6 Bullets In The Chamber

Life as target practice

We have too many options.

Whether it is things to do or think about, the radiance of potentialities *sparkles!* without limits.

The infinite is starkly juxtaposed against our hard constraint: We have a finite amount of time and energy.

In a recent podcast interview with Tim Ferriss, he relayed advice that he’d received from a high level political advisor. The context was around the messaging you share and the causes that you choose to stand for. Paraphrasing below:

Assume that you have 1 gun. Each year, you are given 6 bullets.

If you shoot at everything that moves, you run out of projectiles quickly. Don’t be constantly hitting people, they’ll become deaf, dumb, and blind to your messages.

The main point? Save your ammo for the right targets.

The larger implication is that we don’t have enough bullets (time, energy, money, etc.) to do everything. We need to focus on what matters. We need to choose wisely.

On the day-to-day scale, we have a tangibly limited amount of energy. It is far too easy to waste our resources by say, complaining constantly, fretting about every (perceived) personal slight, re-playing the past, etc.

We punch ourselves out.

And then, we don’t have enough energy leftover to tackle the important stuff.

I’ve struggled to limit my scope of focus *within* my targets.

I’ve tended to take out my frustration on the whole of a something, when maybe a small piece of the overall structure is the issue. That’s not fair.

I’m prone to become deeply invested, holistically, in what I’m working on. In the past, I’ve held the entirety of the situation, project, people, myself, etc., to a high caliber, applying expectations evenly.

The issue is that every situation is an amalgamation of constituent parts, and every piece does not have the same leverage or impact. Not everything matters equally.

Said another way, in each set of circumstances, the 80/20 rule typically applies. For example, 20% of your activities will provide 80% of the returns, or 20% of the experience will provide 80% of the headache.

I have not always taken the time to break down the whole into its bits. Without this step, of course, I have not always identified what mattered most.

And, well, I guess that means I’ve been shooting blanks in some of my past roles (heh *smirky face* heh).

This is a matter of prioritization.

The key questions to ask yourself: “What matters most to me?,” “what is the most important thing I should be working on?” and, “what is the most important thing about what I’m working on?”

Then, and this is the chief tenet: Don’t give so much of a shit about the rest…