You’ve been there before.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready for the New Year to begin.
Intentions set. Goals in mind. Ready for the best year of your life.
Then…
womp womp
You piss it all away.
If you’re lucky, you got a few solid weeks in as the new and improved, 2.0 version of yourself.
If you’re like everyone else, it was game over before January 7th.
Either way, you let your goals drift away from you (again) like a dry fart in the wind.
That’s the bad news.
The good news?
It’s not your fault.
Well, actually, it is your fault.
But chances are you don’t know any better — so I won’t hold it against you.
There is, however, a better way to approach this. A better way to tackle the New Year so you don’t fall flat on your face a few yards out the gate.
Even better?
It’s much, MUCH easier than you’d expect.
And that better way, my fine feathered little fledgling, is simply this:
Focus on doing one thing and one thing only.
I can’t stress the importance of this enough.
True story:
A few years back, I started setting goals for myself. I sat down with a pen and paper before the New Year and wrote down everything I wanted to achieve.
Lots of planning, lots of hard work, lots of intention setting.
And you know what?
I maybe accomplished 10% of those goals.
Hit me right in the feels. I felt like a complete failure.
But the lesson I learned was invaluable. And that lesson was that I took on too many things at once.
I spread my focus so thin that nothing got the attention it deserved.
This is not how you want to do things.
Fast forward to 2019.
I set ONE goal for myself this year. That’s it.
I had other goals, of course, but they were just icing on the cake. I didn’t HAVE TO complete them. But I did HAVE TO complete my primary goal.
Which I did — six months earlier than expected.
And I was able to do this because it was the only thing I was focusing on.
I wasn’t distracted by anything else.
Each day, I’d evaluate my progress and adjust accordingly. That ‘one goal’ got ALL of my attention. And because of this, I was able to make swift and meaningful progress on it every single day.
Such is the power of focusing on one thing.
It doesn’t matter what it is.
You wanna lose weight?
You wanna make more money?
You wanna break free from your day job and finally start that business you’ve been dreaming of?
Great!
Pick the one goal that means the most to you and put every ounce of effort into its achievement.
Some days, you’ll make less progress than others.
And that’s okay.
As long as you hold that one goal in your mind and you try your best to move the needle forward on it each day, you WILL accomplish it.
Of that I am certain.
BUT — if you try to take on too much at once, you’ll spread yourself too thin and never give your goals the attention they deserve.
Don’t do that to yourself.
Instead, pick that one thing.
Then, when you accomplish it, pick another.
You’re building a foundation that’s going to last you a lifetime. And you build that foundation by laying one brick down at a time.
Which brick do you plan on laying next?