Focus on What Matters, Few Things Really Matter

Focus on what matters. There are actually very few things that matter to the goals you are trying to achieve. Whether it’s trying to become a millionaire, getting a promotion, or losing weight, there are very few things that matter. All you have to do is master those few things.

If you want to be a millionaire, there are many things that you can do to get there. You can prepay bills using a credit card and get a discount on your money. You can also focus on a side hustle by taking surveys and doing mystery shopping.

These are what are called extra things to get you to be 100% efficient. However, it’s unnecessary. All you have to do to be rich is to save and invest your money for decades and there’s a good, but not guaranteed, chance that you will be a millionaire.

Saving and investing takes care of 80% of the steps you need to know to be financially independent. If you want to focus on what matters, save and invest your money.

The extraneous things like side hustles are a nice to have, not a need to have. They are necessary if you want to move on to the next level of personal finance, which we should all strive to do. However, you can just focus on the 80% of the step that matters to pace yourself and stay in the game over the long term.

Going 100% every day is too much for some people. Some managers are cautious about delegating work to others because they want perfection. Guess what? 80% of a job well done is good enough. By delegating work to others, managers are free to focus on what matters and do what they are good at.

Why Focus on What Matters?

We have a limited amount of hours in the day to work with. Not a single person on Earth have an unlimited amount of hours. Therefore, if you focus on what matters, you can devote all of your energy and time on the things that add the most value.

As you put more time and effort into something, you become much better at it. Being the best at the vast majority of the things that allow you to become a millionaire sets you very well for success. It’s better to become the best at all of it, but the second best thing is to be the best at most of it.

By cutting out extra things that are only adding a little bit of value to you and focusing on the ones that add huge value, you are propelling yourself upward and forwards. Humans generally are awful at multitasking. Whichever thing you choose to focus on takes attention away from other things you can focus on.

There’s an opportunity cost to making a choice. You don’t get to see how your other choices might have panned out. However, if you consistently and consciously choose to focus on the things that add the most value to you, you’ll be just fine.

There’s no need to be the best at the start. Going 100 miles per hour all the time is a surefire way to burn out quickly.

After obtaining mastery of the things that matter, you can tack on additional things to focus on. After 1 – 3 years of effort, you start to feel mastery. It may take longer and that’s ok. After you feel mastery is when you take on additional responsibilities. That is when you can start to focus on getting to 100% instead of just 80%.

How to Focus on What Matters

One way you can focus on what matters is to SMASH that social share button in the right and post to your favorite social media! It will greatly help out the blog to give out more well thought out free content for you and your friends to learn from.

With that said, let’s get into how to put all your attention into the things that matter and translate that effort valuable results.

1) Write Down What You Want in General Terms

It has to be in general terms what you are trying to achieve. Otherwise it’s too narrow and will cause you to take a detour. You will end up in a different place than the place that you were wanting to get to. Don’t focus too much on a tree and lose sight of the whole forest. Figure out what general things really matter to you.

The big ones are health, wealth, and love. It doesn’t have to be in these categories. Maybe you want to have a killer Youtube channel or maybe you want to be a great piano player. Whatever it may be, actually and physically write down what matters to you. It will help you remember and you can review it after a year or two.

Then you can surround your environment with those general goals to remind you throughout your day. That way, it’s engrained not just in your conscious mind but the unconscious mind as well.

2) Focus on the Long Term

It’s no good if you focus on what matters for six months, see no results, and then give up to another venture. One of my good friends has the “good idea” disease. He used to focus on technical analysis of the stock market and gave it six months to see if he can be successful. After he failed, he moved on to trading stock market futures.

Then after that wasn’t working out, he moved on to trading currencies. None of them came to fruition and he doesn’t do any of them now. The “good idea” disease is real and will steer you away from success. Give it years before you decide to move on to something different.

Don’t get bored so easily. Very few things in the world will be mastered in six months. The things that are worth doing are difficult and time consuming.

3) Identify Things that Aren’t Adding Value

Identification matters in determining which things are meaningless to your life. Genuinely take the time to evaluate and see if it’s worth your time and attention.

Is social media really making you richer? Is turning on and paying attention to the political news getting you closer to your goals? If you are doing it for entertainment value, by all means, go for it. As long as it takes up a very minority aspect of your life, it’s not a big deal.

However, for most people, it takes up a majority of their valuable free time they have after work. Remember we live our life in thirds. Sleep, work, and leisure. If it’s taking up a lot of your time for leisure that leaves you feeling worse, it’s time to change that.

To focus on what matters is to not focus on what doesn’t matter.

4) Slowly Cut Down Those Things

Slowly but surely, take conscious steps to cut those things out of your life. If you spend an estimated seven hours a week gawking at social media, spend five minutes a day less one week. After a week, you’ll have spent 30+ minutes less on social media.

Then the next week, you can cut down by five more minutes, and so on, and so on. Take conscious steps every day. Actually take the time to focus on cutting these things out. If you fail one or two weeks, that’s ok. You can still go ahead and cut it down the next week.

One day, these side hobbies will be just an afterthought.

5) Evaluate Every Month

What isn’t measured can’t be improved. To focus on what matters, consider having a white board around your house to easily track and write down your progress. It’ll be much easier than remembering to actually go into a spreadsheet you created in your computer.

