Monthly Archives: February 2014

More of what you want and Less of what you don’t

Any self-help guru will tell you that in order to really succeed at any life goal you must set goals and focus on them. Pretty simple right? What if you have like 15 goals?

If there’s one thing you probably already know about me, it’s that I have a lot of interests. I’m always onto something new, and honestly, I pride myself on it. I was always a curious child and read a variety of subjects in books and found myself repairing, or better said, destroying items that my brother and I had found at a local garage sale. I never felt that I could satiate my curiosity and for that I moved onto different sports, different types of music, and one day dreamed of travel. After all, travel is curiosity, and curiosity is travel.

I suppose my curious streak continued through high-school as I played basketball, cross-country and soccer, and joined a few clubs. Then onto college it continued with my choice of electives as I took courses on linguistics, ethics, psychology and economics. Well, I guess we are all curious in college right? That’s the time to study everything. To explore what you’ve never been able to grasp a hold of with people who are similarly intellectually inclined. Fortunately, I had friends who were not just intellectuals but pragmatists, and urged me to write down the things that I really wanted to accomplish.

I started out last year with a sheet of written goals. Maybe there’s 15 that include things like cooking and surfing, and then the crucial ones like Spanish and technical writing. And you know what? I had been spreading myself too thing across all these subjects.

sunset-read

I’m focusing on catching more sunsets.

I realized that if I was ever going to make progress, I was going to have to focus on just a few things, the most crucial. I suppose it all boils down to a simple phase: “Do more of what you want and less of what you don’t.” Good phrase right? If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that talk is cheap. Really cheap. We can all say we’ll do something, learn something, or be somewhere at a specified time, but unless these words are converted into daily practices, they simply remain as dead words.