If You Focus on Meaningful Work You Will Achieve Personal Success
When you know what you want to accomplish in life, you can establish systems and structures that will support accomplishing your goals.
There’s this little challenge though, and it’s called distraction.
If you’re easily excited by every new idea, jumping from one project to the next, you’ll never get what you want. Instead, the outcome will be many incomplete projects — some large and some small — or jumping from one job or opportunity to another. You will be no closer to achieving your goals and creating the life of your dreams.
This has been a challenge in my life and something I’ve seen other creatives and entrepreneurs struggle with. For many creatives, like myself, it’s easy to come up with ideas about what we want to make, and goals we want to achieve. Yet the problem is that we often have too many ideas.
This is the big problem of beautiful, shiny objects
“Oh! What’s that?” You say. “Let me drop everything now and follow this cool, exciting new idea, right down the rabbit hole! Hmm, maybe I’ll start writing a book. Oh wait! This idea would make for an awesome new program. Heck, while I’m at it I might as well help my friend with their project — I have those skill and it will give me some quick money.”
Do any of those statements sound like you? I’ve thought, said, and DONE every single one!
There’s nothing wrong with following a “shinny object” per se. Sometimes there’s great value in doing so for the creative process. You might learn something new. You might realize you need to add that new and “shiny object” to your work flow as a system. Or it’s a valuable addition to incorporate into what you’re making.
After a while, as exciting as those distractions are, we no longer feel fulfilled. We went off the map and now we realize that we’re lost. We find ourselves asking questions like,
“What’s my mission in life?
Am I actually making any progress on what I want to accomplish?
Do I know what I want to accomplish? I mean, do I really know?
Am I playing it safe, even though I know I have something much greater in me that I want to explore and bring into this world?”
How do you discover — with certainty — what you most want to accomplish on your own terms?
After facing the challenge of distraction and lack of focus for too long, I did a deep review of the productivity tools I’ve used over the years. I read notes I made from programs, courses, and personal correspondence with past coaches. I saw that I had the tools and the means. I was only lacking a complete systems to organize and optimize the individual parts.
From this investigation I created the ADD Coaching Method. This is a systematic process that helps you to Assess, Dream, and Design your life with clarity, purpose, and direction. The ultimate result is that you will chart your own path to — once and for all — create and live your dream life.
Isn’t this what life is all about? We want to create something meaningful.
We want to work with people who excite us and help us thrive. We want to share a message that positively influences other people’s lives.
We want to do all the above, not only because we want financial security, but because doing that work will provide satisfaction, personal engagement, and a powerful sense of well-being. We will feel worthwhile! Not because we felt worth-less before, but rather because we have finally manifested something of great value, and thus worth to ourselves and others.
When we know our mission, what drives us, it makes it that much easier to get up every morning and get to work. Earning a living almost becomes secondary. Making money almost becomes a default because working won’t feel like work.
How do you stay on track?
Let’s say you have the answer to the question, “What do I most want to do?”.
You’ve connected your answer — your mission — with your values and goals. You’re in alignment, but how do you stay on track and avoid those pesky distractions (because let’s face it, we can’t avoid them)?
Setting up your life and workday to win
We all need structures, systems, and a schedule to best manage what needs to get done so that we can be highly efficient and effective. These last two qualities of work make the rest of your life much easier.
We need a “life plan”, one that offers flexible solutions that provide adequate time for your health and fitness, your relationships, and your ongoing personal growth and happiness.
If you neglect any of those core aspects of your life for too long, it becomes difficult to sustain meaningful work. Prioritizing work above all other aspects of your life is a downward slope to illness, high stress, and a lack of life satisfaction.
Meaningful work feels valuable and important in some way.
We do our best work when we are happy and fulfilled as a result of having taken care of other areas in our life. It’s from this state of well-being that we can achieve the greatest amount of personal satisfaction, and thus financial security.
Isn’t this what living a successful life is all about, taking pro-active steps towards accomplishing your dreams?
When your mission, values, and goals are in alignment, distractions are few.
When you apply the ADD Method to your life, you’ll develop effective systems that support your daily actions and choices. This in turn will make it easier to continue on the path to get what you want.
You will have the means to diagnose problems or struggles that will always to show up. You will be able to come up with solutions so that you can stay on track and keep moving forward.
Reinforcing the links in the chain of events of your life help to support every aspect of what you want to accomplish.
Develop a user manual for your life.
To create something meaningful in life — something that excites and compels you to do the work day in and day out — you need a well-oiled machine to facilitate the process. Your actions and choices are like the “gas”, and the “machine” (the system) only works well if the parts (the structure) are in order.
The term productivity is thrown around a lot. I like to positively frame the word productivity as this:
Optimal self-management to be efficient and effective in working on what we want to create.
When you get off track, when something doesn’t seem to be working, you can review the core steps of the ADD Method to get un-stuck and back into doing the work to create the life that you want by design.
Daren helps people LIVE OUT the best of who they are, to let go of what’s holding them back and LIVE INTO their unique gifts to make their world a better place.
Originally published at darrenstehle.com on October 12, 2018.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 377,643 people.
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