Ticking Away The Moments That Make Up A Dull Day
What’s the most effective strategy for living a life of meaning, fulfillment, and contribution?
You need to pursue the optimal expression of your talent, because one person’s talent can change the world. That makes wasted talent the greatest tragedy in life, because the whole world loses out on what could have been.
What is the most effective strategy for preventing your talent from going to waste?
“Aim at paradise, and focus on the day.” Make decisions about how you devote your time and attention in advance, so your decisions don’t get made by distractions and changes in emotional state. Your talent, time, and attention are your most valuable assets, because time and attention are the mechanisms that transform talent into skill and peak performance.
When you precisely define your non-negotiable priorities, you make priority dynamics work for you. When you precisely define the stakes, you make loss aversion work for you.
Priority Dynamics: human beings will sacrifice everything for their highest priority. For example: what do parents sacrifice for their children?
Loss Aversion: human beings fear a loss more than they desire an equivalent gain. For example: “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” According to that logic, many people will fear a loss more than they desire a greater gain.
Decisions about how you devote your time and attention must be made with with focus and clarity. Set your schedule according to your conscience.
Who are you, and what do you want to do about it?
What’s the biggest, most important problem you can solve, and what’s your plan do solve it?
If you were only allowed to devote your time and attention to one mission, what is the mission you would happily devote all of your time and attention to?
What will happen to you if you never devote any of your time and attention to that mission because you’re too busy with distractions?
There are 12 Skills you can master on your quest to transform your talent into skill that will deliver peak performance and wellbeing to your life.
Authenticity - The relentless return to what matters most, what matters most is the optimal expression of your talent, and the contribution to humanity that results. The alignment of your identity, decisions, and actions with your unique gifts and your highest conscience. Authenticity reveals who you truly are, and from that truth, courage becomes possible.
Courage - The ability to take action in the face of fear. Stepping toward transformation instead of away from it. Courage=hope+fear. Once you choose courage, your attention must be directed, and that is where focus emerges.
Focus - The full alignment of identity, attention, and long-term vision. With focus, the path sharpens, and clarity becomes the natural next step.
Clarity - Knowing what matters, why it matters, and what to do next. But clarity alone isn’t enough, you must hold yourself to it, and that is the work of accountability.
Accountability - The standard that you hold yourself to because how you do anything is how you do everything, and once you start cutting corners, when will you stop? And when accountability is practiced consistently, discipline becomes not a burden, but a natural expression of who you are becoming.
Discipline - Remembering what you really want, then prioritizing accordingly. Sustained discipline inevitably demands tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs form the essence of sacrifice.
Sacrifice - “Sacred subtraction.” Letting go of something meaningful so you can reach for what is most meaningful. And because no great transformation is achieved alone, sacrifice naturally leads you into community.
Community - Your community is the group of people who become the external embodiment of your conscience and your unshakable faith in yourself. Community strengthens resolve, and from that resolve, faith becomes unshakeable.
Faith - “I don’t understand how to do this yet, but I will figure it out, because it’s worth it. I can accept complexity. I can accept uncertainty. I can even accept failure. But I cannot betray my talent and my destiny, so I cannot accept surrender.” Faith demands bold action, and that action is audacity.
Audacity - Utter disregard for the uncertainty of the outcome. The knowledge that regret is an infinitely greater loss than the embarrassment of an unsuccessful attempt. When audacity becomes embodied, integrity is born.
Integrity - The ability to align your decisions and your actions with your conscience and your destiny. When this skill is mastered, flow becomes readily accessible.
Flow - The optimal state of human consciousness that delivers peak performance by allowing your conscience to flow through your decisions, actions, and performance without distraction by thoughts of failure or the uncertainty of the outcome. The embodiment of your spirit. Flow is the reward for practicing every skill that came before it and the doorway to true mastery.
The 12 Skills for Life are locked in a dance with time. You can devote your time and attention to training and mastering the 12 Skills, and mastering the 12 Skills allows you to optimize the use of your time. Then you can devote your time and attention to mastering your craft in search of your talent’s optimal expression.
We prioritize:
The quest for the optimal expression of talent
Integrity
And the righteous devotion of time and attention.
That’s how you create the conditions for peak performance. The quest for the optimal expression of your talent is the quest for the optimal use of your time and attention.
Are you developing your talent or wasting your talent? Are you using your time or misusing your time? Do your decisions and actions reflect your talent and your mission?
If you’ve been misusing your time and wasting your talent, and you want to change course, define your quest, define success, and define the stakes. Then use those definitions as a decision-making framework as you build your schedule for your week. Make decisions about your time and attention in advance so you don’t get distracted by temptations or by changes in your mood.
Never surrender your quest for the optimal expression of your talent.