1. Vision
2. Strategy
3. Tactics
4. Execution

 Seems pretty good doesn’t it?  Get a Vision of where you want to go.  This is the goal, or the outcome you want to achieve.  Then outline a basic Strategy.  The Strategy outlines how you are going to achieve the Vision or Goal. Next come Tactics. Tactics are the specific actions that you need to take to make the Strategy happen. .  The final step is the Execution. Here Nike said it best, “Just Do It.”

Have you ever done this? Did you notice that by the time you get the plan done, if you get it done, the world has moved on? What happens if the target is moving swiftly?  Today, it seems like everything is moving too fast for this model.

Watch the real Masters of getting things done.  They Vision what they want to accomplish.  Then they do it.  They may plan each day or week with an action list. They may even use Strategy and Tactics planning, but they use those quickly and with flexibility. They focus on knowing where they are going and getting it done. At most they spend 5% of their time in planning.  They spend the rest doing.

My weakness is planning.  I love the process of planning, and that is a weakness.

Get in hot pursuit of your Goal.

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”   (Albert Einstein)

Does it ever feel like everything is happening all at once?  Or maybe that it should, or needs to.  I “get” that feeling. It happens to me sometimes. This feeling means that your priorities have slipped; that you really don’t know for, sure and certain, what comes next.

 Everyone says that we have so much going on today; that we are all so very busy.  Well, I have news for you; we humans have always been too busy.   Imagine caring for a family of 7 with no running water.  Imagine plowing the field, that feeds your family and doing it on foot, with a horse.  Imagine hand-spinning the cotton, to make the fabric, to sew the dress that your daughter needs.

 We human always have too much going on.  That is because we are creative.  We can always think of more to do, than we can do.  Focus on your mission.  Why are you here?  What is your Purpose?   What is your Mission?

Maybe yours is to raise your family well.  Maybe yours is get that Black Belt or to write that book.  Maybe today’s purpose is to get that paper done, or plan that trip. 

Know your purpose of the Moment, and work to find the Mission of your Life. 

When you find these, you will find your time.

 H. Jackson Brown author of Life’s Little Instruction Book said, “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”

I agree.  It’s time to get busy.

That puts it in a different light doesn’t it?  We are not wasting time, we are wasting ourselves. 

Ouch! 

Does this put couch potato weekends at risk?  Does Late Night with Jay or Conan drop in priority?  Does Twitter really need your traffic this afternoon?  Does your six-pack buddy really need you? 

And, what about all that time consuming worry? Do you worry about your kids, or the economy or your job?  Maybe you need to give up some of the worry, and go to work on your life. The point here is simple.  You have a certain number of moments left.  Will you use them well?  Will you choose to waste them? Do you play when you play?  Do you work when you work?  Do you love when you love? Are you alive? 

Rudyard Kipling said, “If you can fill the unforgiving minute; with 60 seconds worth of distance run; yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”  Poetic overstatement perhaps… but he got it at a deep level.

Fight to live intensely.  You deserve it.

Most of us can handle the big blocks of time; it is the little blocks that often defeat us.

Consider:  the power of little bits of time. One grain of sand at a time, if you will.

If you invest just one hour a day for a year, you have 365 hours.  That is 9.125 forty-hour work weeks.  That is over two months of work weeks.  A normal 3 hour college credit course includes 3 hours of class time per week, and 3 hours of homework.  Yes, yes… I know, organic chem and others break the pattern, but you get the idea.  So 9 hours  of class work per week times 15 weeks is 135 hours of work to get one ”A.” To get three “A’s” you need 405 hours. Your one hour a day for a year is just under 9  standard college credit hours.  A good student could make it happen. Nine credit hours is just under a “minor” in most colleges.

Now figure what bumping it to 10 hours a week would do.

Start thinking in terms of what you want to Master.  You have the time.

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 But really, why do we pay attention?  We know better.  It is very seldom that a real and immediate disaster is coming our way.  And, it is even more seldom that we need to react suddenly.  So, why are we wired this way? 

 If you take an evolutionary perspective, it is pretty simple.  As omnivores we are both predator and prey.  We are designed to notice both the Lion in the Underbrush and the Gazelle in the Grass.  The Lion in the underbrush is that sudden life ending danger.  If we don’t take swift and effective action to avoid the Lion, we are likely to be lunch.  Its pretty simple; one-on-one, in hand-to-claw-combat we are pretty underprepared to handle that Lion. On the other hand, if we know he is there and we have a little time to plan, a Lion is not really a large problem to a community of people. 

 The Gazelle is the other side of the problem.  Vegetables pretty much stay where we put them.  But the protein we omnivores crave tends to be fast and agile.  Ever try to catch a squirrel or a gazelle by hand.  Even the best of hunters are mostly inadequate to this task, but give us a plan and a bit of community and acquiring the desired protein is not a problem.

What can we learn from this?  Bad News is fascinating. Why?  Because really Bad News is the most critical AND time sensitive information that exists.  It demands immediate attention.  Not knowing could kill us… and very quickly.  Very quickly.

