Dividing Yourself

This article would probably be more for ME than for you...but I invite you folks to eavesdrop on me talking to myself. Hopefully, you'll get something out of being so nosy.

In your vehicle, you have upper air vents on the dashboard and you have lower vents, which you can't see. If you allow the air to blow through both upper and lower vents, then you won't feel the air too well. If, however, you only allow the air to blow through the upper vents, then you'll really feel it!

When the air is divided, then you don't feel it too well. If you're wearing shoes, you're not going to feel cold air blow on your feet. Instead, you'll just feel a little bit of air blowing on your face. This isn't good if you're hot and want instant relief. But when you concentrate the air to only the upper air vents, then you'll really feel the strength of the AC. When the air is divided, it loses strength. When the air is concentrated in one area, then you'll feel some real AC.

In the same way, the more you divide your attention, the less effective you are. The more concentrated your attention is, the more effective you'll be.

One of the reasons my e-mails have been arriving to everybody late is because I've been doing more than I should. There is SO much I want to do, but there is so little time to do it. By trying to do everything, I tend to neglect everything.

Let me say that again...

By trying to do everything, I neglect everything. That is to say, the more that I try to do, the less that I get done in any one thing. I can't be effective being a fitness instructor, car mechanic, store manager, public school teacher, and Batman when I'm doing all of these things. If I want to be effective in any one thing, I need to be willing to toss five other things out the window.

Now in real life, you can't avoid being divided. You will NEVER devote 100 percent of your time doing any one thing. Your time will naturally be divided. How divided that time is would be up to you. The less you divide your time, the more you could do in any one thing.

In my case, I homeschool my kids, do food delivery gigs, teach CPR classes, run the Holistic Health Challenge program, teach ZUMBA and core fitness classes, setting up my plant nursery business, learning languages, and running errands. How effective do you think I could be in any one of those things? Not very effective. Instead of giving a lot of power to a few things, I'm giving a little power to a lot of things. To me, when you give so little energy to 100 things, then you're simply neglecting 100 things.

If you brushed a few teeth in your mouth, that's the same as neglecting your oral hygiene. If you paid some of your credit card bill, that's the same as not paying your bill (just trust me on that one!). If you were one minute late to work, there is no "little bit late." No, you were simply late to work, and you could get penalized the same way as someone who was 3 hours late to work. Giving a little effort in one thing is the same as not giving any effort to it at all.

If you're in a position where you could ONLY give a little bit of effort, then you're doing too much. It's time to cut out some stuff so you could give more energy to the few things in your life.

In one of my last e-mails, I talked about saying "No" and how "No" is much more liberating than saying "Yes." The more you say "Yes," the more commitments you'll have -- and the more divided your time would be. We believe that the more busy we are, the more productive we'll be. The opposite is true: the more busy you are, the more neglectful you'll be. Eventually, something important would be either left partially undone or completely undone because you decided to grossly divide up your time with a ton of commitments.

You know, it's good to be productive. It's noble to want to do things instead of being lazy. But when you keep adding more and more to your plate, you will eventually just stop doing everything due to burn-out. You'll forget to pay employees or contractors. You'll forget to pay certain bills. You'll forget to attend your child's play -- or if you do attend it, you'll be closely looking at the time so that you could hurry up and do something else. There is no virtue in unnecessary busyness. When you're all over the place, you won't hit any targets.

I want to do everything, but I have to accept that I'll leave this earth without accomplishing all that I want to. I have to be willing to surrender one of my dreams to my children. There's an incident in the Bible (2nd Samuel 7) where King David, the second king of Israel, wanted to build God a temple. What an honor he'll have if he accomplishes that! But later, a prophet went to David and told him that he won't be building the temple, but that his son Solomon would do it. I would have been disappointed to know that I couldn't have the honor of accomplishing such a task. But some dreams may need to be left to someone else to accomplish. Just like David, you already have enough important things to focus on without adding yet another important thing to the list.

Freedom comes when you stop dividing up your time into tiny bits. You can't do everything and you shouldn't even try. It's better to give a lot to a little, than to give a little to a lot. It's even better to give a lot in ONE thing than to give SOME in many things.