LIFE UNCIVILIZED

Dating And Life Advice For Men

Archives for July 2017

How To Stop Being a Self-Loathing Burnout

by ·

IF YOUR LIFE is anything like mine, then somewhere between the waking up; showering; taking a dump; masturbating; singing; watching youtube videos of cats; watching youtube videos with a cat; wondering what it would be like if your bus smashed into someone; reading a book; browsing the internet and feeling guilty about not reading a book; being late for work; waiting for the day to end; replying to a message in the group chat only to start an argument; approaching that girl in the supermarket; getting too nervous to approach that girl in the supermarket; chastising yourself for being a pussy; arguing with your manager; arguing with your manager’s manager; going to bed on time because you’re content; going to bed too late because you fundamentally dislike yourself; writing something worthwhile; writing something that’s a complete load of shit; checking your website stats; or measuring your penis, it’s incredibly easy to lose track of your day.

And if you lose track of your day. You lose track of your week. And if you lose track of your week, then that starts to add up exponentially and all of a sudden you realize you haven’t done anything worthwhile in a hell of a lot of time, and your mother was right when she told you that you were a loser.

In order to keep track of a life that is going to get away from you, it pays to have a measure of just what exactly you’ve driven forward.

Human willpower is about as sturdy as a three legged chair. The more we exert ourselves, the less we end up having, and the less we have, the more we fall prey to making decisions that we do not truly wish to make. And far from willpower being something we can realistically train throughout our weeks, more often than not, the simple nature of the routine in our lives often causes it to deplete on mundane tasks.

The reality of willpower is this:

Through the simple act of being swamped by your day to day routine, you are going to run out of willpower, and you are going to make decisions that are contrary to your goals and interests.

Just as it pays to recognize the limits of your willpower and take steps to expand those limits, it also pays to recognize that those limits are going to defeat you more often than not, and you are going to suffer as a result. Just as you cannot go to the gym for the first time and lift the biggest weight on the rack, you cannot hope to force your mind into a state where it will be able to perform feats of incredible force of will. The training takes time, and again, as with the gym, if you over-train, you will see set backs and more failure.

This may seem fairly straight forward and obvious – but the problem is that when we want to improve our lives, our happiness is often tied to metrics of how much we have improved, and because our happiness is so deeply tied to that improvement, we measure our performance on a day by day basis based on how much we’ve improved. This leads us, inevitably, to notice how much we’re not improving, and exert more willpower in the effort to improve.

Which, as I’ve mentioned above, more often than not leaves us in a place where improvement is unlikely.

It’s a process that we all engage in, and it’s a process that cripples our effectiveness. 

The trick then is to break the process.

And we do this by addressing what causes us to expend our willpower. That being the way in which we choose to view our own progress.

I can’t remember who it was, but in a book about success (one of the many I’ve swallowed), some guy said that he reviewed his week, every week, and he credited his success to this. An idea I liked at the time, but one that never caught on, this is something that lingered in the back of my mind ever since.

The idea is a simple one, but one that can be deeply tied to our self-image. As I wrote above, when we desire improvement, all we notice is when we aren’t improving, and this leads us to pursue and expend excessive effort from a state of neuroticism. In other words, when you hate yourself, you treat yourself badly. When our foundation for improvement is flawed, so too will all of our efforts; and the longer we engage with flawed efforts, the more they will compound upon each other, corrupt our motivation, and sink our dreams.

I propose another idea. Look at where you’ve moved your life forward. Maybe this week. Maybe this day. Just look for where you’ve moved it forward. In any way shape or form. Look for where you’ve moved it forward.

Instead of being lost in a race against who you no longer wish to be, or what you’re trying to escape from – look at where you’ve moved your life forward. Maybe this week. Maybe this day. Just look for where you’ve moved it forward. In any way shape or form. It doesn’t have to be a success, it doesn’t have to be some ringing achievement, it just has to be some kind of forward movement of any measure. Because cumulatively, over any period of time, any movement, of any size, adds up to a bigger movement.

And in life, big movements add up to big changes.

And it is within these scarcely perceptible changes that we actually grow, not in the goals or wins that we drive ourselves to seek.

And in any form of ambition, whether that be specific or an emotion change within you, it is the movement that constitutes the distance gained.

