Are You Working For Distance Or Distraction?
Humans have done an impeccable job of separating themselves from nature. Our sandcastles of concrete, metal, and enterprise seem larger than life when there isn’t any life. We have cut back and cut into wood and earth until everything is level, everything is sterile. We refer to the wild as animals, forgetting we are also members of the animal kingdom.
All members of the animal kingdom perform the following tasks: eat, sleep, defecate, and procreate. As humans, we do these four tasks and fill the remaining fifteen hours of our days with a blend of obligations, distractions, and the idea of free will. If you were to take a bleak outlook on the purpose of life- or rather the lack of purpose in life- you might say there is nothing more than a repeat of these four tasks until we die. A cyclical dance of existence; Just one generation handing off the human genome to the next until the evolutionary clock resets.
For those of you who have read up to this point, you might be thinking, “Geez! Who pissed in his Wheaties this morning?” Quite the opposite! If you believe life is more than the biological cycle, PROVE IT. I want this to be your wake-up call. One that calls out:
Are you working for distance or distraction?
Are you putting yourself through the stress, the strain on relationships, the stretching of your potential for distance? Or distraction?
Are you spending forty-plus hours each week away from the people and activities you love because you’re bored? Because at least when you are working you aren’t spending money? Because your job or title is your identity?
At the end of your life, do you want to point and beam with pride at your contribution to the local landfill or do you want to know you lived life with purpose? Will your answer be a resounding YES to questions like:
Did I build generational wealth?
Did I ease the suffering for myself and those around me?
Did I help those who couldn’t help themselves?
Did I build within myself with the same tenacity as what I built around myself?
To work for distraction is to live a life that confirms the statement: In the absence of a long-term goal, I will always justify a short-term distraction. Want to splurge on an impulse buy? Spend $500-$1,000 weekly on restaurants? Binge-watch four seasons of the newest show on Netflix? Without having your money or time preallocated to something bigger, the distraction of your present self will always be the priority.
In much the same way, without having your process attached to goals, how easy is it to fall into auto-pilot? Life is little more than going through the motions until the next payday when you can run out, spend on distractions, and do it all again.
Maybe you had goals and lost your way. Maybe the idea of goal setting feels pointless; a distraction in its own right, disguised as the chase of an unrealistic future to escape from the dread of the present. Or maybe, you are a goal-minded person, yet one with only a monetary goal and quickly realizing money will not solve the void in the other parts of your life.
Shifting from Results-Oriented to Process-Oriented Thinking
I was recently in a coaching session with a client who said, “I hate the saying, ‘trust the process’”. When probed further, he clarified that he hated the notion the future was out of his control and he must surrender the unknown to a process unfolding. As I reminded him, the saying doesn’t say ‘trust ANY process’, it says ‘trust THE process’. To trust the process means to shift our perspective from results-oriented thinking to process-oriented thinking. When I have built an executable plan; a plan that has fielded questions and has been built on strategy and market research, I must give my relentless focus and energy toward the activities and trust the results will be a byproduct of my efforts.
Ready to build an executable plan and process you can confidently follow? Download and apply the following four resources to your plan of action.
Will you challenge yourself and your thinking? Will you reflect on your activities and see where you have been on autopilot and where you can make a conscious, intentional change? Your desire to grow and be the best version of yourself doesn’t have to be by yourself. Surround yourself with the coaching, courses, and community helping people move from distraction to distance. Will you be in the same spot a year from now? You decide.
