Your problems are very rude. They call relentlessly at the most unholy hours.
It’s another 3am phone call for you. No, you are not the President of the United States, but your problems and challenges are keeping you awake till the wee hours of the morning. Again. You have been tossing and turning in bed, your restless mind giving you no respite. Finally, in exhaustion, you give up and sit up in bed. What’s the use, you think? You might as well get up and try, once again, to find the solution that has so long eluded you. You go to your desk, and turn on the lamp. Its brilliance disturbs your eyes and makes you squint. It’s as if your mind too has been squinting lately, unable to open up and clearly see the way forward out of this morass that you find yourself. Your log into your computer, and time blinks back at you: 2:57 am. It might as well have been shouting three minutes to failure, three minutes to being fired, three minutes to going out of business…
You open the dreaded sales reports. The numbers seem to be mocking, jeering at you. It’s obvious that you will not make your sales target for this month. The past two quarters have been equally disappointing. You know something must change, or you will have to change jobs. Maybe your small business would have to shut its doors for good, if something doesn’t change, and change fast.
You have conducted brainstorming sessions, ideation conferences, until you are blue in the face. No breakthroughs, No usable ideas have come of it. You sense that there is something that you can do, and that you’re capable of figuring it out, but it’s like a detective following a strong lead on a case, whose trail suddenly runs cold. You simply can’t seem to reach into the unknown and draw out the answer that you know exists, and which you desperately need. And this is the bigger frustration, knowing that your solution is available, but you can’t connect with it. At least not yet.
Still, you have the consolation that a solution exists, and that you will eventually find it. That has been your life’s philosophy. You believe in possibilities, that every problem can be solved, or at least mitigated. That there is a serum for every virus or pestilence that plagues your business, career, or life. Like this author is wont to say: “There is a way. Go find it!” You already know that the problem is solvable, all that’s left now is the search. You are determined to pour your heart, soul, strength, mind, and body into finding the elusive but not illusory solution. You are giving all that you are, to get all that you want. I call this FOCUS! “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, like the renowned poet Alfred Tennyson writes in his famous poem, “Ulysses”.
Focus is the concentration of one’s mental, physical, even spiritual forces towards the achievement of a particular outcome. Focus is the delineation of priorities, of identifying the one thing that one is willing to stake everything on, and to pursue it to completion.
Focus eliminates distraction. It is the erasure of mental noise, caused by the overload of our mental faculties with information and everything else that competes for our attention. Noise is the distraction that impedes the easy flow of information. Thus, focus is the elimination or reduction of this noise, in order to assist in the unobstructed flow of direly needed information and ideas from our inner man to flow to our physical man, from the subconscious mind to the conscious mind where decisions are made and action taken. Our subconscious mind holds the insight and rare wisdom that we need to tackle our problems, be they professional or personal, and it is imperative that we clear the path for such valuable information to flow through with ease and reach us, so we can profit from it. In information technology, this will be described as throughput, ensuring the clear and maximum delivery of information in a network. The human mind is a network of sorts, and sometimes the mental clutter and distractions of daily life can seriously impede the seamless flow of ideas and information from the subconscious to the conscious mind.
When the mental noise is high, one’s ability to hear, let alone hear clearly from their subconscious mind, is severely curtailed.
Unfortunately, this is how we miss out on great, life-changing ideas and solutions, and instead go marching round and round the mountain of confusion, and being tormented by our own 3am phone calls. Focus is the answer.
Imagine the motorcade of a dignitary passing through a busy thoroughfare. The traffic is cleared to make way for him or her to pass without delay. It is in a similar fashion that we must pave the way for vital information to travel from our subconscious mind and reach our conscious mind. Some information is just too important to get caught up in the traffic, be delayed, or not make it through at all. Remove, or at least reduce the traffic so that eminent ideas and hunches that you have been expecting will find safe and timely passage from your inner, wiser man, to your physical man. Now you can go to work implementing the ideas received. That is why meditation and other such techniques are helpful. And that is why focus is indispensable to the person who is determined to succeed in any worthwhile endeavor, especially if the project entails doing something inventive, or something that they have never done before as an individual. And the more we want to accomplish, the more we must tap into the strange and infallible abilities of our inner man. And we can hardly do so, unless we focus. You’re not bereft of good ideas, you’re just distracted, and your mind too busy and cluttered, to hear the timeless wisdom emanating from your more enlightened inner man. Hush! Be still and succeed!