But right now, I’m sure you thinking, that’s all well and good, but what if I haven’t moved my life forward in anyway. Not today, not last week. Not ever.

Uh, okay? Who cares? Move it forward now. Move it forward tomorrow. Just move it forward in whatever way you can. Just do something, anything, other than giving yourself shit. After all, is dragging yourself down and beating yourself up internally not a step backward? Is it not a destruction rather than a construction? 

Because at the heart of it, any forward movement is an action you’ve taken towards building something new.

Maybe you want to be more social; maybe you want to get a better work ethic; maybe you want to have a better dating life; maybe you want to be better at guitar; maybe you just want to get better at being proud of yourself. Whatever it is, within that desire, is a tiny, microscopic improvement you can make on a daily basis, that in some way, will move you forward; will move your life forward.

You could do something as small as saying something nice to a friend. You could do something as small as saying hi to a colleague you haven’t spoken to. You could do something as small as not looking at your phone for 30 minutes; focusing on work for 20; read a few pages of a book; ask a girl for directions; tell a girl she looks great; spend 10 minutes practicing a guitar riff; read some music theory; or just sit down and take a moment to figure out what your values are in life.

Y’know, important stuff.

Because within any goal, there are tiny steps of progress. And all you have to do is take them, and recognize that you’re achieving movement.

When we fail to accurately measure our lives, we become neurotic about our progress and exert unnecessary, excessive effort in an attempt to accelerate our progress. This results in us losing control of our will, and falling into poor routine and poor decision making.

This all stems from our sights being on the win that we want, rather than the steps what we’re taking. But it is only the steps that get us there. The steps we take are the vehicle that carries us the distance. In other words, the steps are the win.

When we learn to measure our lives by the movements we have taken, we learn to keep our actions in the present, consciously advance our lives in realistic ways, and prevent ourselves from falling into neuroticism. Because at its core, measuring our lives accurately comes from a place of self-acceptance, not self-hatred.

Isn’t that foundation you’d rather build from?

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and share it on social media. Just click one of the icons at the bottom or top of the page. Thanks!

And make sure to subscribe to never miss a post, or alternatively, like me on Facebook, so you’re always up to date on the latest content.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

How to Become The Master of Your Motivation

by ·

THE LONGER YOU PURSUE or try to generate motivation within yourself, the longer you will fall prey to what is already motivating you, and consequently, never change the actions you take. Just as a sailor must harness the direction and force of the wind in order to get to his destination, so too must we learn to harness our own innate pre-existing motivations or we will be blown off course.

It seems like there is an enormous, never ending patch of internet real estate devoted entirely to useless advice on motivation. Ranging from “never give up” platitudes on persistence to echoed sentiments of “you choose your own destiny”; motivation is treated like something that we can learn; a skill that we can obtain.

This, of course, means that when we’re lacking in motivation, it’s due to our lack of will, ambition, drive or discipline. In short, when we’re lacking in motivation it means that we are lacking in strength of character. This position, the most commonly held by people, is the most persuasive. Chiefly because of how it allows us to self-aggrandise when we’re doing well, but also, more sinisterly, it allows us to indulge in our feelings of worthlessness when we’re lacking motivation. We agree with this reasoning of motivation because it agrees with how we feel about ourselves.

But consider your life. How often have you willed yourself into a state of motivation, and how often has motivation arrived on its own, generated from a place within you that you have entirely no say over? How often have you turned motivation into a skill, and how often have you simply been at the whims of varying motivations throughout your day, that arrive and depart of their own accord?

If you’re anything like me, then motivation shows up whenever it wants to and has little to do with your own determination. Motivation isn’t something we learn or generate but in fact, something that is already there, and already motivating us.

When we pursue and identify with a goal, and then lack the motivation to pursue it, we often fail to realize that our lack of motivation doesn’t stem from laziness or lack of discipline, but often because we are already motivated to pursue something else that is contrary to our goal. And the longer we fail to identify and understand this motivation, the longer we are susceptible to its influence, and condemn ourselves to move away from what we want.

