.
People, and things, will constantly pull at your attention, and you'll happily follow along as if you were Pinocchio on a quest to make his father happy.
You have to stay disciplined.
You have to say no, more than you say yes.
You must realize that you can't do most things you want to do due to the reality of your finite time.
And you have to be patient.
Patience and discipline are the keys.
Do what matters, over and over again.
As Ryan Holiday says,
"We must master ourselves unless we'd prefer to be mastered by someone or something else."
