If I had to pick the one word that has marked me most this last year, it would be this one: Focus.
It is something colleagues and mentors have repeated to me. For example, Marta, a colleague from the Liderazgo programme in which I took part in 2011-2012, used to tell me: Juan, if you manage to focus, you can achieve everything you set out to do.
Around that time I started putting David Allen’s GTD into practice. Later, during 2012 I took part in T. Harv Ecker’s Quantum Leap seminars, I have read books on personal development by Robin Sharma, Stephen Covey, hundreds of articles about Startups and Entrepreneurship on Hacker News, as well as completing my training as a trainer of groups and teams and preparing my own talk on Discovering your Vocation.
«Discovering your Vocation» workshop
One of the activities of the «Discovering your Vocation» workshop.
I keep one of the phrases I read and presented at the workshop: If successful people have anything in common, it is the ability to focus. That this is relevant to me is simple, it is still my battle, and one I have to apply willpower to every day to fulfil.
Creating new habits looks simple, although it may not be easy.
And this year, part of my effort has gone into creating new habits that let me build the vision I have for my life and my company and all the projects I have on the go. And as part of creating new habits, there is dropping old ones. Some who have known me recently are surprised that back in 2011 I smoked a pack a day. New habits I try to create this year have been exercising regularly. The key is that they form part of a routine. Part of my routine includes 20 minutes of yoga exercises in the mornings, they are a great stretch, and you only have to visit youtube to find excellent classes; attending Aikido 2 times a week (I remember the words of one of my mentors, Jay: «There is no more transformational sport than Aikido»: Cardio exercises 6 days a week.
Have I kept it 100%: No. All-or-nothing perfectionism has meant in the past that I abandoned things at the slightest error. Now, if I miss a day, I try to continue the next one. If I have missed a week of exercise. My phrase to myself is: «Yes, today, is a good day to pick it back up».
If you are like me, with a high propensity to get enthusiastic about a great many projects, with a lot of eagerness to learn and discover, you may have a tendency to scatter. That is why I link focus with habits and with creating routines.
I finish the post with the answer my friend Manuel Rodriguez gave me when I asked him: What is your secret for successfully completing all those big projects you set out to do? Manuel is a software engineer and systems administrator, who has had, since I have known him, an itch for starting his own projects. This was his answer.
- Being up to date. That gives you the possibility of doing in less time what it permits, what someone who is not up to date would take a month over. So you can see it as a «Time investment».
- Perfection: The goal of doing something is to forget about it and never touch it again. That means doing it perfectly.
- When quality and comfort compete, comfort always wins. To be precise: in 99% of cases, programmers choose comfort. If you want to be good choose quality.
- The greatest quality of a systems administrator is being lazy. Being lazy is what will give you the most work. Automate.
And you, what do you put your focus on? Do you do it effectively?