FOCUS
[A friend recommended Baltasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Gracian was a Spanish scholar of the 17th century who set forth a series of maxims for ethical action. From time to time I'll write about one of his maxims.]
I was watching the Olympics on television and thought about how hard the athletes work on improving their skills, how hard they must have worked before they could even know which sport they might be good at, which sport to pursue. I thought about the single-minded determination they must apply over long periods of time to have a chance to compete at the Olympics. And then I thought about how the athletes' approach might help us in our own lives.
Gracian advises that excellence resides in quality not quantity. He meant that we can't spread our efforts widely without losing quality, we can't try to do too many things without being condemned to mediocrity. Once again, his message is timeless. In our age of abundance of so many things, we also face an abundance of opportunities, of choices. Every day, at work and at play, we face many activities we could pursue, many activities we would like to pursue, many opportunities to deploy our skills, many tasks we could perform adequately. But we can't do all the things we could do if we want to do something really well: If we don't focus on a single activity or group of activities we will spread ourselves too thin, we won't be able to do our best. Some people can do more than others but everyone must accept limits if the goal is excellence.
Sometimes we make ourselves frazzled by trying to do everything, we run ourselves ragged trying to avoid making choices, we excuse ourselves from making our best effort by doing too many things at once. There are always good excuses for not doing our best: We're too busy, our employers ask too much of us, our wives, husbands, friends and colleagues make too many demands. But we're in charge of our lives, we're the ones who choose what we do.
The answer is focus. To do our best, to bring excellence to our lives requires choosing one or a few tasks and bringing all our efforts and skills to those tasks. To achieve excellence requires recognition of our own limits. Don't try to do too much, don't try to do everything. Instead, pick your spots and give everything you can to them. Doing a few things well is better than doing a number of things poorly. You'll be better rewarded and you'll feel better about yourself.
10-2-00
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