Doing less.
No. I am not going to share on minimalism today, although I am a passionate follower and advocate of the lifestyle. Doing less is a wisdom independent of any movement and cult. It is a simple living strategy that I used to become creative, productive, and effective in life. It started with dismissing the mental diseases of doing more and achieving more. Yes, to a certain extent, it is a growing mental disease that is spreading across the world by people advocating that the more you do in life, the more you achieve in life. I had to first reject this enforced belief and chose something that is opposite to what the majority of the population believes — less is more.
This I say confidently because I was the ‘majority’, I was the person who would cramp up the day with personal and professional tasks and projects to ensure that every area gets my attention and energy. This kind of thinking is energy shrinking in nature. This actually impacts our natural ability to be focused. Focus is the real skill that brings more or high productivity than multi-task. It is the single and most important attitude to strive for success.
The thing that I am going to share with you helped me realize why focus is a rare skill.
Before I started my own venture, I worked as Head of marketing for an organization. Since I excelled well in one project, I was bestowed with more projects and assignments by my boss. The prestige of handling maximum projects in the company boosted my ego. The popular logic of achieving more by doing more was at play. I started to accept everything as an opportunity to solidify my position, beat the competition, and prove my ability to multitask. After all, more equals more, right? Well, what happened was the opposite — A Disaster. My attention and energy started thinning and I stopped really producing any good results. I could barely focus on one thing as I was jumping from project to project, producing little result or no productivity at all. The more I did, the more I lost. My finite energy was all over the place, draining out like a container with multiple holes at a time. It emptied soon every time I filled it with enthusiasm. Getting up for work became more like a nightmare, as I knew the office would suck my blood like a vampire. As expected, all my projects started to fail miserably and I was cleverly shoved away from the projects with reasons of being overloaded and underperforming. The loss of doing more caused anxiousness inside and one day under the stress of losing to do more, I met with an accident and broke my ankle. The container was now with no energy. This is what I call an ‘Energy Sucking Trap’. The trap of doing more to achieve more.
This incident made me pause. Think about the trap for a moment and see how insignificant the whole effort has been in life. Being busy doesn’t mean being productive. No wonder my career’s progress was slow or almost nil. I was all over the place without clarity and direction. My assets like energy and time were getting depleted by doing many trendy things at a time where as I could have used the same energy and time on something that is one-directional.
Today in every area of my life I operate from doing as less as possible. The intention is to how I can save my energy or direct this energy to one single work so that the best results are produced and more is achieved. It is the process of constantly knowing how I can build the strength to say no to attractive nonessentials and develop the skill to identify the essentials in opportunities. Eliminating the many and focusing on one specific thing will give me massive progress. The experience is both frustrating and beautiful. Frustrating because we don’t want to lose all the things that are beautiful because you now love doing only one thing for a long time until it takes off massively.
