The entire world seems to be on an edge with unprecedented events happening weekly. You must search for your opportunity and then focus on it. Make this your moment. Ignore the distractions because this could be your time. Focus on your opportunity.
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Albert Einstein
I was struck by a post on LinkedIn about how our focus can bring different results. In essence, it was the formula to make it happen, using the topic of weight loss.
It resonated with me as it is in line with one of my chief beliefs about how we can achieve anything. Although humans are quite good at having ideas and starting projects, the difficult bit is usually in the follow through and results.
After all, “Results are the name of the game”, as Jim Rohn would say. However, results can be tricky to get if you are not aware of the pitfalls and distractions.
If you can keep the following key ideas at the top your mind, you are far more likely to achieve anything you need in your life:
That is the formula to make it happen, regardless of whatever your ‘it’ is. Yes, it takes some effort. Yes, you have to do your own pushups. Yes, you have to want it bad enough.
I know you can do it, though. Attack the day and do whatever it takes.
Are you someone who can’t wait to celebrate when you get good news, big or small? It’s a great way to live. Celebrate every little success and every big one too. Don’t just wait for the big moments though. Sometimes they never come, or they don’t come soon enough and you’re not around for the party.
You can celebrate with a smile, fist pump, high five (with your family or when wearing gloves), fancy dance, arms over head, music, a favourite food, drink or person or whatever you fancy. Just be sure to acknowledge the good news or success. It’s a great feedback loop.
Celebrating successes, large and small, yours and others, builds confidence and brings joy to your soul. You’ll walk taller and feel more powerful. And it can be sooo easy to do. Try it.
Don’t wait to celebrate. There is not just one big finish line. Be delighted with your every step forward. It’s practically a miracle you are making any progress at all. Have you ever stopped to think about how many little tiny things have to go absolutely, stupendously well just for you to get out of bed, eat, digest and physically move your body to your work place?
Maybe this lockdown era will help us all appreciate all the little conveniences, daily miracles, and successes a little more. Remember, you don’t know what you have, until its gone. Ask anyone who is finding lockdown difficult or has recently had an accident and found their body parts not working so well.
Decide from today that you can’t wait to celebrate. Train your brain, from today, to find at least three reasons to celebrate every day. Maybe you’ll get up to 10 times a day by the end of the year. You’ll feel better for it. And so will everyone around you.
Most people find new things a bit awkward or challenging. If it is exactly your type of thing, maybe not. Otherwise, of course it is uncomfortable.
You could be learning how to ride a bike, solve a Rubik’s cube or do your times tables. Maybe you want to start a business or circumnavigate the globe, but you are not sure how.
Well, first you have to think you can. Next, you will have to prove you want it bad enough. This will become obvious as you will then have to learn some different things. Then you will have to do some different things too. This is rarely easy and of course it is uncomfortable. However, you must press on, as it is the basis of how you #AchieveAnything.
Of course there is more detail, it will be difficult and there will be diversions. There will be plenty of diversions. Like reading this post right now. Get yourself back on track and focused!
Believe, be curious, be done. Repeat. You will get closer to the outcome you want, if you actually work toward it. Put the effort in and thrive.
Just get on with it. Make a start. It doesn’t need to be perfect. You just need to start. Or re-start. Do it right, now. Not later.
Right at the start, you should just get going. It might be a little messy. That’s ok, as long as you get going. As you progress along though, you should want to up your game and do a reasonable job of it too. You wouldn’t want to continue being a bit messy once you got going or you’ll be adding to your jobs to do later.
For those things you have got moving along, try to do them as best you can. It doesn’t make sense to come back to them later.
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
Coach John Wooden
If you have 30 minutes of time you could release from your schedule at the moment, try to get some tasks done you’ve been putting off. Do it right now or do it right, now. Either way, just get on with it and do something.
There is a lot of opportunity to get involved. Start looking for your impact zone. You are amazing. You can do something.
I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.
Helen Keller
What is the something you can do today?
It would be nice to be able to solve all the problems in the world with a snap of the fingers. Yet, if you simply do what you can, you will have done more than most people do in a given circumstance.
