“Shift from chaotic complexity to elegant simplicity.  Why be brilliantly busy around useless pursuits?” Robin Sharma.  We vacillate between extreme business and boredom, looking for things to distract us.  When we find something that sounds right suddenly we put our foot on the gas.  We over complicate and start and stop, create our own obstacles and then wonder why all the movement we made has only gotten us right back to where we started.  A huge societal issue I see is the constant need to prove ourselves.  The constant, inherent set up toward competition.  This makes us feel like we always have to be doing something others will deem “worthwhile.”  We always need to seem busy and we have to compare how busy we are.  We make it difficult to breathe and connect with what we really need, what we are really looking for in the preoccupation with proving our worth.  If proving our worth is our main goal, then we will spend our time doing nothing more than finding people to prove ourselves to.

When we really start to evaluate where we are at and where we want to go, we have to get in touch with ourselves at the deepest level.  We need to evaluate what feels right and what is important to us because that is going to tell us our driving purpose, what makes the most sense to us.  At the most basic level we need to value our time enough to make decisions that provide the best results that make sense to us.  When we exist in the distraction I mentioned above, we waste time and energy on things that have no value to us.  There is no point climbing a mountain only to realize it was the wrong one.  Great, we made it to the top but we don’t have the view we were looking for.  Sure we learned a few things but we can’t get to where we wanted to go.  In the effort of proving we could, we ended up settling even though we expended all that energy.  Sharma says on that topic, “Don’t major in the minors.”  The things that are irrelevant in the long run tend to take up too much of our time so we need to shift our focus on the things that will make the most impact.

Making the shift to simplicity makes things easier in that they are clear.  Simplicity doesn’t mean easy—there is still a great deal of work when it comes to achieving goals.  It just takes away the unnecessary and focuses on the result producing things that need to be done.  We are trained to think we are progressing when we are merely moving and shifting things around and staying busy but until we make a focused effort, it has been nothing but movement.  Look at the ways we keep ourselves busy and distracted in life.  Look at the ways we clutter our homes, our bodies, our minds.  We carry the weight of those who came before us, their ideas, their pursuits, their pressures in a world that no longer supports those things.  We struggle to keep up in a world that will always move faster than we can because we are connected 24/7 now.  We have to find our own rhythm in between the two.  Don’t focus on the things that aren’t going to move us toward the best of who we are and what we want.  Use our time as best as we can.