Focus is the most important thing you can do to make sure your dreams come true. There are so many rivers to cross, and they all depend on what your dreams are. Some problems look very big, and many people give up at the first sign of trouble.
Focusing helps you get things together. It helps you get your resources to work together and point them in the same direction. So, you can keep making steady progress toward your goal or milestones.
Think about the headlights on your car. Most of them use bulbs of the same size and wattage. Focus is what makes a full beam. At midnight, you can see up to a kilometre ahead on a dark road. When the beam is focused more, heat can be made. When it was focused even more, it cut through some things. That's the power of staying on task.
To make your dreams come true, you need to break them down into steps, or goals. To make the dream come true, you have to reach the goals that make up the dream. Focus enables you meet your goals.
If you don't pay attention, you lose focus. You lose direction. You lose track of what's most important. You begin to look in many different places. This could mean starting new projects if the current one hasn't been finished in a logical way. The cycle keeps going, and the result is a lot of projects that are never finished. If all the time, energy, and money that went into these projects that were never finished had been put into one project, results would have been achieved.
This reminds me of a simple experiment we did when we were in middle school. Without using a straight edge, to draw a simple straight line from point A to point B. We were told to mark out the two points at the two opposite ends of a plain sheet of paper to do this. Then we were supposed to put our pencil on point A and keep our eyes on point B as we drew the line. The end result was a simple, straight line from point A to point B, which might not have been perfect. We were told to try the experiment again, but this time to put our pencil at point A and watch it move to point B. You can guess what will happen: a wavy line from A to B that doesn't go anywhere. When the pencil reached the other side of the paper, we had to look for point B. We were all way off the mark.
It was a simple but important lesson in staying on track: keep your eyes on where you want to go, and you will get there. Don't look where you are going or you will get lost.
Have you ever thought about what makes a magnet different from a nail? Carbon steel is used to make both of them. It's in the way its molecules are made. Every one has a north and a south side. All of the molecules in the magnet are perfectly lined up, with all of the north poles pointing in the same direction (to make the north pole) and all of the south poles pointing in the opposite direction (to make the south pole). This is what makes up the magnetic force as a whole. The nail's alignment is all over the place. They face every direction. In the end, the electromagnetic forces cancel each other out, so there is no magnetic force.
If you bring a nail close to a magnet's magnetic field, it will pull the nail in. Even though the nail is still stuck to the magnet, it too becomes a magnet and can attract other metals. What happens is that the magnetic force of the magnet forces the molecules in the nail to get their act together and line up in one direction. If you take out the nail, its molecules go back to how they were before, and it stops being a magnet again.
The guy with the magnet is focused. He pulls together its resources and makes it happen. The nail is a confused person. He sends his resources in all different directions, jumps from one project to another, and undoes any progress he would have made.
To be smart with our time, energy, and resources, we need to plan and concentrate. You could have a lot of ideas. Make a file on your computer where you can store your ideas. Every thought has its time. When the time is right for an idea, nothing can stop it. If you run before the time is up, you'll tyre yourself out and add your idea to your list of projects you've given up on. Instead of getting you excited, the idea is now making you feel down.
Every well-run army knows what its strategic strengths are and how many wars it can fight at the same time. If it tries to do too much, it sets itself up to fail.
It may be time to take a step back and look at the projects you already have going. Look over your short-term and long-term goals again. Do you still think your dream will come true? If so, look at projects that are important to making your dream come true. Stop working on things that keep you from getting where you want to go. If all of your ongoing projects are important, put them in order of importance, work on the most important one, and keep the others in mind. Follow through on one project until it makes sense to stop. It might not mean that you have to stay on one project forever. You can work on it until it can run on its own or be given to someone else. Then you can give it to someone else and move on. As you break new ground, it will continue to grow. You can also take on other projects, but only if they don't take your attention away from your main goal or slow you down.
It doesn't make sense to complain that you don't have enough time to do the things you need to do just because you have too many nice but not necessary things in your life.
It's a good place to start. Most folks don't. But just beginning isn't enough. Complete what you've started. The laurel goes to the person who finishes, not to the person who starts. The end of a situation is better than its start. If you keep your mind on the goal long enough, you will reach the end.