 So we must look.  We are hardwired to look for the Lion in the Underbrush first, and our logic and experience supports this. 

 On the other hand, in a modern society where we are often inundated by Bad News from around the block and around the World, we constantly face adrenaline overload.  Ask any psychologist. 

This becomes a version of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder light.  More Lions in the Underbrush are presented to us in any one day, than we can handle in a decade.  Ultimately we give up… how can we possibly handle this?  Some of the most well informed people I know are the most depressed. They keep the TV on and they are connected to their news feeds 24/7.  They accept no break in the Bad News, manufactured or real.  In their obsession to be well  informed they forget that there is anything but bad news… still they persist in having food, shelter and many of our modern luxuries.

Often included in this group are some of my favorite people; aficionados of the Objectivist / Libertarian philosophies. They tend to obsess over the non-freedom messages found everywhere in the news.  What happens to these well meaning friends-of-freedom?  Over the years they often grow bitter and depressed.  Many of them curl in on themselves and give up.  They cannot handle the constant unremitting exposure to a Lion in the Underbrush everywhere they turn, and in every moment.  No one could.

 Your subconscious needs rest.  Everyone needs recovery time. Have you ever watched the late news, and woke up depressed in the morning to find a bright sunny day?  Ever feel surprised that it was sunny, that it wasn’t as cold and damp and depressing as you feel it should be.  Has it ever seemed like the sunlit sky was being unrealistic?  It has to me.

 The moral of my little story is this: save your adrenaline for the real Lion in the Underbrush.  Manage your input.  Manage both kinds of input. Manage the input that you receive from outside sources AND manage the input that you give yourself.  Then choose your action, don’t just react.

 The final two articles of this series will be “The Lion Without” and “The Lion Within.”  Guess which is the hardest…  Handling the Lion on the Outside or the Lion on the Inside?  The winner will receive a (re-animated version) of Marvel’s old “No-Prize!”

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But when I finished what felt like it should have been an enjoyable, informative and fun read; I simply sat there depressed. Why move? Why work? Why raise kids? Why try at anything?  Why not have that extra large triple machiato caffeinated something and follow it with a Jack Daniels chaser?  Why not?  Nothing matters.  It is not use at all.

It was in that moment that I realized why I had left years ago. The constant focus on the negative had depressed me, and caused me innumerable mistakes including one very big one where I bailed on some quite profitable R.E. investments because I was afraid of government confiscation. Yes I know, that is a one 10,000,000 chance, but I was young and had just made my first real money. I suppose my success spooked me. 

Where is the problem? What is the Error? At the end of the day with the perspective of experience it is easy to identify. Here in the U.S. most things work. Some innocents get arrested, certainly. Some people grow up in poverty, certainly. Some people live lives of pain and suffering, certainly.  But this is not the norm. Mostly, here in the states, things work and we have it pretty good.

Some call focusing on the Negatives of our world, “being realistic.”  The optimists among us hear it from early childhood “Oh be realistic!  You can’t do this, or you can’t do that.” Focusing on the Negative (capitals intentional!) is equated with profundity, with thoughtfulness and with the “objective analysis” of academia. 

But focusing on these Negatives unremittingly over years does nothing positive. Rather, it depresses us, it slows our forward motion and it restricts our actions. This depression often hides just below the surface of our mind. Unidentified, it works with insidious pressure to limit our lives in uncountable ways.

As human beings we can’t move forward without hope.  We need that internal conviction that we can succeed and grow.  If we don’t have it, we die.  We die inside, slowly and alone; long before we ever near the grave.

Sometimes we must trust, not in blind belief, but rather in the conviction that this is, as Ayn Rand once said, a “benevolent universe.”  Not that our universe is a gentle touchy-feely place, but that as human beings we are designed to function, and succeed, and be happy in this context and in this universe. Based on this conviction we take a calculated “leap of faith” and go to grad school, or start a business, or fall in love. All the while not knowing what will happen next.

So will I return to Reason Magazine again? Yes, I believe in reason, in free minds and in a rational meeting of those minds in the market.  But, I will not dive in deeply nor will I spend many precious hours of my life there. I will manage my time and I will focus preserving the positive forward driven perspective that I have spent years cultivating.  It is this that allows a human being to function; it is this that drives a human being to make a difference.

Think about this in your lives. Do you spend too much time watching the evening news? Do you browse the news of the depressing and depressed in the Major or minor media?  I have definitely been guilty of it.

Consider giving yourself a permanent bad news diet. Look at the good stuff. Go to TED and listen to the best of the best. Read Ray Kurzweil, or Don Tapscott or Tony Robbins or Stephen Covey or Juan Enriquez. Pick up a magazine like Wired or Inc. and get some real perspective on the world, not the unremitting “bad” that used to sell newspapers so effectively, and now sells clicks by the billions.

Where you focus IS where you live in this moment, and it will control much of your personal future.

Watch for the sequel later this week. “The Lion in the Underbrush” 

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