We can easily talk ourselves out of doing something because we don’t think it will make a massive difference. However, by doing what we can, it might. Making an impact can happen in so many ways. It is difficult to foretell which of your actions will make a significant difference and which won’t.
On that basis, I suggest you do the following.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
Stuffocation, minimalism, the KonMari Method. It’s all there to get you to Declutter: Get it out!
Education phase:
Quite a few years ago, I found myself quite deeply involved in a decluttering phase. I was reading books, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. My days were focused on practicing the techniques and getting rid of things that I was inadvertently collecting.
I noticed that the minimalists had the right idea as far as bringing stuff into the house was concerned. The best thing to do was not to bring new things into your home. The only exception was when you knew exactly where you were going to put them.
Changing Habits:
Well, my newspaper and magazine habit had been thinning out for years before this anyway. However, now I would gather even fewer of them in a month. I also committed to throwing them in the recycle bin before I entered the house. By doing so they couldn’t lurk on a table or other surface for weeks.
If I did not throw it away on my way in, I would give myself three days to read or recycle it. If it wasn’t important enough now to squeeze it into my day, when will I ever make the time. The merely interesting must be binned quickly. The compelling will have time allocated.
Sort for Joy:
The ‘Declutter: Get it out!’ types also had a key message. Bit by bit, get rid of it. Sort out a drawer to get some momentum. Then maybe a cupboard.
As Marie Kondo would suggest, the item must bring you joy if you are going to keep it. I was a little sceptical of the term at first, but now I use it all of the time to weed things out at home and also at the point of consumption. Does it bring me joy.
Tips toward success:
Anyone who has ever been on a diet will recognise this truism: It is easier to keep it out than get rid of it later. So if you are going to put significant effort into decluttering (or weight loss), focus on being a disciplined minimalist when it comes to consumption.
One of the best tips came from the minimalists. Take a picture of the thing and then give it away. For most things, the picture will be enough to bring back the memory of the item, event or time.
Now may be a great time to declutter and give your space a little Spring clean. You’ll feel amazing clearing out a drawer, cupboard or whole room! The whole process can be quite liberating. Good luck with it!
(fyi, if you found the Coronavirus Exit Strategy post compelling, you may find its follow up article worth reading. It considers the next 2-3 years living like this, under lockdown, and some alternatives. Find it here.)
Coronavirus Exit Strategy: Use empty hotels to develop Herd Immunity
Stopping this market meltdown, and the fast growing financial and social challenges, requires two things:
1. Making livelihoods our absolute focus (while still saving lives impacted by Coronavirus and managing hospital beds) and
2. Providing a clearly defined end date to this situation. This can be done by immediately starting to develop herd immunity by creating a Government Organised Voluntary Infection (GOVI) programme, for healthy people, in all the UK’s empty hotels
The Problem:
The market, and people generally, require certainty so they can move forward confidently. Currently there is no certainty when considering the end to this pandemic*. Hoping for a viable vaccine provides no certainty. It is like hoping to win the lottery: It’s worth trying, but don’t count on it as your only strategy.
The Solution:
We need a clear, time-bound exit strategy that can show progress is happening and has a clearly defined end date. A GOVI programme would do both.
GOVI explained:
While people are self-isolating in this Suppression Phase, we can roll out a government organised voluntary infection (GOVI) programme at designated hotels (all UK hotels). The GOVI programme would be similar to the idea of chicken pox parties, where healthy children would get together with an infected child and get infected to be done with it. If 50%-80% of the healthy 6-60 population are going to get the Coronavirus at some time anyway, with mostly mild symptoms, why not get it over with?
For WWII, people volunteered to fight in the war effort knowing that there was a significant risk of death or serious injury. These recruits were checked for being in good health (i.e. no underlying conditions) and then sent off to battle the enemy. With more than 700,000 (mostly empty) hotel rooms in the UK alone, the government could pay hotels to host people who are 20-50 years old, and with no underlying conditions, who volunteer to contract the virus under supervision. They would get checked out by a GP, and if ok, they would go to a government designated hotel where they would contract the virus and stay in the hotel for 7-10 days, until ‘immune’. The volunteers are then checked/tested by a doctor before leaving the hotel to confirm their immunity. Once immune, the volunteer gets a document and badge noting that they can re-enter society.
