The Universal Law of Focus

We move towards what we focus on.

We’ve all experienced this simple law. Things are moving along nicely in your life. So good in fact that you begin to worry that something is bound to mess with this good fortune. So you start to obsess with worry and then the inevitable happens; something comes along and messes with your good fortune.

You were no longer focusing on what was going good in your life but what could go bad and it did.

Have you ever got interested in something and then serendipitously the subject of your attention seems to pop up everywhere?

I decided last year that I might be interested in getting a Jeep Wrangler as a new car. Everywhere I went a Jeep Wrangler passed by as I drove my trusty old heap. My focus was on Jeeps and that’s all I saw.

Here’s another truth to this law.

You can only focus on one thing at a time. 

Several weeks ago the local news was reporting a recent study that stated that because of so much information coming at us, the average modern multi media, smart phone totting person has an average attention span of 8 seconds. Shorter than a goldfish’s attention span.

We live in an age where we are inundated with thousands of marketing messages every day. We are offered hundreds of career options. We have millions of decisions and choices to wade through as we go about our lives yet we can only focus on one thing at a time.

No wonder our attention span is getting shorter and shorter. No wonder we get stressed and burn out so easily.

It wasn’t that long ago (just last century) that most people chose one profession and stay with it their whole working life. They made a choice and focused their energies and over time became a master.

It was, I’ll admit, much easier to focus your attention way back when there was only a few channels on television, and no internet or social media. People could spend large swaths of undivided time on specific pursuits.

We all have dreams and goals we would love to achieve if only we had the time. But what do we actually do with our time? If you wrote down, even for one day everything you did and how much time you spent doing it, I bet you would be surprised how much time was wasted on discretionary activities.

Imagine what you could really achieve in your life if you focused on one goal at a time until you completed it, even if it took weeks or months or yes, even years.

That’s what the really successful people of the world do. They focus their energy and attention on one goal at a time. Do you want your brain surgeon pre-occupied with his twitter account right before he operates? Do you want the airline pilot texting his buddies mid-flight? If it’s worth doing it’s worth your sole focus on. Successful people know this and know how to focus.

So if you don’t have goldfish syndrome and it didn’t cause you to lose focus on this post after 8 seconds, I say thanks for your undivided attention. The message here is this: If the law states what you focus on is what you move towards and the truth of it is that as humans, we can really only focus on one thing at a time, then make a choice, block out all the sparkly attention stealing fluff that surrounds you and focus your energy on that choice and the universe will  move you to where you need to be.