I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, focused on launching a writing and advisory business around personal finance for GenXers. I’m blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
When you only have one goal at a time, you can be laser focused and disciplined with your mind. And one of the things that I have discovered is that when I’m focused on one thing, I have much more disciplined thinking.
So, you know, I know that my brain is so powerful. I know that it has the ability to literally create whatever it spends time thinking about. And if I have too many things going on and it’s thinking about too many different things, I create a lot of half-assed things.
And when I focus on one thing and really focus on creating that really well, then I notice that my brain comes up with things that it might not have otherwise come up with. And it solves problems in ways that it might not have ever solved those problems. So I think that’s an incredibly powerful ability to have.
And the other thing that it does for me is because I’m so disciplined in my thinking about that thing, I’ve noticed that my discipline overall is increased when I think about other things. Right? It’s almost like I’m becoming much more of a steward of my mind.
Brooke Castillo, The Life Coach School Podcast Episode #85: Constraint
I have felt a fair bit of overwhelm lately and I’m not making good progress. Part of that is because my personal life has seen disruption lately: first Maycember end of school year activities then my mother’s moving out of my house. My sisters are coming in town this weekend to help her settle in, which means another round of family social events.
With respect to my plan to create a podcast, as the foundation of a personal finance writing and advisory business for Gen X, I am trying to do way too much. I’m not happy to just do a podcast; I want it to have video too so I can post it to YouTube. I don’t want to do just personal finance; I want to add in other aspects of life (retirement, career, end-of-life planning).
I’m pretty sure it’s time to narrow down and pick just one goal.
Castillo says making a decision ahead of time allows you to clear up energy because you don’t have to make so many other decisions. For example, if you decide ahead of time you are going to eat the same thing every day, you don’t have to waste any brain energy thinking about what to eat. If you decide you will wear a particular “uniform” you don’t have to decide each day what your outfit will be.
Further, focusing on just one goal allows you to tap into your creativity about that one goal. Your brain won’t be quite so overwhelmed if it’s just trying to solve one thing rather than many.
This week I’ve been working on getting clarity about exactly what I’m doing. On Monday, I wrote about defining my target audience and, in the process, worked on further refining my podcast’s niche. Yesterday I pondered how I can rationalize my web presence. My website shows how I’m doing too much. I have abstract art on there, 1000-day project posts on there, newsletter articles.
One radical idea would be to postpone the podcast and instead work on a written newsletter.
I’m not ready to decide, but I know that I need to do so.