I’m like you. I say with confidence, “I can multi-task”. Because yes, I can walk and talk at the same time, I can scroll Instagram while eating cereal, and I can run four businesses at once. Those things may be true, but I can’t do them well. I can walk and talk at the same time because walking doesn’t take active thought for me, my body just knows how to do it. I can scroll and eat but I often end up with milk on my shirt or missing the bowl when I get into a post. I have tried to do all the things and failed.
What happened when I tried to do all the things, is everything suffered. I split my attention and each thing I wanted to learn, do, and start, got a fraction of me instead of all of me. The result from me giving a lot of things a little attention was none of them becoming what they had the potential to be. I had to step back and decide which one thing I wanted to focus on, which one thing did I want to see all the way through to fruition, first. I, like you, can do lots of things, I have lots of ideas and interests, and get excited to jump into new things. But as complex as we are, and as much as we are sometimes able to do more than one thing at a time, our best work is put out into the world when we focus on just one thing and do it extremely well.
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” -Stephen Covey
As much as I love this blog and will continue to work on Launch as an organization, I had to make the hard and conscious decision to focus on writing. I am a writer, and for me to write books worth reading, I have to take a short break from everything else. It’s not easy, I’m writing this blog post right now riddled with guilt because I’m not writing my book, but I wanted to share why there hasn’t been anything posted here as well as encourage you to focus. Get the first thing done and then work on the next thing. Use your downtime to learn, practice, and indulge in your other passions, but buckle down and spend the majority of your time on the one main thing.
Talk soon.