I spend a lot of my time writing. I consider it my dream to become a novelist. To write well structured, emotionally engaging, dramatically memorable stories is something I’ve wanted for the last 6 years of my life. I would consider myself very motivated to write. I write on this blog, I read innumerable amounts of fiction, and have spent countless hours thinking about structure, plot, and character; yet I have scarcely taken any large strides towards my goal of becoming a novelist.

I have ideas, I have characters, plots, scenes, structures, acts, moments, images, descriptions; I have, at the point of writing this, at least three clearly outlined novels in my head. Yet still, they go unwritten. Despite my motivation to pursue writing, of which this blog is a testament, whenever I approach the craft of fiction, I shy away even though the pursuit of writing fiction is what I am so motivated to pursue.

So why don’t I write?

Because I believe that I don’t know what I’m doing, and because I’m scared that my stories, once written, will reveal me as someone who fundamentally isn’t a novelist. And for someone who is actively invested within his identity with the idea of being a writer; this would be intolerable. This would be painful.

And it’s a contradiction.

Just as I am motivated to change (through the act of becoming) the novelist that I believe I am, I am even more motivated to not pursue that change as it threatens the identity that I am possibly a novelist. My motivation lies more in enjoying my idea of myself than it does the reality of what I want my life to be.

But this contradiction doesn’t just stop at writing.

When I was younger and looking to improve my dating life, I decided I wanted to approach girls during the day and I considered myself extremely motivated and driven to do so. I would go out, I would dedicate time to figuring out what I wanted to say, wear, do, act, and where I would go about doing this. But strangely, once I’d arrived, I was never really motivated to do so. The tricks that I’d learned – getting myself in state, desensitising myself, and visualising my goal – never seemed to work, and instead, all I seemed to notice was how fucking weird it is to approach people during the day, and that everyone would see, and that I was a social reject.

Needless to say, I rarely approached. And far from just being during the day, this reluctance extended into meeting girls at night. It was something I didn’t want to be seen doing, and no amount of generated motivation could change that.

Because, as with the writing, I was already motivated. Rather than being motivated to change my dating life, what I was motivated by was something far different. And as soon as I realized that, everything changed.

When it started looking at my actions and how I went about pursuing my goal, it became apparent to me that I was more than willing to sort myself out and put myself in the necessary environment, and I was even willing to approach. I had no problem with motivating myself to change my life. But when it came to changing my life by approaching girls in front of other people in socially awkward ways, I would always back down. Always.

Changing my life, it turns out, wasn’t my real motivation. Preventing social embarrassment was. So, I began to dig.

And it only got worse.

Preventing social embarrassment wasn’t just my motivation, but changing my life was simply a channel through which I was attempting to prevent myself from being embarrassed, rejected and alone in future. I wanted to change myself into that ‘cool, confident, fearless’ guy I pictured in my head. The one who was the exact opposite of how I felt.

What led me to seek to change my life was exactly the same thing that was preventing me from approaching. I was both propelled and withheld by the same force.

Try that for a mind fuck.

That single motivation – to never feel like I didn’t measure up socially (whether that be with others, friends or romantically) motivated 90% of the decisions I made within my life.  Even if the motivations seemed to be contrary, and caused me to take actions against my best interests, the motivations for each were often exactly the same thing.

And it was only upon understanding this relationship, that I began to by extension, understand myself, and work on the factors that were affecting and nurturing my motivations.

Understanding that I wasn’t being motivated by a desire to have a better dating life, but instead to protect myself from being alone allowed me to address that fear of aloneness, and address the issues of inadequacy that were shaping my life, and affecting my motivations. And it was no surprise, that upon doing this, my motivations began to fall in line with my desires.

Likewise with writing, understanding that my motivation stemmed from my investment in my idea of who I was allowed me to realize how it was holding me back, and defining the actions I could and couldn’t take. When I was certain about who I was, anything that threatened that certainty was a threat to my very being, and by extension, a threat to my happiness. Letting go of that allowed me to view writing as it is – a craft and a way to enjoy my time.

This is why I look at motivation less as a series of techniques, and less a reflection of our ‘strength of character’ and more as a deeply personal relationship. When we lack motivation in our lives, it’s usually because something is fundamentally wrong, and is being left unaddressed. And rather than addressing it, we usually seek to pile things on top of it and crush it with will power and determination.

