Saying no is a hidden yes to something far more important. When you’re faced with choices, it’s often difficult to make the decision. But when your resources are limited, you can’t choose both, and expect them all to produce best results. That’s the price of divided focus! But it’s often not as elusive as it could seem! Let’s see where it goes.
Suppose you’re faced with a choice. You’d have to choose a research topic, and you like the 90 topics that came to your first search result. All of them sounds interesting. You can’t seem to figure out which one to try, right? Then how would you decide? Or perhaps a choice to buy the next laptop. Buy a gaming laptop, or a mac - build a PC or maybe just settle with an iPad? Tough decision, right? How would you decide! Let’s see if this helps.
This is more of a personal observation. But I think you’d understand the story. It’s the apple vs google story. Apple, the rich kid’s gadget. Shiny tool, and even fancier apps in it. Why is it so popular? I really like the apple’s engineering philosophy. I think Steve Jobs did it, or maybe later on someone else. I’m not sure. But apple is notoriously known as the slowest ones to ship the features. The perfectionists! The against the grain people. Apple has a philosophy where they try to completely build a feature to it’s perfection, and then move on to the next one. So, it’s become quite synonymous with apple, the word quality! It’s more reliable. Google on the other hand, they have a internal policy of pushing as many passion projects as possible. They have the numbers game policy. I think they had almost 20 chat apps, that got killed. Thus the famous Killed by Google list!
The point here, is that no matter how good work you’re doing, if they are not focused towards a central goal, they’d all go to waste! Suppose you’re doing 10 projects on 10 different topics. Unless they’re all focused towards a central goals, chances are they’re not going to matter much in the end! If your goal is to get a job, work on one tech stack, and increase your skills over there. It all really starts with your goals. The end goal, connecting all the dots backwards, that’s how you can make seemingly meaningless things part of a larger plan!
Here’s a simple step by step actions I’d recommend, when you’re trying to get to the journey, of whatever path you’re on!
The checklist:
- Identify your goals. It really should be on your own preferences! Something that resonates with you. This is what will keep you going, in the tough times, and they always come! Your “why” will keep you in the track, so make sure it’s something you truly believe in. And it’s always personal.
- Take on “projects” based on that goal. Projects here can be anything. If your goal is to earn a degree, the project is those courses!
- Say no to everything else. Specially the good things.
Prioritization, and staying on track is hard. That’s why you should always choose something that is truly important to you. It’s what will keep you going, when times will be tough.
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