The first principle of my blog is Creating Ecosystems of Success. One of the keys to being successful is focusing in your goal and not becoming distracted. Approaching your life with focus and specificity can all but ensure you success. The following contributed post is thus entitled, 4 Reasons Why You Should Take Focus and Specificity Seriously in Your Life.
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It’s generally pretty common for all of us — at least at certain times in our lives — to be somewhat chaotic, disorganised, and to lack specificity and focus as we go about fulfilling our day-to-day obligations and moving towards what we hope will be prosperous and meaningful futures.
While it’s understandable, however, to fall into this kind of pattern every once in a while for a limited amount of time, allowing yourself to go through life in a permanent haze of unfocused vagueness, can be absolutely devastating to your ability to live a fruitful, uplifting, and successful life.
If you listen to many of the more influential coaches, advisers, and commentators on personal and professional growth and success out there, you’ll find that there’s a commonly recurring theme that focus and specificity are essential to success and happiness alike.
Here are just a few reasons why you should take focus and specificity seriously in your life.
Often, being precise in how you handle matters can forestall later troubles and complications
It likely won’t take you too much time spent reflecting, to notice that there are just certain things in life which require a high degree of attention, specificity, focus, and care, in order to turn out right.
If, for example, you are installing a new complex network infrastructure at your workplace, failing to have a data cabling installation expert on hand to perform — or at least, oversee — the procedure, is likely to result in some pretty serious trouble if not immediately, then certainly a short way down the line.
When all is said and done, many of the problems that we encounter in our lives — including many of the most pressing and difficult to come to terms with — happen as the result of the fact that we failed to perform our due diligence at the onset of a given project.
In fact, the same is often even true of our interpersonal relationships. When marriages break down, for example, it very often happens as the final straw in a long and drawn out process, during which one or both parties failed to attentively and specifically address the issues that they saw arising in the relationship, when it would have been possible to handle them without them devolving into major crises.
Whenever you’re dealing with something that really matters — you should be as focused and specific as you can in handling it. That focus and precision can often forestall serious problems and complications down the line.
Time is limited, and to achieve meaningful things, it has to be leveraged effectively — therefore, failure to focus can have catastrophic consequences
It can be pretty disconcerting, to say the least, to reflect on your own mortality. And yet the hard reality of life is that life itself is finite, and we each only get a certain amount of time with which to do everything we want, forge meaningful relationships with other people, and leave something behind that we’re proud of.
Of course, it should go without saying that achieving meaningful things, and doing meaningful work, is difficult and requires a high degree of focus, specificity, and attention.
When you see people who are very successful in a given area of life, it is typically the case that they have been extremely focused and disciplined with their time, and have dedicated a major chunk of their waking hours to that particular field.
Allowing yourself to exist in a chronically chaotic and unfocused state, on the other hand, only means that your time, and your opportunities, disperse as a result, and that you end up with nothing meaningful to show for things as a result.
Of course, this is a nightmare scenario for most of us. So, for the sake of achieving something meaningful and uplifting with your life, it’s by far in your best interest that you leverage your time and energy effectively, and spend them on the things that matter most.
Being specific and precise in your words and in the formulation of your goals and intentions, can keep your actions in line with your true values
It would be difficult to convincingly argue that living with integrity isn’t one of the most — perhaps the very most — important thanks in life.
No matter what hardships you’re facing, or whatever other goals you may have, if you always abide by your own moral code and stay true to your values and principles, it’s possible to live life in a way that makes you proud of the person you are, and justifies and counterbalances the struggles in life, too.
On the other hand, people who betray their morals and principles for anything else, such as in order to make more money, are always figures of scorn and contempt for the rest of the world — and usually for themselves, too.
Of course, people often go against, or at least fail to live up to, their own values, not due to conscious choice so much as the fact that they just weren’t thinking very clearly about things.
If you always put an emphasis on being specific and precise in your words and in the formulation of your goals and intentions, you can exercise a much greater degree of consciousness over the way you’re conducting yourself through life, and can live with significantly more integrity as a result.
Specificity may force you into a more action-oriented mode of living, which in turn has various benefits
A lot of people are, so to speak, essentially addicted to abstract hypothesising on any number of different topics.
Sometimes this is conscious and intentional, but very often it’s just the consequence of failing to make coherent plans and to construct effective strategies for implementing those plans.
By always holding yourself to the principle of specificity, you are more likely to work through the details of your plans and goals in a systematic manner, and to turn them into things that can realistically be actioned.
The result of this — a more action-oriented mode of living — can, in turn, have various benefits, not least of all greater productivity.