Instead, if we treat ourselves with empathy, if we pay attention to the actions we’re taking and ask ourselves ‘why’ our true motivations begin to come to light and we can begin to unearth the contradictions within our lives and our identities. And once we’ve discovered those contradictions, we can begin to work on them.

Because that’s the secret.

Motivation isn’t about forcing ourselves to become who we want to be, it’s about discovering who we actually are.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact, and share it on social media. Just click one of the icons at the bottom or top of the page. Thanks!

And make sure to subscribe to never miss a post, or alternatively, like me on Facebook, so you’re always up to date on the latest content.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on, or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

The Problem With Self-Reliance

by ·

IN HIS ESSAY on Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that we must not fall prey to our desire to socially conform, and instead strive towards an originality and authenticity in our action and thought. To Emerson, this was a matter of living in line with one’s ‘nature.’ Something so important that he held it above all else.

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”

Looking at history, Emerson saw swathes of great men that he felt shaped society around them. The engine through they did this was their originality and refusal to conform. He felt that these great men when shunning the desire to conform, would return to a primitive, intuitive nature, that would bring out unique solutions to the problems of living. To Emerson, this was incredibly precious because it offered an originality not yet seen in their world:

“The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

As per Aristotle, Emerson felt that the engine through which one’s original nature was brought into being was courage. He wrote: “We but half express ourselves and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.” To Emerson, cowardice made a life in line with one’s nature impossible and doomed you to a life where you were the victim of the conspiracy of society. 

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

As the true nature of man is something unique to each, it is incapable due to its uniqueness to exist within the bounds of the “joint-stock” society.  Men, in his mind, were something far more than names and customs, but instead beings that existed apart from one another, and would not be swayed by the pressures of others.

Emerson saw men as a force which grew in proportion to the degree to which it turned it’s back on conformity and strove towards its true nature. He saw every step towards originality as a power which grew exponentially until the result was the man who towered above society. For in not looking to conform, and in not seeking for anything beyond his internal approval, men could harness the strength of their innate natural power.

EMERSON’S PRISON

Emerson’s essay, which I recommend you read, has always hit me with force every time I’ve read it. Written, I would imagine, as a challenge to himself to live to his ideals, the essay stokes a fire within you to shun the pressures of society and imitation that you feel now and instead strive towards your own nature. Reading the essay, you can very well imagine the power of which Emerson speaks – of the unyielding, unbending nature, that will not bend to the force of any mass of people.

But when thinking about Emerson’s argument, it became apparent that something was missing, that much was assumed, and that the method chosen by Emerson would just as likely take you towards your nature as take you away from it.

After all, what exactly is our ‘nature’?

Although an attractive concept, the ideal of a true nature, real identity or genuine self is one that has struggled to be defined by people for millennia. Are you the version of yourself when you feel confident? Or are you the version of yourself who feels down? Are you the version of yourself that you picture in your head? Or are you the version of yourself that your actions lead people to perceive you as?

Like any certainty of self, Emerson’s nature is a question of identity. And like any certainty of self, Emerson’s Nature is a prison.

Identity is difficult to pin down. What could seem like a fixed truth may well just be an illusion composed of our psychological needs, weaknesses, and beliefs, as well as our physiological needs and weaknesses. This is, of course, to say nothing of inherent biology, and the role of chance.

How do we experience identity? If you’re honest with yourself, do you really identify with a true and essential form of yourself, or do you spend most of your day pursuing your fluctuating wants and feelings? Do you connect with an idea of who you are? And if so, where does that idea come from? Is it in fact who you really are, or is it rather an attempt to escape who you don’t want to be?

The question of our nature doesn’t have an answer beyond relying on faith (incidentally, Christianity was a huge influence on Emerson), and its vagueness leads you down paths that may not be all that they promise.

If our identity seems to be defined by random wants and emotions, then our nature, one would imagine, would be the choices we make from that foundation. True nature, by extension then, would be making the true choice, or the right choice, in the present moment.

From this standpoint, Emerson’s rejection of conformity makes sense, as that’s just another influence that may take us away from the right choice.

But where Emerson proposes a nature that is essential to who we are, I suggest that who we are might not be all the easy to perceive. Where Emerson rightly says that we should not seek for things externally, I argue that we should be cautious of what we attach value to internally.