The government would need to authorise and organise this phase to maintain a controlled spread of the virus. They would need to set out the plan of action, acknowledge the challenges and risks involved and call out for suitable volunteers.
GOVI benefits :
In theory we could have c.700,000 very low risk people gaining immunity every 10 days. Over the next 12 weeks (84 days), we could have roughly 5 million people gaining immunity. This could be happening while the 70+ group and the Underlying Condition (UC) group are protected through self-isolation. Additionally, we could continue to have strong social distancing/lockdown policies in place (Suppression Phase), continue testing and encourage scientists to search for and progress a possible vaccine: all concurrently.
It’s more Churchill D-Day then Chamberlain “Peace for our time”. Let’s take the battle to the enemy rather than try to avoid the inevitable. Advance on the enemy rather than simply shield the citizens from harm.
A war time army of volunteers is required and I believe many would be willing to do this. Since there seems to be an overwhelmingly high recovery rate for healthy people aged 18-50 (99.7%), let’s get it and get on with it.
The ever-growing Immune Army can then help high risk people, relieve care workers, support hospital workers and others, or just get back to work. Ever more volunteers will spend a week in the designated hotels until huge swathes of the population are immune.
Within one year, about half of the young and healthy population (25 million people) in the UK will be immune, without having overrun the NHS. In 2 years, most under 70’s and those without known underlying conditions would have immunity (c.55 million). After communicating this plan, normalcy will start to return in weeks to months, demand will return, markets will stop the slide and maybe reverse, and the world can start to mend.
Summary:
Without creating certainty with a credible exit strategy, the markets will continue in meltdown, workers will be laid off, industries will collapse, and the government will have to finance the entire economy, possibly for years. Adding a GOVI programme in parallel to the other strategies/phases being employed, could greatly improve our chances of saving the most lives, from all causes. In addition, the GOVI programme will also put a floor in the economy with a certain and time-bound exit strategy, which will stop the markets sliding. Finally, this additional strategy could save billions of people from suffering through the severe, drawn out, Depression era future that the trends seem to indicate we are heading for.
FIND MORE DETAIL:
I have added several follow up thoughts for you on my blog website page called Coronavirus Exit Strategy: GOVI. Points covered consider the next 2-3 years and our options. I’ve also added some sources and supporting detail,
For some, this is a great time to take stock and think through what they truly want to do in this life. For others, it may have become so crazy busy that they don’t have a moment to pause and think about anything other than the next government announcement and its implications.
Without all the usual kids activities and appointments to arrange and get to, some people may have a few extra minutes (hours) in their day. Or maybe you no longer need to “get ready and commute”, so you may have a little more time now.
For those of you with a little extra time, this is a great opportunity to consider what kind of life you want to look back on when you are 85 years old. What do you want to remember when you are going through your photo albums or chatting to friends or younger relatives. Life flies by quickly, so don’t delay.
Block out an hour in your calendar on a day this week. Be specific with exactly what hour and day it is. It is an appointment with yourself. Then, when that time comes, do nothing else other than reflect and write out a list of things you would love to do, be or have in your life, between now and 85 (125 if you’re already well up there).
Just write all the things that come to mind. Ideally you will do an electronic list which you can save and sort out later on. But it could also be written on a sheet of paper or in a journal. You can always take a photo of it and file it on a device for easy finding later on.
The list does not have to be realistic, believable, conventional, exciting or anything really. What it should be though is a specific list of things on your mind and in your imagination. It could be things like: Spending two weeks on a golden sand beach in the Caribbean, helping your grandson learn French, walking on Mars, writing a funny novel, buying some art from a local artist, becoming a pilot, writing a letter to a loved one, collecting rare stamps or watching The Bucket List (enjoyable movie to get your thoughts flowing – good for most kids too).
This list-writing can be a challenge. Some find this exercise easy and some difficult. Either way, I suggest you do it. Now is a good time. It will give you a focus on things you are looking forward to, once we get life back to something approaching normal. It also helps you clarify what is important. Have fun with it.