When your goals are that easily accessible to you to visualize and see, it’ll be easier to keep track. It actually takes a bit of brainpower to remember and actually search to access the spreadsheet you created for yourself in your computer. A white board means that your goals are already right in front of you.

Without you having to search for it. We are more prone to doing an act if it’s easily available right in front of our eyes. The path to least resistance and the lowest hanging fruit is music to our decision making process.

6) Take Breaks Once in a While

You can’t focus on what matters every waking moment of your life. The best route to take is actually to continuously focus on what matters. Cheat days really ruin your productivity and makes you sadder at the backward step you’re taking. Taking 5 steps forward and one step back makes you feel really bad for that one day.

However, not everyone actually has the motivation to go through and be on 100% of the time. A good start is to have cheat days. Then if you become frustrated when you have backward progress days, change to 100% progress days.

It makes me frustrated when I was on track to lose 5 pounds in a week only to lose 2 pounds by the end because of a cheat day. I didn’t just lose the day I progressed backwards on. I lost the following day too to get back to where I was before. And that’s IF I have the willpower to get back to where I was before in the first place.

Backward progress costs us more than we know.

However, I still choose to have cheat days because it keeps me sane and helps me avoid burnout. Cheat days are quite useful.

7) Keep at It

Many of us think six months is a huge amount of time to evaluate whether to keep going or give up. Six months is a very short amount of time. Keep at it for a year or two. However, if you focus on what matters and nothing is changing between now and then, then you need to pivot your approach.

One of the easiest ways to lose is because you gave up. Don’t give up. I used to think it was a cliche thing that people say, but it truly isn’t. The only way you lose in investing is if you get wiped out and the value of your investments reach $0.

Same goes for life. The only way you lose at getting a promotion is if you stop working. The only way you lose in finding love is if you stop looking for it. These things take a lot longer than we give it credit for. Keep at it for years and be amazed and what you can accomplish in that time.

Focus on What Matters: 5 Goals to Consider

In each goal below, apply the steps mentioned above to focus on what matters. There’s an infinite number of strategies to improve on each area. However, there’s only really one or two things that add the most value in each area. I did the work to outline them below for you.

1) Health

Health is a number of things such as lowering cholesterol, weight, body fat, or anything else. When people say focus on what matters, health comes into mind as one of the most important things to take care of. A good start would be to be mindful of your BMI and make sure it’s between 18.5 and 24.9. In losing weight, diet and exercise doesn’t matter. What matters is diet, that’s it. Anything else is extra.

2) Personal Finance

Wealth and money will always be one of the things to focus on for people. Whether we like it or not, it’s a huge part of our lives and it will continue to be so. If you can choose to be either rich or poor, why not be rich? I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, rich is better.

In personal finance, all that matters is do you save and invest. That’s it. Anything else is to optimize your finances, which is helpful but not necessary.

3) Getting a Promotion

In getting a promotion and getting a raise, one of the strategies is to sit down with your manager early and frequently. Or it could be to build relationships with higher ups and schmooze your way up. All the times I got a promotion was when I did quality work consistently for years.

Then when I asked for it or told them I was leaving, I got a promotion. In getting a promotion, what matters is doing good work and having the confidence to ask for what you deserve to be paid.

4) Bettering Relationships

Again, there’s an infinite number of things that influence how good a relationship is. Giving compliments, gifts, doing the little things, and more. What really matters is do you spend time together face to face with the other person without having net negative emotions?

If the answer is yes, there’s little chance that relationship will fail.

5) Side Hustles like Blogging

Like others, there’s countless strategies to grow your side hustle income through blogging. Social media, guest posting, commenting on other people’s blogs, etc. All you have to do is write good SEO-optimized content 2 – 3 times a week and it has high changes of working out by the end.

While I haven’t experienced the success with this blog yet, I know I’ll experience it after a year or two. Stay tuned, time will tell.

Focus on What Matters and Cut Out What Doesn’t

It’s in your best interest to focus on what matters and to not focus on what doesn’t. Our brains only have a limited capacity to store information and put our focus to. Therefore, you need to first find the areas that you want to devote your time to. Then actually apply the steps mentioned above to better your productivity and life goals.

Remember that focusing on A means you are not focusing on B. That can get very expensive in terms of time and energy. Therefore, you need to pinpoint the exact things that will continue to add meaningful positive value to your goals. Multitasking is a very bad idea to pursue.

Humans are generally god-awful at it.

If you want to perfect your craft, you can add on the extraneous things to get you to 100% efficiency. However, don’t look into doing too much at once. You can easily drown in opportunity. Take your time with it. For me personally, it’s actually quite difficult for me to work during the week and blog during the weekends.

I’m almost getting tired and exhausted. It’s hard to change my mindset from work to blogging. I always think that I’m missing something with work which takes focus away from blogging. I’m a first hand experiment at showing you how much it makes sense to focus on what matters, one at a time.

Otherwise, you lose efficiency.

Will I give up? No way that I will ever give up. I will continue to provide valuable content to my readers that’s helped me out so much in the past five years. However, that still doesn’t mean that I don’t lose productivity by having to multitask throughout the week between blogging at work.

Focus on what matters, one thing at a time.