After all, self-reliance only works when we understand what is the true thing to be reliant to. Without an understanding of how our choices are made, why they are made and what the right choice is, we are doomed to make the wrong one – and if we believe that is our ‘true nature’ then we are confining ourselves to a false life.

I have written before about the importance of courage in bringing yourself into being, and I still believe it is among the most important traits you can develop. Without it, you are left with a life that is constrained by the drivers of fear and anxiety. A courageous life offers freedom from this.

But more important than courage is self-awareness. Without which you can never perceive yourself or by extension the world correctly. Without self-awareness, you are deluded, and if you are deluded then any self-reliant, courageous act only strives the bring you further away from what it is that you actually are. And just as Emerson argues that living within your nature magnifies its power, I argue that being true to a deluded nature only magnifies your delusion and your attachment to it.

We cannot be reliant on ourselves as long as we cannot understand the ways in which our own identity operates.  Once we can navigate our identity, and arrive at the right choice, then courageous self-reliance will bring our nature – our original, unique nature – into being.

This isn’t just an argument against Emerson, but an argument about self-help in general, of which, ironically, he was the father.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact and share it on social media. Just click one of the icons at the bottom or top of the page. Thanks!

And make sure to subscribe to never miss a post, or alternatively, like me on Facebook, so you’re always up to date on the latest content.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!

The Art of Unbreakable Focus – The Last Guide on Focus You’ll Ever Need

by ·

YOU CAN ALMOST IMAGINE his wife’s dismay, when, upon hearing that her husband had lost his job as an oil executive, that he was now to embark on a career in writing. This is hard enough to stomach on its own, but in the Great Depression of 1933, this must have seemed like a stroke of madness.

Raymond Chandler was 44 years old when he came home with this announcement. Having nursed literary ambition at a young age, Chandler forsook his calling to instead amble through various careers, ranging from a stint in the admiralty, a venture stringing tennis rackets and even the military. Nothing stuck. His desire to be a writer never left him, but when hearing of the suicide of author Richard Barnham Middleton, he realized that if a man with ‘more talent than himself’ couldn’t make it, what chance did he have?

Finding his feet as an auditor, Chandler rose through the ranks of the Dabney Oil Syndicate to become Vice President, but his erratic behavior (heavy drinking, womanizing with female employees, and deciding not to show up) eventually became too much for his employees and they fired him.

So, left jobless and in the worst economic turmoil yet faced in history, Chandler decided to have a crack a writing.

Dying twenty-one years later, drunk and alone, Chandler left behind a long and impressive career as arguably the greatest writer of pulp stories that there ever was. Eschewing typical formulas that relied on the final twist, Chandler’s stories gripped from scene to scene and sent him from waiting in the bread line to selling movie scripts to Hollywood executives.

Although he’d lived a troubled life, Chandler had by all accounts achieved his dream. He had become a writer. What is usually considered a goal to be started early in life, Chandler started towards middle age, in a time of desperation.

When asked how he did it, his reply was a simple one. He sat himself down in a room and gave himself two choices.

“Write. Or do nothing.”

And in doing so, he mastered focus.

FOCUS

No matter how hard I try, I can never seem to focus. My mind, far more concerned with its own interests, can never be directed into a particular direction of my choosing. In the past, I would often mistake this for procrastination; and chastise myself for my lack of will, or challenge myself as to what it was I was afraid of that made me avoid my work. But the reality was often much simple.

I just couldn’t focus.

Where other people could knuckle down, I couldn’t.

I remember, when pressed to revise for an imminent exam on Ancient Greece, I instead gained a newfound interest in doing streaks of 3-pointers off the back of a trampoline. When in need of writing a CV for my first job, I instead decided it was more pressing that I teach myself HTML; and when I had coursework due that would fundamentally alter my options available to me moving forward, it just seemed more practical that I master the accuracy and finesse of my web-swinging on Spider-Man 2.

Although, I suppose all those examples indicate an element of choice. In reality, they just sort of happened. Rather than focus on what I needed to, my mind started focusing on something else.

