Abstract Thoughts

Filed Under PERSONAL GROWTH/DEVELOPMENT

We've all had the days.

You're the first one up, and the last one to bed. You run around doing random errands, accomplishing any task that so happens to cross your mind and is of relative importance, an entire day with all work and no play, and despite your constant effort, when you lay your head down at night you still feel overwhelmed with goals, desires and to-do lists.

There are a few things this can be, attributed to. One of the most common is a tendancy to ignore the little things in life and let them continue to build up. By the time you get around to the tasks you've pushed to the side, you've forgotten what half of them even are, much less how to go about completing them.

Small tasks are like loose change. Sometimes 11 cents doesn't seem worth the annoying clink it makes in your pocket to carry it, yet one month later when you've deposited all your pennies, quarters, nickels & dimes into the water jug, you suddenly have a free dinner for 2 at a restaurant of your choosing.

We do the same thing with our smaller problems, putting them off to the side to accomplish bigger, more meaningful tasks that have a bigger impact at the present time. However, even if we don't consciously remember each and everything we put inside, somewhere deep down in our subconscious is our mental "water jug", hard at working storing records of all your unfinished business you've accumulated throughout your day-to-day activities. Eventually we begin to feel completely overwhelmed and powerless. Even worse, due to the more recent stresses overshadowing the older, "less important ones", we forget exactly why.

It's vital to knock down the problems thrown at you as life sets them up. I love the analogy of the technically-skilled boxer VS the slugger. The slugger doesn't focus on the little shots that are going to wear his opponent down throughout the course of the fight. He looks for the one big shot that is going to give his opponent an up-close and personal heart-to-heart with the canvas. And many times he is successful. He can go 30 to 40 fights achieving victory in this way, which causes him to become stuck in this pattern based off of previous successes, to the point where he can no longer even see the benefit of any other way but his own if he is victorious by his own methods.

But eventually he's going to meet the more well-rounded fighter who knows how to avoid his haymakers and spends the first 8 rounds of the fight picking apart his opposition with body shots to slow him down. The slugger feels unphased by each individual shot and laughs at the attempts. But eventually the shots add up, and before he knows it, the slugger is so winded he can barely stand, much less throw a punch.

As he falls to the hard, sweaty canvas in demoralizing defeat, you fall to the cold, unforgiving cement on the road of life that requires your complete focus and dedication of it's intricacies to maintain a successful course.

Don't underestimate the power of freeing your mind. Get the little things out of the way and leave your mental capacities open for more difficult tasks that will require your full attention.

Strive to be the technical fighter over the slugger. But either way, don't be the punching bag.

Filed Under PERSONAL GROWTH/DEVELOPMENT