6 years ago I did a course with success mentor Darren Hardy called Insane Productivity. It was a 12 week course that aimed to (and did) improve my productivity and my focus for my personal and business goals.
Since then, I have put 16 of my team through the course at a cost of over $60k. The course isn’t cheap, but I really believe we can all have more of what we want… IF we BECOME more than we are!
Speaking from personal experience, my ability to set structures and habits into my daily and weekly routine have not only set me free from the ‘busy disease’ but have greatly reduced my stress and improved my ability to prioritise. The course was really a game changer at a time when I desperately needed help.
Since then, I was very conscious off all distractions that were eating into my time and ability to achieve my goals. So I sold off my tv, quit social media and made a host of other changes.
That was 6 years ago.
And… I have never looked back.
In my spare time I wrote my second book, wrote and recorded my first album and am half way through my second record.
Last year Johann Hari, author of Chasing the scream and Lost connections, released his latest book called Stolen Focus (why you can’t pay attention).
I have just finished reading it, and I highly recommend it as an eye opening read. There were numerous links to what I had learnt with Darren 6 years earlier.
Insane Productivity gives you real-life strategies, routines and schedules of Fortune 500 CEOs. In one module, Darren literally shares the prioritisation system and the focus system that helped Richard Branson build 400 companies and become worth more than $5 Billion. He also shares growth strategies from Warren Buffet, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and so many more.
Stolen Focus reads more like a novel and research project and is very hard to put down. It also comes to similar conclusions as Darren’s Insane Productivity course. That being; in order to grow and flourish your ability to focus to its full potential, you need certain things to be present and certain things to be out of the way.
Much in the same way a new flower needs sunlight and water and not be planted in an
environment where it will be stepped on… we humans also need certain nutrients in order to grow our focus.
Johann’s book goes into detail about:
1: Uncovering WHAT those nutrients are
2: Discovering WHY those nutrients are being lost and what we need to protect ourselves from, and
3: HOW we might regain some control over our focus.
Kids need their day and environment to be set up so they can have more time to ‘play’ and adults need more time doing things in their flow states.
We all need time to let our mind wander and not constantly fill it with noise and information so that we can make sense of our life and where we are and where we might want to go. We all need to up our intake of basic nutrients like exercise, unprocessed food and sleep in order for the brain to be healthy and be able to focus.
We all need to protect our attention from too much stimuli and from intrusive technologies and social media, as their profits are based on making us addicted to them. We need to spend less time switching from task to task.
We need to be in environments that are not stressful as the brain cannot focus under stress and we need to clean up our environment as all the chemicals and polluted air is affecting our brain development. We also need to look at our work life balance because if we continue to be a society that is over worked and under-slept, who multi task and switch, who are tracked by technology companies and enticed to be hooked on their programs, who are fed poor diets that cause our energy to spike and crash, that are breathing in a chemical soup each day… then we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems and anxiety and excessive growth in ADHD diagnoses.
Johann points out that the economy and the profits of the multi national digital companies and rituals of the modern world all need to change in order to help the next generation of children. He is calling for an ‘attention rebellion’ much like the civil rights rebellion or the gay rights or the use of fossil fuels.
I believe… All the great things you want to do in life require deep focus. Time out from
distractions to get into a flow state and dig deep into your beliefs and ideas. They quietly call for you to spend more time on them.
Yet … All the easy things in life are trivial are the things that are loud. Emails call out to you and you spend your day on them rather than planning out your goals step by step.
I believe that the children who will succeed in life in the next 20 years will be those who can cut out distractions and teach themselves the ability to get into deep focus.
Sadly, as this goes into detail to point out, the odds are against kids these days and the system and environment is also set up against them… BUT… if we make them understand that they can become more than they are… then we can set them up for success and ignite the full power of their brains and their focus.
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