Taking Time to Focus On Yourself
100. Focus on yourself.
If you are wondering why the dream life you are trying to build isn’t really coming out as you had hoped, maybe it’s because you’re spending more time watching others build and less time working on your own project. Why do we do this when we have a home to build on our own? Well, for starters, up until now you may not have known how to build your own life house. And now you do. This will also help explain why others are so concerned with what you are doing. They either have no clue what they are doing themselves or if they think you do, they may be trying to copy some of the skills you have acquired. Hopefully, once you begin to become a master carpenter with regard to the skills you have learned in this book, you will hand them a copy to let them know this is where you learned how to build. In doing so, you have helped someone build their own life and “focus on themselves.” On the flip side, if they don’t use it, you can continue on guilt free knowing you can throw a life preserver but you can’t make people grab it.
Another reason that we lose focus on ourselves is we take comfort in knowing others have the same issues that we do. It feels better and it is easier to deal with life when there are others all bundled together with the same problems. I think you remember this group is called NAILS. Remember, we are trying to build and become a hammer and a hammer focuses on itself. It worries about what it is building and not what the home is doing down the street. Every moment you spend working on someone else’s project is one less moment you could be working on your own. We often will take breaks or time outs when there are tough parts to build and work on in our lives. To be a hammer means knowing that working on it right away helps it from becoming a much bigger problem. Being a nail means finding someone else with the same problem and sharing it with each other. This will ensure no building or repair will occur. Nail, nail, nail. Or you may decide to find someone with bigger issues to make yours not look so bad, or blame it on those who have no issues stating that they are lucky. Bigger nail, bigger nail, bigger nail. Bottom line, when you are focused on someone else, you take time from working on yourself; seems pretty obvious to me.