Ok, we’re going to move on now to what is quite literally the most important part of this program. I wouldn’t recommend forgetting everything else that we talked about, but if you wanted to choose just one concept to remember, this would be it. The concept is: Focus.

 

Where you put your focus determines everything that’s important in your life. It determines how you feel, it determines what you think, it determines what your beliefs are, and the reasons why you have those beliefs…and those things influence the actions you decide to take.

 

Look, when it comes right down to it, you can have a head full of good ideas, clear visions and empowering beliefs, but they just can’t do you any good if you don’t USE THEM. And the only way for you to use, or access those mental assets is for you to focus on them. The same is true for mental liabilities. When you focus on something, you put your power into that thing. So, if we want to continue increasing the quality of our life, we’ve got to stay focused on the things that can help us do that…and of course, spend less time focusing on things that get in our way.

 

This is all simple enough to understand. But it’s not easy to do. We’re constantly being distracted.

 

And by distracted I mean: things that have no productive value whatsoever are constantly interrupting our minds. …Disturbing our focus and sending us off in directions that are just plain wasteful; at least wasteful for anyone who has a specific destination in mind. If you just want to bounce around on the waves of life and see where you end up, that’s fine.  But if you actually have goals, or dreams and aspirations, you’ve got to stay focused…it’s just that simple.

 

And not to harp on setting goals, but here again we’ve got a great reason for writing things down. It just makes everything that much easier. Lets put it this way: It makes us take the goal more seriously when we write it down, it creates a clearer vision in our mind, and it certainly elicits more of a commitment from us but most importantly (this is where it makes it easier) it gives us the EXACT thing to return our focus to when we get distracted.

 

Now clearly there’s tons of things that can shift our focus away from a productive use of our mind. We’d be here forever if I tried to cover even half of them. …So instead, I’m just going to touch on a few that most people probably don’t even notice. 

 

First on the list is Television:

More often than not, television is a needless distraction. Yes, on rare occasion it can be a resource for useful information, but for the most part its primary role in our lives is mindless entertainment.

 

I take that back, its primary role is to sell you something that you may or may not need and it does that by entertaining you in between commercials.

 

I know we need to “entertain” ourselves a little every now and then but the problem is; if we’re spending twice as much time focusing on entertaining ourselves than we are on expanding our minds or looking for ways around the challenges we face, we’re far less likely to gain what we need to overcome those challenges. 

 

   Think about this: During their lifetime, the average American will spend over 90,000 hours watching a television.  If you turned those hours into normal workweeks, it would equal 45 years of full time employment. 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for 45 years. 

 

What if we set just a little bit of that time aside for something else? Imagine how much you could accomplish just focusing 10 hours a week for one year on a worthy goal. …What could you get done in 5 years?

 

Instant gratification is not all bad, but neither is investing a little bit more time into things that actually build in value as time passes instead of just those things that lose value as soon as they’re consumed. And keep in mind, you can always tape your favorite TV shows…that gives you a chance to do something productive while the show is taping, and it also gives you the ability to fast forward through the commercials. Over the course of a month, that could easily add up to 20 hours worth of commercials that you didn’t have to watch. 

The excerpt above is from The 1-Hour Guide to Successful Thinking. To access the complete program (Transcript, Audio Files and Workbook) please purchase either the PDF version or the Kindle version.