Focus, Happiness, and a Birthday

This week will mark another year notched on my belt. The perfunctory salutations will arrive this week, from friends and family, and all will wish me a joyous and happy birthday. Fortunately, happiness really is already there. My benchmark for happiness is not too high. As long as I am focused on the things that matter to me, I already know that I will be happy. It is as direct a correlation as anything I could think of.

I’m a very big proponent on focus. The lack of focus, especially in our current day of direct, constant, and faster consumption of information. Sometimes, we can focus on things that are not important at all. In that regard, my intent this year is to guard my focus as if my entire life were dependent on it. Because, what we focus on will ultimately become our life.

I was recently re-reading a book by Charles Duhigg, “Smarter, Faster, Better”, a book that is meant to give insight on strategies that take people to the next level. There’s actually a chapter in the book solely on FOCUS. It is a prerequisite and a part of success and happiness, it talks about building mental models, visualizing, and telling yourself stories. It talks about cognitive tunneling and how this type of thinking can limit our decision making. It’s actually one of the most riveting chapters on self-improvement I’ve ever read, only because it also tells a story of a doomed Air France flight from years ago, and how a lack of mental models to pivot sealed their fate.

In any case, the chapter is not only about FOCUS, but also how to create the right type of focus, and how FOCUS coupled with visualizing can truly up your game. I’m paraphrasing of course, but that’s basically the gist of it.

I do think, Mr. Duhigg can do a better job of hammering home the real nugget of which I found from this chapter, and it’s truly something not even new in terms of focus. It is planning your day, planning your ideal day. In his words, it is to visualize and think about what his day is supposed to look like. But others have termed this visualizing your perfect shot, visualizing your perfect day. Athletes do this all the time too, in terms of visualizing different situations that could arise. In the book, Mr. Duhigg actually has an example of another flight, that basically everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. But because the pilot, the co-pilots and the team were able to pivot, utilize proper visualization, and mental models, they were able to focus and cut out the fluff from everything else.

That to me is the true nugget of FOCUS. Already knowing in advance, what is the ideal situation, and cutting out the other distractions. It is also the reason why I have a planner that only lists down TOP 3 things that I want to accomplish that day. And I decide in advance, what the top 3 priorities are for that day. Because I know there are a million things on my plate potentially, but only 3 things usually are THE MOST important thing. I FOCUS on things that are important to me, my business, and my life.

Granted, I’m not the master of this yet. But it is a habit that I have tried to cultivate over my professional years, ever since I was a Financial Adviser and even going back to my Chemical Engineering days. It’s a skill that I am still working on, and it is a skill that I can see myself getting better and better on.

Which gets me to HAPPINESS. Because, focus is a key factor to my own happiness. My ideal day, and my ideal life, I try to visualize that consistently. Whenever I feel burnt out, it is because I know I have lost focus and I have tried to do too much, of which the needle hasn’t budged on the things that I know are critical to my own life. I have not prioritized my ideal life, my ideal day, and my visualized day has not gone as planned.

Happiness to me really is, if my FOCUS is directed on things that can contribute to the visualized life that I create for myself on a daily basis.

What are the wishes I would like to nurture in the coming year? Get back to reading more often. At least 40 books is usually a goal I try to strive for in the past, but haven’t gotten a lot of chance to accomplish in the past 2 years as life has gotten a bit hectic. But I am not making an excuse, I am writing this as a challenge to my best self. We all have our challenges, but reading has always been a priority in my life. The fact that I have not gotten to 40 books a year in the past 2 years is a choice that I accept I have made. There’s no situation that I can think of that doesn’t get me to 40 books in a year. There’s just too much time in a day, even the busiest of CEOs get to read 40 books a year, and I speak that into existence for myself.

Another birthday wish is focus on family more. As the years have gone by, especially in light of last year, I just don’t know how many years I have left with the people that are close to me. Mama passed away last year, and it was by far one of the hardest things I have gone through. Not being there personally to see her, it was not something I had ever expected that would happen. And so this year, my wish is for me to realize and embrace the importance of family, even as I try to make a difference in the lives of the seniors I help take care of here in Michigan.