A lot of the writing on focus would suggest that I was lacking in willpower, shy on discipline, and my work ethic wasn’t good enough. Other opinions might suggest I just didn’t want whatever I was supposed to be doing enough. But on close scrutiny, I was always applying a lot of willpower, discipline and work ethic to what I was doing, it may have been on the wrong thing, but to charge those diminished faculties as the cause seems to miss the mark.

And this always seems to be the case.

The people who find it extraordinarily difficult to focus on what they need to be doing, rather than being lazy, lacking in will, and ill-disciplined, are often willful, disciplined and hard working on whatever it is they’re doing instead.

But they still can’t focus on what the need to focus on.

In attempting to find some kind of solution to the problem of focus, it became apparent that a lot of the opinions on it stemmed from internal choice. That the individual, on some level, was choosing to not focus on their work, and instead choosing to fail. Alongside this, it was posited that focus was a deliberate, channeled used of energy and that people that lacked focus simply failed to channel that energy.

In every instance, the person who couldn’t focus came off as weak.

But if that was the case, then why the hell could so many of them demonstrate willfulness, discipline, and work ethic? Why was it these traits failed to evade them, but focus always did? What made focus so fucking hard to understand?

CHANNELS OF FOCUS

When looking at Chandler’s story, it becomes obvious that he was a bit of a mess. Lacking direction for most of his life, Chandler juggled a variety of careers and nursed dozens of bad habits. By any accounts, this was a man who was not gifted with direction, purpose or focus.

Yet when we look at the results of man’s life, it’s clear he was quite the opposite. He was focused.

When we look at focus it’s easy for us to overestimate the reasons for which focus occurs. It’s presumed that focus is the result of strength of will, and that inability to focus is down to a weakness in that will. But not only does this definition stink of macho dick measuring, it’s also not very practical. Minds wander, and when they’re given options, they wander into whatever channels there are available to them. Rather than being a product of willpower, focus is a product of environment. When we give ourselves channels for our focus to run down, we give ourselves less chance of focusing.

And when we do lose focus, we spend all our willpower trying to bend it back.

And we lose energy.

And we give up.

If you’ve been in this situation then I think you will, like me, recognize that this sucks. It’s a self-fulfilling pattern of procrastination and distraction – and rather than being a measure of our own weakness, is rather a measure of our poor planning.

Focus has less to say about us and more to say about what’s around us.

When Chandler sat in his room and gave himself the choice of “Write. Or do nothing” he gave himself the power to turn his focus to where it needed to go. He could sit there in silence, sure. He could twiddle his thumbs. He could stare at the wall, the roof, the floor. But he couldn’t leave, and he couldn’t do anything else. His focus only had one way to go. And it was writing or boredom.

His life’s work shows which one won out.

Chandler is a model for an effective understanding of focus. Rather than being bogged down in techniques and draining force of will, Chandler simplified focus down it’s basest element. 

Choice.

When asked about the definition of focus, Steve Jobs said it was “saying no” to everything else. Like Chandler, Jobs understood when that focus would go wherever it could, and that controlling those channels was more important than forcing your focus into one channel of many or spreading it too thinly between multiple.

When we, as Chandler did, utilize our choice to sit for an allotted time, and do our work, or do nothing at all, what we do is create an environment where focus is a natural by-product of our actions and our environment. Rather than chasing focus as a goal, we create focus as an outcome. Rather than forcing our focus towards our work, we give ourselves no option but to become focused on our work.

And that is the true nature of focus.

 

Liked this article? Help me make an impact and share it on social media. Just click one of the icons at the bottom or top of the page. Thanks!

And make sure to subscribe to never miss a post, or alternatively, like me on Facebook, so you’re always up to date on the latest content.

If there’s anything in this article you want to go in more depth on or you just want to get in touch – drop me a message here! It’s completely free.

WANT A BETTER DATING LIFE?

Yeah, I know. You’ve read enough. But this is important. I made a dating course. Like, a really big dating course.

It’s over 8 hours of video content, 30 lessons, and over 80 exercises. It covers everything you need to know from making yourself more attractive, building sexual confidence, having great dates, and finding the right women for you.

It’s based on years of experience, a library’s worth of scientific research, and just the right amount of common sense. So stop listening to me and check it out for yourself.

CLICK ME!