The Virtue Of Focus

I feel like so much of my time is spent at my day job that when I get home I don’t want to focus on structuring and building a business. After all, my day job is very much to turn around a struggling venture.

I don’t want to come home from that and try to get another business off the ground.

I find myself watching TV on Netflix, sipping a cold beer, and not attempting to work. Realizing this, I’ve decided to wake up at 5 am each day and push myself, work on my business, and then get ready for my day job.

My problems continued. I’d wake up at 5, put on coffee, then crank up my GET GOING music, and read the news for 3 hours.

I realized that my problem wasn’t when I was choosing to work, but what I was choosing to do instead of work. I didn’t have focus. I’d rather be distracted than successful.

I don’t know that there is a secret formula other than to grit your teeth and make yourself. There are plenty of tips online for learning how to focus that can be read if you do a simple google search, but then reading those articles instead of doing what you need to do isn’t focusing.

Lacking focus will kill your drive and will dry up any passion you have for an idea, venture, or life change. If you can’t focus enough to get your ass to the gym, to get off of the couch and go out to meet people, to start that awesome business idea – if you can focus and push yourself to start, you never will.

You’ll simply continue to be distracted, looking at everyone and everything else pass you by as you queue up another episode of House.

As far as how you can focus?

I would say try a rewards system, where a completed task equals an amount of distraction time, but who would keep you accountable to honoring your time limit on the distraction?

The only real way to focus is to eliminate the things that distract you. Sell your TV, sell your DVDs, write out all of your blog posts by hand and then type and publish them – eliminate the distraction. Remove it from your life.

I’m still working on it myself, and it’s a tough thing to get over. I think mostly because of the desire to be distracted. I want to be distracted, I don’t want to exhaust myself, to give so much effort.

I suppose right now my need for happiness doesn’t outweigh my need for comfort.

I need to change my mindset, I need to change my circumstances, and I need to force myself to push through. I need to have a tenacity, a fire, a drive. Something that will encourage me to focus – if not directly cause my focus.

If you’re in this situation, or have been, what are some tips and tricks you have for focusing? What is it that got you to get up and push through to where you wanted to be?