Focus on Life™

You are surrounded by your past. All the tangible items and assets represent the earlier achievements. The same applies to your monetary wealth as well—it is only storage of your previous efforts and endeavours. The past is not the future; you need to create something new in between.

Basically everything goes through a cycle of creation, sustenance, and decay. It does not really matter whether we talk about knowledge, skills, physical goods, or even our thoughts. The only constant is change. It stays and forces everything else into movement. Effort is required to keep up with the changes in the world around us.

Tangible things are relatively easy to produce—if you only know how. And this is exactly the point. We need ideas, innovations, experience, knowledge, and the right skills to get something done. A beautiful house/car or any other physical good or product does not last forever. They need either be replaced or maintained. This information is always within people. Persons make everything happen.

Diversity and specialisation are the means that enable our society to have a wide variety of different tangible items and products available to us. There needs to be people who have the required skill set and the production tools to create the items. They do not come out of nowhere—they represent the existing expertise and knowledge.

We often take services and products as granted, and can only start to appreciate them when they have first demonstrated their non-functional nature. If your bathroom pipe is leaking then suddenly a plumber is a very valuable person for you. Actually your life becomes pretty unbearable without the necessary reparation skills!

The richness is not in the goods and things around you. They are only the presentation of the wealth in the society. The future success needs to be earned every day. No money can buy you food if you are in an isolated island. Similarly the wealth of any society can be measured only by the richness and the variety of experience, knowledge, and interaction among its members. Specialisation is only available when there are enough goods and services available to take care of the more general needs of the members of the society. If you need to grow your own food and prepare it as well there is less time available for other activities. In a similar manner any specialist is dependent on the work and expertise of the other people in the production chain. We all need each other. If you are not contributing or loving what you’re doing everybody is worst off. Do you see how personal freedom is very closely linked to the well-being and the wealth of the society?

We tend to be very practical in our thinking. It all culminates into question—how? How am I going to do it? How is it possible? How did you do it? Many questions and very little answers. If you were to know the means you would not bother to ask—you would just do it. But how have you done it in the past—without the answers before the action, that is?

One person’s impossible is other person’s business as usual. What’s the difference? A point of view—the other person cannot imagine a solution based on his/her past experiences, knowledge and understanding while for the other there is no mystery because it is part of his/her everyday life (understanding). In other words the doer believes and the doubter does not.

Ask a successful entrepreneur how he managed to do it, and often you may not find specific answers. They will emphasise their vision, passion, and dedication—they believed 100 per cent what they we about to create. And more importantly, they had the strong will and confidence in themselves that they can make it to happen, no matter what. And after all, how could you know beforehand how to do things that you have not done before? If you were to do only those things that you have done earlier, you would repeat yourself. So, is there any other way to create something new?

Your thinking is based on your past knowledge. We only know what we know, and we see and hear only what we know. Worries are produced in our mind and only by our mind. It is a closed system that exists only when you are thinking (of it or something else). While you are in the middle of some intensive action, you do not have time to think. You have to act. Try to think while hitting the ball in the golf court and you certainly do not make a dream swing.

Often thinking substitutes the action, and makes the realisation of our goals more difficult. It is not that one does not need to define the goals and plan things in advance, but it is important to realise when it is the time to believe on what one is doing and start to walk the talk (or the thought). Mind can produce different scenarios endlessly. Those what-ifs and hows have only one problem–they do not match with the outside reality. Only by starting to move one can keep a bicycle stable–the same applies to our lives as well. Paralysis by analysis cumulates the worries but does not provide any remedy for the underlying issues.

A different matter is when it is a right time to consider the how-question. If you want to make something big and major, it is not very wise to start by thinking how you are going to realise it. This would only result that you are not going to vision such a grand ideas and objectives after all. The road looks very cumbersome and also the visibility is very poor. You start to doubt and very soon the great venture has been turned into a farce—and all this can happen just in your mind! A sailor does not know the weather conditions for his entire route before starting to cross the Atlantic. He certainly knows where he’s heading and why he is doing it. He even may have a clear vision how he is going to sail the route and how long it is going to take. He is confident on his skills and competences to make it to happen. The how-question does not come to halt the action. In a word he believes himself.

Many times not doing is worse than doing something. While you are not making any progress you are still doing something—being in the same spot. Circling around the same area certainly consumes lots of energy but the overall impact may not be exactly what you wanted to have. Taking the first step is often the hardest. The sooner you do it the easier the consequent paces are. And like always before in your life you will figure out how to do it after all. How you did it? -is the question you can try to answer—afterwards. Just do it!

(See also Reverse Confidence )