100 Days of Vision…Day 38
Life in the 21st Century. How to Excel
Saying that life in the 21st century is challenging and confusing is probably a huge understatment! We’ve entered a new paradigm especially with technology and all it’s extra benefits and pitfalls and most people feel stress as a result as there is so much other there; not just technology but choices in general.
With all the additional components of life that we have to deal with it’s ever increasingly important to filter our lives in the same way that you might filter the email entering into your inbox. If you don’t filter you will become inundated. Take facebook as a prime example. I’ve got nearly 600 contacts on there now and ever increasingly I’m being invited to groups, events, fan pages etc and the list just goes on and on! I want facebook to serve me and my ultimate goals and not become a pain in the backside.
The amount of importance and value you place on these things will also have a big impact. If you place a huge amount of value making public appearances, and you become overwhelmed with requests to make public appearances, if you don’t know how to filter those events you may well become frustrated if you can’t fulfill all of them. I do like what the Roger Hamilton says about success in that: “It’s not what you say yes to but what you say no to.”
We as human beings are filtering creatures anyway so we may as well tune that skill and make it work for us. In addtion to filtering, the other thing which will be of immense value to you, will be the ability to make quick decisions. The uncanny thing was I began writing this post on Wednesday and had already made a start on writing this paragraph on the ability on making quick decisions. Yesterday I was on a flight to Milan and I was speed reading the book ‘Think and grow rich’ and in it there is a whole section about having the ability to make quick firm decisions. Looks like Napolean Hill and I share a common philosophy about success! 😉
The caveat with regards to quick decisions is learning to deal with you own ‘second guessing’. It doesn’t actually matter how long you take to make a decision. Most people think that they need a good length of time to make a decision and in some cases it does matter but in the majority of decision we face on a day to day basis we take our time because we’re asking ourselves if the decision is the ‘right’ decision. Length of time will not necessarily make it any more right, wrong or better. Even if you’ve taken time with your decision you may still be questioning yourself in the back of your mind. “Did I make the right choice?” etc.
So ultimately this all comes down to you and how you deal with the influx of different opportunities that arrive at your doorstep. The onus is on you to think quicker and smarter about the ever growing list of avenues and gateways through to the road of success. Stop expecting yourself to be ‘right’ all the time and just go with your gut. Sometimes you will lose out but ultimately what you’re doing by adopting these ideas is disposing quickly of things that have no value to you and increasing your time to focus on the things that do truly have benefit for you and ultimately taking you step by step towards fulfilling your purpose.
To summarise:
1) Learn to filter quickly; learn when to say no and learn to say it firmly. Saying ‘Yes’ to everything that comes along isn’t obligatory. What you’re learning to do is spot and differentiate the real opportunities from the ones that leech your time and energy
2) Decide quickly. Every minute spent trying to make a choice is just a waste of your time and time you could be using more productively.
3) Escape the habit of second guessing your decisions. You not always going to make the right decisions all you can do is make them quickly and move on as fast as possible without subjecting yourself to regret or hindsight.
