Poignant thoughts on priorities and focus
It was a great Thanksgiving weekend, despite having “walking pneumonia”. I’m still not recovered but sitting here trying to get my focus straight for the next week I have been reading a lot lately and found these thoughts I saved on a paper in one of my books. I don’t have a source, if you know it please send along:
Take a look around you, right this moment, and you’ll see the results of your past priorities. Whatever has been most important to you, whatever has been the focus of your time and commitment, has come to pass.
If you’re satisfied and fulfilled by where you are, you know what it took to get there and you can continue cheerfully along the same path. If you’re not completely pleased with the results of your past priorities, the first thing to do is change those priorities.
Every moment of every day you are committed to something. When enough of those moments are focused on a particular priority, on a particular possibility, that possibility will come to life.
Look at the possibilities that you’ve already brought to reality as the result of your focus and commitment. Whether you like the results or not, the fact is that you’ve definitely achieved results.
The question now is, what results would you like to achieve next? Aim your focus, aim your commitment, aim your priorities, aim the efforts of each moment in the direction of those results, and they will most certainly happen.
Time to get focused again.
Re-org and update notice
I’ve noticed this is my first post in almost 2 months. It’s not for a lack of “free” time but mostly a re-prioritization of other things I need to do in my life. Since the provision of time off, I’ve spent some much needed time with the family and with my future wife.
I realize it’s not financially justifiable for me to not push immediately for a new job but I’ve been working head down for almost 4 years. I’ve felt I’ve made a justifiable difference in the companies I’ve worked for, earned them millions of dollars in sales and yet my end result of it all is I’m now looking for a new company to start all over again with. For those that are employed these feelings of prioritizing self worth and focus may not be immediately apparent but I’m finding it exceptionally positive for me to get centered before jumping back into the career field.
In being so well organized and time focused in my career, I’ve left my personal life quite in disarray. I have over a decade of digital documents and history of work cluttered on multiple disk hard drives, CD’s and even floppies. I’ve consolidated, organized and triple backed up the important financial histories, address books, work projects and personal projects. I’ve spent some time upgrading the backed of most of my web sites (AV.com, GPC.com) and rebuilding my Shopping site (which still needs now the content). I’ve made the decision to consolidate and standardize my social profile by privatizing most of the non-work related content, and making my twitter, FB, stumbleupon, and other sites more accessible.
I’ve had additional time to refocus on photography again. I purchased a new lens and have also consolidated and cleaned up my galleries. Creating a Flickr site for the photography and using my smugmug site more for an online repository for all my pictures. There’s still more work to do here but it’s getting there.
With the added time I’ve had the opportunity to read more, finishing books on Johnny Cash, John Adams, and Savannah GA (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). I’ve reviewed my paper subscriptions and moved much of my reading to online; consolidating everything into RSS readers or twitter feeds now. I’ve also evaluated my subscriptions and am keeping items that I’m most interested in (NY Local, Food, Photography, Travel, and Music for personal and Info Sec, Mobile, Cloud Computing, and many other IP tech solutions for career related reading). I’ve dropped periodicals that were not keeping my interest (Rolling Stone, Forbes and Travel & Leisure mag), not written well (NY Mag), or ?I just don’t have the time for them (ESPN).
I’ve been traveling a lot again and with the added time I’m still participating in industry events (Just completed the SC World Congress 2009 event).
All of this has not translated into work on my blogs, which I’ve just reciently committed to get back to. Unfortunately I’ll be doing some journalistic “No-Nos” in that you’ll see some old, historical posts pop up that are back dated. This is mostly for my own “Personal Journal” rather than to be periodically accurate, but I have over 40 started posts that need to be finished and I’ll try to keep them dated to when they were started – most are personal related for my own record. I’ve also started writing for Minor-Ripper which I’m committing to post every Wed and hopefully at one other time per week (twice a week) and keeping up with my local reviews on Yelp.
Last I’ve taken the time to reevaluate my time and study for the GMAT for future work on an MBA. This coincides with additional research I’m doing in my industry for consulting and future career work. More to come.
Cheers and best regards,