As time progresses, we find ourselves beset by more and more options of how to spend our time: all the subjects you can learn, skills you can develop, activities you can pursue, entertainment you can passively consume, people you can engage with, places you can go, and material possessions you could add to your life. Human life has never been more abundant in terms of ways of spending time.
We can fundamentally define “spending time” as where you are putting your focus in the Now. The now is the only medium in which you can act. Yes, you can look toward the future and plan what to do at a later time, but the planning occurs in the Now; when the future time to act is reached, you will still have to apply your focus in that Now. You can also inhabit the Now by mentally looking at the past and analyzing what has already happened, how you have already spent your time.
There was a time when I naively thought that one could do it all, learn it all, master it all. This world holds so many curiosities, so many delights, as well as horrors. With a mind naturally drawn to research, learning, and especially the powerful feeling of being able to study and practice something and see improvement over time, I have been sucked down many rabbit holes. Music, sports, psychology, history, mathematics and physics, the occult, biology, electronics, computer science – there are so many interesting and powerful subjects and activities.
Explore many options to move laterally; explore few options to move forward.
It took me a long time to realize there is only so much time in a day, there is only so much time in a lifetime. It is a question of depth or width. The reason the time segment convention of “a day” is mentioned is to illustrate that the concept of consistency or regularity is important to achieve any kind of depth in anything. This is in-line with the concept of “momentum” as defined by the Law of Attraction crew. This is also a function of the phenomenon of neuroplasticity and adaptation in general, summed up in the phrase “use it or lose it”. Would you rather get to know a large number of people superficially, or get to know one person deeply? If you only end up talking to one person for a moment on one given day and then never repeating the process, how deeply can you get to know them? This is true for any subject, skill, or activity. To develop anything on a deep level, you have to do it on roughly a daily basis.
Balance is important to avoid becoming one dimensional and to expose yourself to other information and experiences. There always is a degree of “cross-pollination” that can occur between disparate subjects or experiences. For instance learning about mathematics can inform an approach to music. Having relationships with many different people can give experiences which you may be able to apply in relationship to any single person. But in general, engaging in a wide array of activities and subjects can be considered “lateral” movement. It is moving sideways through life. Widening the field of experience, but not making a deep impact in any one area. There are benefits to this deepness, this enrichment of any single subject or activity, and such benefits occur within as without. According to the findings of neuroplasticity, repeating a behavior enriches the neural connections that carry it out. The cognitive circuit fires quicker, easier, more efficiently, and more powerfully. If you limit distractions and focus more time on your desired activity or subject, if you repeat it with more frequency, you enrich the neural connections; not only does it become easier, it becomes more enjoyable. A sense of power in the activity increases as fluency increases. Creativity increases as you are able to call on the depth of your experience to synthesize new manifestations. This effect tends to become evident in the external world. “As within so without”. It is obvious that moving laterally, you can have a wide array of superficial relationships, you could develop a wide array of different types of businesses, you could learn a wide array of subjects, but you pay the opportunity cost of time, focus, and energy that could be used to focus on just one. It is this this type of focused application, bordering on what could be called obsessive, that produces forward movement in the world rather than lateral movement. Instead of making many small microscopic scratches on the of the face of reality that you attempt to sculpt with your lifetime, with focus, you are able to make a deep and lasting impression.
The phrase “jack of all trades master of none” is commonly known, but I think of it in different terms.
It is more about the personal experience you want to create for yourself in the time you have. We need some way to deal with all the stimuli coming at us in a given day: all the various people, all the new information, new trends, all the temptations that appeal to our evolved physiology, all the subjects of interest that can be studied. Let’s consider hypothetically that there are actually infinite possibilities. Infinite potentials of what can be focused on in any given moment. Infinite ways in which you could apply your energy and spend your time. An infinite amount of roads that you could travel down. The difficulty is not in the lack of options – it is in choosing – and the difficulty in choosing is in knowing yourself to know what is most important to you, why it is important, and that those two things are strong enough to give you the strength of choice to sacrifice all other potentials and say “no”.
Instead of making many small microscopic scratches on the of the face of reality that you attempt to sculpt with your lifetime, with focus, you are able to make a deep and lasting impression.
I refer to this as signal to noise. The ability to prioritize in real time between these infinite potentials, infinite things that you can focus on on any given moment, to the few things that it is relevant to focus on.
Exercise the power of your filter, the sovereignty you have over your own mental focus, to separate the signal from the noise, constantly, in every moment.
