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- 🏔 Focus on the Man
🏔 Focus on the Man
What’s up, fellas!?! Glad to see all 12 of you back here again!
Alright, let’s save the pleasantries and get into it…
I reread a book this week called The One Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan. The book is a game changer, for sure! It scientifically and anecdotally destroyed a lot of beliefs I had surrounding discipline, focus, and overarching success.
If you haven’t read it, you can buy a copy here.
But there’s one section of the book that I want to highlight today, so let’s dive in…
All I had to do was put the man together and the whole world fell into place.
Near the end of the book, the authors share a story about a man and his son.
The man was excited to spend time with his son, but all he needed was a few extra minutes to wrap up his work, so he came up with a solution:
“Here, put this puzzle together. As soon as you’re finished, we can go play!”
The puzzle was a map of the entire world and he figured he had bought himself an extra 30 minutes. So when the boy came running back in saying “I'm done! I’m done!” after just 5 minutes, you can imagine how shocked his dad was!
Sure thing - the boy finished the whole puzzle.
“Son, how’d you finish that so quickly?”
The boy responded, “Well, I accidentally dropped one of the pieces on the floor. When I went to get it, I looked up through the glass table and realized there was another puzzle - a picture of a man - on the backside of the puzzle. So all I had to do was put the man together and the whole world fell into place.”
Lesson Learned
No doubt there are a bunch of ways you could interpret this story (and I actually broke it down way more in-depth on my Youtube channel), but right now we’re going to focus on the obvious one:
“All I had to do was put the man together and the whole world fell into place.”
If you’re anything like me, then you put a lot of pressure on yourself to do what you’re “supposed” to do. Plus, all of us here are ambitious and driven, so there’s an even longer list of things that we WANT to do!
I mean we’ve got big goals, so, of course we need to:
work towards those goals ferociously
be a good man
journal every day
read 100 pages of a book/day
eat healthy
never have a bad day
be a multi-millionaire
volunteer at church
take your spouse on 8 date nights each week
wake up at 4am
cold plunge and sauna
run a marathon
eat your veggies
and do all the other things you’re “supposed” to do
Sounds exhausting, right? I know. I see you, man… You’re not alone.
But what this story tells me - and as I reflect, what I have seen ring true time and time again - is that if we just focus on the man in the mirror, then the rest of things will fall into place.
You ever notice how you have a better day at work when you get your workout in?
Or how people on the road seem to drive less bad when you’re listening to some positive tunes?
It all applies here - if we control what we can control, and if we are truly working on ourselves, then so often, the rest of the world just seems to fall into place.
Now, that’s not to say that things will never go wrong or that the universe is going to give you a bunch of “Get Out of Jail Free Cards,” but something about it really does release us from having a fearful, scarcity mindset, and drops us into a pool of wonder and abundance.
I’m sure you’ve noticed this too, right?
Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight and it does take intention to live in that kind of contentment, but I’m hoping that you’ll join me in leaning into the facts that:
We can only control what we can control
We can trust God with the rest (better in His hands than mine anyway)
If you shine your light, then the world can only get brighter