Episode Transcript.

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business.

Guys, today, I want to talk about focus. All right, I want to talk about focus. And I want to talk about how you can actually focus better as a person. Here’s one of the tips. All right, it’s to increase your time horizon in What do I mean by your time horizon? Your time horizon is how big of a skill you look at this big adventure called life. Do you look at it as a daily thing? Or do you look at it in the years? and if you are constantly plagued with short term thinking, reactional decision, you are not looking at life over the course of years, you’re only looking at life in the course of hours, maybe minutes. And you’re not even I would say, look at life and scope of a daily timeframe. And you need to start increasing your timeframe how you’re actually going to manage Life.

And Here’s one of the ways you do it, you begin writing out your goals, and putting timeframes in there. And by the way, the real definition of goal is it has a finish line drafted out and defined, it also has a timeline of What you should complete it and can measure against, if you don’t have timelines attached to your goals, you don’t have real goals. And oftentimes, the reason why we don’t have timelines attached to our goals is because we don’t want to see when we fail, we’re avoiding failure, because when you attach timeframe to it, now you have the opportunity to fail versus Oh, yeah, it’s just a goal. And whenever it happens, is whenever it happens, and there’s never failure.

So all that being said, Because I digress. Increasing your time horizon comes from really setting goals, looking at an entire year, What am I going to do this year, first quarter, right? Second, third, fourth, What am I going to do every six months, half a year from now? What will the end of the year look like? Right? What does five years look like? What does 10 years look like? And you begin actually visualizing these things that will help you increase your time horizon. And if your time horizon increases, and you have goals laid out, and you have things that you’re going to accomplish an attack, then you also become more focused. And Here’s why. Because cool, I now see that in order to do What I need to do, all this stuff has to happen on the daily basis. And then it helps eliminate the short term thinking because now you’ve drafted out your plan in a long term manner.

Oftentimes, we do short term reactionary thinking simply because we don’t have a plan. It’s oftentimes emotional based. Yes. But other times, it comes from lack of clarity about where we’re really going in the long term. And I am naturally much better in the long term, I’m naturally much better at the big picture. And at scale. Andrew is naturally much better at the small term, and the technical and things like that. We make a great team because of this. And so Andrew has helped me travel to the small side. And I’ve helped him travel to the big side. And I’ve watched as Andrew has come closer, a lot of reactionary thinking has been removed from his life, just simply because his time horizon has increased for a lot of things. And it’s like, Oh, that’s really cool.

And so the short term thinking in my life actually has stopped from the same thing. Oh, it’s just reactionary. Because I don’t have clarity on the long term. I haven’t mapped these things out my life, it’s been the same for me, as it’s been for him. And so his journey has helped me and see my journey. And who I am to, which is interesting. That’s really how life works. And if you’re not very good at listening, I would encourage you to become good at listening, because that is one of the reasons why listening and observing. But going back to the whole focus, when you stop, and you actually begin drafting out the plan and the goals, it helps you focus everybody wants a reason and a purpose for why they’re doing everybody. Right?

If you go to any college student go to any student in any class anywhere, right? In any college in any educational system, at least in the US, you ask them and ask them if they feel like school is pointless, they’ll most likely say yes, and the reason why is because they don’t understand why a common phrase I heard in school all the time was why are we learning this? And I thought that all the time to why are we learning this? Why? When I got my first job out of school is like Man, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Wow, this seems pointless and especially if processes or things were frustrating, man not having a wider purpose behind doing that type of work made it even more miserable.

And so if you’re building something and you don’t want it to be miserable, to work in give purpose and meaning behind work, and I talked earlier in a previous episode about real meaningful work is your job as a leader to facilitate that and create that for people. But this is also how you focus better and how you remove more short term thinking is you broaden your time horizon, map out your year map out two years map out five years map out 10 years and put goals and visualizations of What life will look like in 10 years when you get there.

Well anyways guys, I’m out of time so I’ll catch you later. Peace