Principle — Focus on what’s important

Kent Beck, software development expert, said in a course I attended, that he often found the following to be true.

The more discussion there is about something, the less important it is. Everyone agrees about the really important ones.

Obviously, it is not always true, but in many cases it is. People can get into almost religious wars about things like which brand of sports car is the best even though most of them are really similar, and any of them would be a great car.

Lifehacker published a quote from American pastor Robert Schuller. The quote represents a very good way of finding out what you really want.

What Would You Attempt to Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?

What would you do?

After my last example Prepare to win, Karin added a great comment which made me feel compelled to add a new example as an follow-up. It is what Karin said, somewhat paraphrased.

Don’t try to win if you just want to enjoy the ride.

Today’s lesson I would like to call Henrik’s Third Law of Advice: For every good advice there is an equally good advice saying the opposite.

I originally saw it on dump.com, but they have since cleared their archives. The caption, to which I can only agree, was “strangely enough, this motivates me”.

Leo Babauta talks about choosing what to spend your time on.

Start to eliminate the unnecessary. When you do the important things with focus, without rush, there will be things that get pushed back, that don’t get done. And you need to ask yourself: how necessary are these things? What would happen if I stopped doing them? How can I eliminate them, delegate them, automate them?

How much time do you spend on things that really doesn’t matter?

Leo Babauta on being busy.

In fact, often we compete by trying to show how busy we are. I have a thousand projects to do! Oh yeah? I have 10,000! The winner is the person who has the most insane schedule, who rushes from one thing to the next with the energy of a hummingbird, because obviously that means he’s the most successful and important.

Right?

Right?

Here’s Seth Godin’s take on what laziness means in today’s world — somewhat counter-intuitive.

Laziness in a white collar job has nothing to do with avoiding hard physical labor. “Who wants to help me move this box!” Instead, it has to do with avoiding difficult (and apparently risky) intellectual labor.

“Honey, how was your day?”

“Oh, I was busy, incredibly busy.”

“I get that you were busy. But did you do anything important?”

Busy does not equal important. Measured doesn’t mean mattered.

Are you lazy-busy?