High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Focus’

“I didn’t get anything done this weekend,” my go-getter friend said with a slightly frustrated tone in his voice.  What he meant was that he didn’t get to work on some of the projects that  really turn him on and that he thinks of as his priorities.

“Oh?” I said.  “What did you do?”

He listed a few of the detours that lead him from where he’d planned to go.  It was a replay of conversations we’ve had before.

“Life is what happens when you have other plans, hey?” I laughed.

It’s not that my friend doesn’t have focus.  He can knock out daunting pieces of work over the course of a couple hours, and frequently does just that.    And it’s not a matter of time-management either, although almost all high creatives could use some tweaking with that.

It turns out that the time he spends away from his pet projects is usually time that he spends helping other people when they’re stuck and need a hand, or when they need the counsel of a friend, or when his kids want attention.

Like most of us, his highest strengths come so naturally to him that he takes his acts of generosity and service for granted.  He does them automatically because service to others is his real top-tier value.  It gives him more genuine satisfaction than anything else.

He wishes for more hours in the day like many of us do.  But he’s happy and sleeps well at night even, when he complains that he “didn’t get anything done.”

The truth is that any time we give to living according to our personal set of top-tier values is time we’re spending planting seeds.   Eventually those seeds bear fruit and we find, when we look back, that the time we gave to planting them was one of the best investments we could have made.

And when we do that, our second- and third-tier priorities magically take care of themselves.

To learn more about identifying your core value-based strengths, see What’s Right With You: How to Discover Your Personal Strengths

Grab that something that grabs your mind, that something that makes you lose all track of time and forget everything else in the world.  Open up the biggest space for it that you can make and then climb right inside it and ride it for all its worth.

Feel the tension of its delicious challenges pulling out your skills, teasing you to push just a little bit farther, to stretch just a little bit more.  Catch how it rivets your attention, how it dares you to cross your limit lines and dive into your genius zone headlong.

Watch how it plays with you, teasing out your best, your most inventive and determined.

And when you are done with it, revel in the pride and satisfaction of all that you wrought while under its spell.

That’s flow, man.  That’s riding your passion.  Work, hobby, play, it doesn’t matter.  It’s whatever really turns you on, whatever really turns you into one focused, red hot performer, baby.  Get you some.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” ~Marcel Proust

At last the long work week came to a close. A bank of clouds had blown in during the afternoon, draining the sky of its color, mirroring the way the sleep deficit I had accrued drained me.

I ran through the list of places I could go for my daily photo shoot, but none of them appealed to me.  I wanted just to go home.  “It’s spring,” I told myself flatly.  “You’ll find something in the yard.”

So I let the pressures go, and the work week go, and drove home with music on the radio, dreaming about the nap that waited for me there.

As I pulled in the driveway, a patch of weeds on the hillside caught my eye.  Some kind of small white flowers bobbed on leafy stems in a little clump near its base.  They were kind of non-descript from a distance, ordinary weeds you would pass without giving them a thought.

But when, moments later, I focused my camera’s lens on them, their beauty bathed my awareness.  Atop each stem, dozens of pretty buds snuggled at the base of the perfect four-petaled white flowers, surrounded by slightly blushing deeply toothed leaves.   Each bud would open to become a flower.  And each flower would produce a seed capable of growing into another plant that would produce more blossoms and more seeds.  How remarkable!

The sight washed all my weariness away.  The world was a miraculous place once again.  And all because of a patch of weeds that I could easily have passed by.

It’s all in how you look at things.   The world within us and the world without are strewn with limitless possibilities for discovering new beauty, new wonders, new paths, new interpretations and perceptions.  I was reminded to keep from too quickly dismissing a glimmer on the hillside as a weed.   Often it’s wise to readjust your focus, to take a second look.

“Somewhere,” Carl Sagan once said, “something incredible is waiting to be known.”  And it’s up to us to open ourselves to see it.