You Can’t Care About Everything
My uncle said, “while you’re sleeping the next guy is out there working harder than you”. He told me this to make me better in little league sports but this resonated with me my entire life.
When I went to college, and began working, the hardest thing to learn was time management. This was a skill I lacked and I had a bad habit of procrastinating. Since then I have learned to maximize my performance by goal setting, being self-motivated and staying focus.
The time that I wasted sleeping or partying was time I could’ve used to gain an edge over my colleagues. The time and money wasted impressing women that had no interest in me at fancy dinners and outings could’ve been used to further my goals and secure my future. The time I wasted being stressed out and emotionally unavailable caused me to miss class and call out of work. The time I wasted worrying about other people’s problems was time I could’ve spent solving a few of my own.
We should all strive to be socially aware and conscious of the issues and conflicts that happen around us. However, when being aware transitions into you caring and allowing yourself to disburse energy and time, that’s when you’re held back from reaching your full potential.
If your energy is divided among 100 different causes and goals then nothing will get done. You will drain yourself before you even begin. If you want to be successful, or change laws, or get an “A” on your final exam, it all starts with a focus and it takes time, energy and effort.
To narrow down your cares, you need to prioritize as best you can. Start by asking yourself what is most important. This will narrow down your distractions. To avoid the stress of a strenuous relationship that could likely cause me more pain than happiness, I simply prioritized school, work and music before love or social connection. This has left me a bit numb emotionally but after a few months I noticed that I got better grades, made more money and had more time to create. Minimizing your distractions can help improve your productivity and decrease stress.
Social media is used to keep people connected but is abused when the connections transition into distraction. This may come in the form of fake news, insensitivity and trolling. However, in the simplest form it can be memes or drama. I often find myself glued to twitter completely unaware of how much time had passed. It wasn’t that I genuinely cared about anything that was going on, I just got sucked into it. I wanted to stay in the loop so I allowed myself to care about issues I would see on social media. These distractions left me so drained and lifeless that I felt like I never had time to do anything.
But you can’t care about everything.
There’s only 24 hours in a day and you have school, work, homework, study time, gym time, friend time, family time and sleep time. Just thinking about it gets me stressed out.
After you realize that it is impossible to care about everything, find out what you care about most and run with it. Then designate how many hours of each day will go towards what you care about.
I deleted Twitter but I still have snapchat. Let’s start slowly.
