My Life Got Crazy Better After I Shed This One Thing

My life dramatically improved after I stopped trying to do everything.

We live in a fast-paced society. When you look around, people seem like they’re always juggling multiple things. In fact, it’s written in stone on job descriptions and such.

We’re bred to think we’re superhuman and can push beyond the walls of our limits, every single time. Also, to believe that more is better— it’s always good to have a backup..etc.

For the longest time, I felt that I thrived on doing multiple things at once. I’ve never not worked during my schooling and it was common for me to juggle two jobs at a time. On top of school and work, I tried to maintain academic-related extracurriculars such as clubs and taking on intensive summer sessions. And here’s the thing. There are people out there that I’m familiar with who do much more.

I learned the hard way that trying to do everything at once, resulted in mediocracy in the things I was attempting to do.

My biggest fear was losing control

I’ve always sought to have some form of control over my life because I felt like much of it was up to someone else. Someone else determines your grades, job, salary..etc. Although you may work hard, your work and your character will always be defined by your parents,  professor, or your employer. I felt like increasing the number of characters in the story, would somehow give me more flexibility or control over my life.

What I didn’t realize was by doing this all the time, I could say that I was someone who was ‘adaptable’, ‘a great multitasker’ and ‘someone who could push their limits, but I wasn’t able to say “Hey, I excel at this one thing.”

This feeling of excellence is something I’m more intentional to pursue these days, rather than pursuing multiple things.

For example, I haven’t focused on growing this blog at all—rather I’ve been focusing my attention on the portion of writing. Strictly the writing, because I know that’s the one aspect I want to closely monitor and remain authentic to my voice. Literally every other aspect of this blog I’m willing to change or offload to someone else who is an expert at what they do. 

Everything from the design, to even the topics and social media. Anything other than writing, I am no expert in nor do I wish to really become one.

I rather have a nice, shiny working gear in every part of the chain, than try to use the same gear for every part. It simply won’t fit nor will it produce a nice smooth running engine.

When you’re unable to achieve excellence, literally nothing matters

It doesn’t matter how many things you’ve ‘done’, at the end of the journey you always feel like crap. Why? Because you knew you could have done better. And it’s the stone-cold truth. If you had put your energy and deliberation into one thing instead of five, you probably would have achieved much better results in the one thing

Excellence breeds confidence. This is why A students are more likely to remain A students than C students moving up to a B or an A..etc. When we have a sense of self-efficacy, mastery becomes less out of reach.

Let go of the mentality of being a serial achiever

Being a serial anything can garner you a bit of attention or pride, let’s be honest—it looks pretty cool on a profile. However, no one ever questions whether you actually achieved a fair level of success in those domains. For example, someone could refer to themselves as a serial entrepreneur, but does that mean they’ve made serial exits, or have they just started multiple companies? There’s a significant difference in quality here.

Instead of judging someone or yourself on how many things you’re capable of doing at once, focus on achieving greatness in one aspect of your life before moving on to the next exciting project. Trust me, once you hit that peak, the effects will start to drip over into other aspects of your life. Let’s take health for example. Maybe your career and your relationships are quite average, but you take six months to a year to really focus on gaining strength, eating well, and meditating. By the end of the six months, your energy levels are off the roof, you look like a snack and you have a way calmer mind. You start performing better at work with newfound energy and concentration and start attracting more vibrant people into your life. See what a big impact just making this one shift can have on your life?

Every consequence is a result of an action. If you get really granular about your actions, your results will begin to show that too.

We diversify our energy because results aren’t immediate

Humans are wired for immediate gratification. When we study really hard for a test or spend weeks writing a paper, only to get not-so-great results, we feel disheartened and think we’re not making progress. In reality, true mastery is not a linear line. If you think of it in physics terms, much of mastery is building up enough potential energy until it hits a point where that energy can turn into kinetic and boom. Mastery is a long process of preparation, application, failure, and reiteration.

Many people, myself included, get frustrated with the length of time it takes to achieve excellence in an area, which leads to this exploration of other interests. There’s nothing wrong with dabbling in other interests, but if your end goal is to become exceptional at something (hence the more you’re rewarded for this), you have to accept the fact that it’s going to take time and a lot of effort. When you derail from this, you also have to accept the costs. Even the most gifted athletes have to train religiously to keep playing at a high level, even after they achieved some success.

I’ve been writing professionally for around half a year. In some regards, I’m good. But I didn’t become good in those six months if that makes sense. The reality is I started writing when I was in elementary school. It’s more of a decade of writing that has made me somewhat decent, and I still nowhere close to mastery.

When you’re in the 1% of anything, regardless of whether it’s engineering, business, or arts, you’re almost guaranteed not to have to worry about the financial aspects. The difficult part is the long road to get there that doesn’t sometimes offer lucrative benefits at the beginning or the middle.

The perseverance to push past this period of discomfort is the key to truly becoming a master and reaping the rewards of such. Letting go of the mentality that you have to do everything to be worthy can create a lot more space and freedom for you to focus your energy on the few or one thing that matters.