Did you ever realize how focused you will be when you have a strict deadline which could impact your career and negative impact on your life if not done on time. Did you ever consciously observe how we will be focused when we have a pressing personal issue or how we give our undivided attention if a close one is in dire situation. Generally narrow vision circumstances and ambitions would have a genuine purpose behind them. They are not trivial to an individual.
Narrow vision requirements in life are the ones which defines us, these missions matter to us because we heartfully connect to them. We do not tend to divert our attention when we are working on these category of needs. Some of the motivational speakers would call them ‘majors in life’ – our passions, our missions, our ideals, our causes, our why, our purpose and so on.
These majors are generally bigger than ourselves, we place them above us , they define our identity and gradually people start to recognize us with our ideals. If we have to define our purpose , our passion – we cannot give a one word answer. We would like to talk about it passionately. We would like to explain how much it means to us. Our values, our passions, our life meaning and our vision of ourselves require narrow focused attention.
But in normal circumstances in our daily lives we tend to be casual and unconcerned about anything that is happening in our lives. This I call is having a widening of our vision or focus. In this scenario we cover a wide rage of topics and thoughts which are generally random and trivial. We have no intention to think about them but we focus on them for that moment just because we don’t have other important tasks at hand. These are things and circumstances we give least attention when we have a significant objectives to attend to. Appropriate way to define these minors is they are distractions disguised as our immediate needs.
Tasks that does not narrow our attention give us instant gratification and happiness only to find ourselves loosing interest in them in a short while.
They are ordinary day to day stuff like thinking about would happen in next episode of of reality TV, which movie or which video series to binge watch this weekend, stressing about delayed food delivery while having a sugary snack, fretting about traffic and our infrastructure while sitting in a AC car listening to random songs in FM, haggling with bus conductor over change while getting late to office , cursing the long queue for billing in a store etc. Indulging in this trivial things lead to further distractions, stress, anxiety and wastage of time due to inadvertent aftereffects of these mindless activities.
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References:
Excerpts from various motivations coaches and inspirational leaders