You need to be more mature. What does that even mean?
That was a question that perplexed me growing up. Adults would throw this concept called maturity around and I just could not seem to formulate a working definition. The only concrete thing I could get out of people is that maturity had to do with age. The older you get the more mature you get. I suppose the logic is that the more experience that you have, the more mature you will be. However once again, what exactly is maturity anyway?
I finally figured out the definition. This took me almost 50 years to figure out. Maturity is the willingness to make the decision to focus on a few things rather than many things. That is going to sound strange to you. You are probably going to come up with definitions like, maturity is the wisdom to make good decisions. If you really examine these two definitions, we will realize that they are the same things. The wisdom in decision making is to know what to focus on, where to put your resources. Rather then trying to do everything, you make the mature and wise decision to focus on what is going to produce for you the most results.
Someone who is immature, and I am not just talking about age here. An older person could take a new job and in that new job they could be really immature. A young person could become pretty good at identifying the right type of stock to purchase and therefore become a mature investor, even at a young age. Maturity is the effectiveness of your decisions. The more the decisions you make produce results for you, the more mature you become.
If you decide to do something, like let’s say, go to school and get a medical degree, people might instinctively say that is a mature decision? However, is it? If you had a flourishing career as a sales person, with a young family at home, and a good quality of life and then you decided to go to medical school – would that be a mature decision? Maturity has nothing to do with the actual decision itself, maturity has to do with your ability to choose the correct decision based on your circumstances and what will produce the best result.
When you are immature, you want to do everything. You think by casting a wide net, you are going to catch more. In reality, your net is too large with too many big holes and you in effect catch very little. The best example is the sales person. A immature sales person will have this concept that they need to pursue every opportunity, every account that comes their way. They need to hold on to everything, and try to be all things to all people. They believe that are making a good decision by chasing every shiny new opportunity that comes their way. However, in reality, they are making a decision that makes them less effective. The mature sales person, and as a consequence the most successful is the one that learns to selectively choose what to focus on. They have a identified set of targets and they focus on them. They say no to everything and yes to focused things. They are mature in their decision making process.
In other words, maturity is knowing what you want to be when you grow up.
When you know what you want to be, the decisions on what to work on become easier. You have thought it through. You know exactly what types of activities you want to be doing because those activities will produce the best results to get you where you want to go. That is maturity. Knowing what you want and knowing what will get you there. Choosing to focus on a few rather than trying to have it all.
So young padawans, we all need to learn that we cannot be everything to everybody. We cannot say yes to everything, hoping that we will stumble into something that will make us happy, rich, or whatever your goal is. We have to be selective. When you are mature you can handle ambiguity, because you are focused. You understand that you cannot possibly understand everything and how it all works, rather you can just be ok with all of that because it does not matter. What matters is what produces you results, so that that is what you focus on. This is why the immature person is the center of their own universe. Surrounded by everything, because they are actually trying to do everything. The mature person, accepts a larger world around them and recognizes that they are not the center of it. However, they know that they can make the greatest impact by focusing on a few things and increase their effectiveness.
This is easy for me to write, but very hard for me to do. You see, I am about as immature as you can get.
Guy Reams
