Everyone is Trying to Steal Your Most Valuable Resource
Greetings Family,
Welcome to our 3-part series, embracing this month's mantra, "Do Less Well." Here, we aim to unravel the essence of prioritizing quality over quantity in our creative lives. As we delve into this journey, you'll discover the importance of safeguarding and judiciously using your most valuable resource. This isn't just about feeling fulfilled; it's about sustaining that fulfillment.
🤔 Rethinking a Common Belief
We often hear and repeat that "time is my most valuable resource." Yet, is this belief truly accurate? Time, unlike tangible assets like money or energy, eludes our control. It's a relentless flow, indifferent to our plans and desires. Understanding time as a sequence of unique, fleeting moments rather than a commodity alters our approach to life. It encourages us to experience moments rather than trying to capture them.
👑 The True Resource: Attention
If time isn't the ultimate resource, then what is? Attention. It's the foundation for focus and presence, and unlike time, we can master it. Consider two individuals with identical time spans: one distracted, the other fully present. Their experiences are worlds apart. Mastering attention intensifies life experiences, learning, and enjoyment. Attention, thus, becomes more than just a resource – it's the essence of our engagement with life.
By valuing attention, we enhance relationships, improve focus in work, and elevate every experience. It's not about how much time we have, but how attentively we live each moment.
⚔️ The Battle for Your Attention
In today's world, every content, marketing, and advertising strategy, both digital and physical, vies for your attention. The 'attention economy' is a reality we cannot ignore. With digital connectivity, our attention is constantly sought after. However, not all demands on our attention yield negative outcomes. Recognizing that attention is finite and valuable, and that we can control it, is crucial.
Understanding our capacity to allocate attention helps us realize the finite nature of our daily lives. If we're not proactive in managing our attention, external forces like emails, notifications, and social media will dictate it for us.
🧘🏽 Action Steps in Reclaiming Your Attention
To aid your journey in proactively defending and allocating your capacity, here are some practical steps:
- 🧘🏽 Mindful Mornings and Evenings: Begin and end your day intentionally. Switch your phone to airplane mode an hour before sleeping and after waking up. This habit allows you to cultivate presence during the day's key transition times (for additional support here, consider our "Yin Yang Livin" program - pre-sale ends Monday).
- 📖 Recommended Readings: Dive into "The Art of Focus" by Dan Koe (book will be released to public sometime soon but the book summary can be found here) and/or "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" by Greg McKeown. Both are enlightening reads on the importance of focus, especially for entrepreneurs, and a must-read for those aspiring to monetize their creativity.
- 🗓️ Intentional Scheduling: Treat your time as a precious asset. Use time blocks in your calendar for structured days. Adjust your scheduling app (i.e. Calendly) settings to reflect your optimal hours for calls and to prevent last-minute bookings.
- 🎯 Prioritize Creative Work: Avoid starting your day with emails or Slack. This can hinder your creative flow and immediately put you in reaction mode. I prefer doing focused creative work in the morning, like writing this newsletter, and handling communications in the afternoon.
- 🔎 Daily 'Zoom-Out' Ritual: Develop a practice to remind yourself of the present moment. Amidst life's hustle, it's easy to get lost in the information overload (again, for additional support here, our 30-day wellness protocol for Creators does exactly this).
- Reflection Time: Set aside a moment each day for quiet reflection.
- Limit Information Intake: Be selective with your engagement in news and social media.
- Practice Mindfulness: Include simple mindfulness exercises in your daily routine.
- Physical Reminder: Use a tangible object to symbolize your commitment to staying present.
- Big Picture Perspective: Remind yourself that your primary experience and impact are in the present moment.
🗺️ Navigating Our Next Steps
Recognizing that our attention is a limited resource in a world where time is already scarce, we confront a crucial truth: living reactively to the ceaseless demands of our physical and digital environments is incompatible with building a life of inner peace, sustainable income, and meaningful impact. This realization brings us to an essential inquiry: "How do I best allocate my finite and valuable attention?"
The answer is embedded in the art of prioritization, a concept central to our mantra "Do Less Well." It's about making conscious choices on where to focus our limited attention, thus being proactive rather than reactive. In our upcoming edition, we will delve deeper into this concept, exploring how to effectively prioritize and, in doing so, embody the true essence of "doing less." This is where we begin to shape our approach, setting the stage for the third part of our series, which will guide us on how to fully engage with and excel in each aspect of what we prioritize.
Thank you for being an integral part of the Conscious Creator Newsletter. If these perspectives resonate with you, please feel free to share them with your circle. Part two of this month’s series will come in two weeks' time!
Bless Up,
Elijah 🌴
