The Paradox of Choice: Less is More
There is always a temptation to extend your reach as far as possible because you visualize that the more opportunities you have, the more chances you will have for success. The opposite is what tends to be the reality. Your presupposition is that increasing activity will produce more results; increasing what you have in front of you will make more. What is reality is that by so doing, you reduce your attention to any given opportunity, reducing your quality. If you keep this mindset, you end up adding more in the vain hope that you will get more quality opportunities. Still, you keep adding to the problem, ultimately resulting in such poor quality that you can never take advantage of any opportunity that was to present itself.
Avoiding the Multi-Front Battle
It is just not wise to fight a multiple-front war. Any military general will inform you of the difficulties resulting from having your resources, your country’s support, and your military focused on more than one primary front. The same is true in our lives. When we continuously add, we invite ourselves to spread our attention span. So, with this in mind, it is clear that it is better to focus all of our energy and resources on fewer options. The first rule of prioritization is that less is more.
The Essence of True Focus
Working on fewer things is not enough, however. You cannot just choose to do less. You must then do each one of these things better. You must increase your energy, effort, and talent to focus on your selected opportunities. What you will likely uncover right away is that the opportunities that you do have may not be a good fit at all. This will be where you decide to really focus on what you are actually going to work on. What are your criteria for determining what to work on? Most likely, this is the first time you have considered this. The idea of saying no to something because it does not fit your preset criteria has never been a consideration. This is because you have largely been in growth mode and have gotten increasingly used to saying yes to everything that comes along. The second rule of prioritization is to select with purpose.
Investing with Intention
Now, you will start narrowing down your options and removing those you thought you must have. Here comes the fun part: invest all your time, energy, money, and passion into your selected option. Now, you are ready to add more options in the future because you will start to see really effective results. You now know the full potential of your determined attention on an opportunity that fits what you want to be doing. That is something that you have never enjoyed before, and now that you are focused on something with that amount of efficacy, you know what it means to prioritize.
