1. Divert All Remaining Energy To Shields!

The biggest roadblock to improving our world, is that almost every person who could read this article (or anyone’s articles, or books, or courses etc.) and benefit from it:

Is busy.

Almost no one is sitting around with a wealth of time and energy and care, waiting for the right article to come along and get them to work.

Almost everyone is busy already.

Almost all the time.

Stephen Covey explained this through the difference between Urgent, and Important.

Some things are both Urgent and Important. If someone you care about needs a trip to the hospital, that’s urgent because it’s time-bound, and it’s important because that’s someone in your life.

Some things are neither Urgent nor Important. When we obsess over some small detail that won’t matter, that’s usually not urgent unless someone is waiting on our finished product, and it’s not important because it’s immaterial to the core benefit of the thing we’re involved in. An example would be arguing over fonts with yourself.

Some things are Urgent, but they’re not Important. If you forget to vote for your favorite reality tv star this week, that might be something you care about a bit, but it’s not really important in the grand scheme of things; you’re not going to be looking back years later wishing you’d been on the ball with that tv voting. It was just urgent. It had a time component, and it slipped by.

Finally, some things are Important, but they’re not Urgent. I recently had thousands of dollars of dental surgery, some of which was preventable, if I had gone in years earlier. And the part that was unavoidable IS much worse because I waited; what was supposed to be a routine wisdom teeth surgery, is taking weeks (and may take up to a year) to complete the recovery period. If I had gotten in when I was supposed to go in high school, when it was important, but it wasn’t urgent, I could have prevented a lot of pain and inconvenience. But it was so non-urgent… I couldn’t really be expected to take care of it, could I???

When we want to make a change in our life, we rarely get extra time that we didn’t used to have.

Stephen Covey explained this Urgent/Important system, so that we could siphon energy away from areas that were unimportant, and put that energy on the important side.

The biggest transfer of powers he recommended was to become aware of the things in your life that are unimportant, but urgent -the things that create fear of missing out, without any real long-term benefit- and then transfer that energy to the things in your life which are important, but are not yet clamoring for your attention.

Important, but not Urgent.

This site is important stuff, that is not that urgent.

If there’s a movie premier tonight, plenty of people will but important-but-not-urgent stuff on the backburner, to go see the thing that is urgent.

I’ve gone to movie premiers before; they’re fun. Plenty of times in our lives we should make that choice, especially if the real event isn’t the film but the excuse to spend time with loved ones. That shifts the perspective. Then it is important and urgent.

But some movie you give half-a-crap about? Seen with someone you don’t even like that much?

That’s maybe skippable.

If you want more free time and energy and care to apply to the things in your life that you feel are missing.

2. Act Now To Receive This Great Deal!

For as much as we collectively balk at advertising, I don’t think many people really understand just how much people are trying to influence our decisions to do what would be right for them.

There are plenty of people who try to do this ethically. To the best of my ability, though I am absolutely trying to convince you to care about this stuff because it makes the world better for me, I have taken a great deal of time and effort not to just sell my ideas willy-nilly. These are things I believe in. I teach things I have seen succeed with others.

I sell upgrades, not miracles, and I sell them because I want to see more upgrades in the world. I think it’s a shame how disempowered the average person is. I think we deserve upgrades.

That’s my purview. That’s my angle.

And when I’m selling shit for money, that’s because I’d like to make a living selling upgrades instead of only ever giving upgrades away for free and then relying on my family’s charity to support me.

That’s my angle. I’ll need money to live so that’s why I’ll be selling courses and training, and the things I sell I believe will help many people who feel frustration about their lives, start to have a sense of control or even eventually mastery about their lives.

But there are plenty of people, way better at selling shit, who have no core that they are working from. They have no vision of a world that continues to thrive and improve.

They just like to score more cash than their rivals.

I had a friend who got involved in the mortgage banking scene.

Mortgage bankers are bro types who like testosterone and competition, and it turns out:

Have no earthly idea how to spend their money, nor do they know how to fill up their freetime.

At a party of one of the senior banker’s houses, they took a chainsaw, and cut off a piece of a felled tree, and placed the circular slice of tree up on the stump they kept there. Then they took out tack hammers and finishing nails, and while drunk, tried to race to see who could hammer in their nail fastest, despite being drunk enough to maybe hurt themselves or another (that was part of the challenge).

The people who know how to sell, sometimes don’t know anything else. This is why you are advertised to indiscriminately.

I’m trying to make influences in the lives of anybody I talk to, but I’ll share my vision with you of a world where people have had enough time and energy and care, to build the skills they need to gain a seat at the table.

But so much of the advertising we are bombarded by, is from those who have no imagination. They have no vision of a world we’d like to live in.

They are just filling up the empty space of their lives, because they don’t know there is anything more they could be doing.

And you’re the casualty: the viewer.

They don’t care if they’re advertising you crap.

They just like the game of it because they don’t know anything better to do with their lives yet.

These were young guys, twenties and thirties. It is possible that those who retired out of the mortgage game eventually found something important to do with their life.

But the stories I’d heard, were all about these guys and the worship of Urgent yet Unimportant.

If you want to take control of the time and energy you have, it may be worth your while, to start to understand better the tools of sales, which are being used on you.

I often mention that I think more smart and caring people need to learn sales.

I don’t mean that these persons should abandon their principles and sell something urgent and unimportant.

What I mean is that if you have something important to sell, you will forever be drowned out by the legion voices which seek only to sell unimportant urgency, because they have nothing better to do on a Sunday night dinner, than hammer drunkenly some nails into a log.

3. Consumerism Replaced By Gym Buddy

We are not equipped for this century.

Everything comes at us too fast.

Urgently.

I had a weird luxury in that I had years and years of extra time to spend learning the skills that let me navigate the world.

Most people will not have that luxury.

If most people are bombarded with urgency, and are unable to develop what matters to them, what is important, then those with the largest momentum will continue to do stupid shit that we all will have to put up with.

I spent years learning, but one of the tricks I learned far late in my path, was how beneficial it is, how much of an amplifier it can be, if we do not have to learn the important things in life alone.

Everything in my life changed when I got “a gym buddy” for my profession. A colleague who is in the same boat as me, trying to learn all of the skills required to make and sell new and experimental video games.

He sent me a link to a lecture during the time I was writing this article.

If I’d come across that lecture on its own, I would probably think, “Ooh this might be important, but I’m so busy with all this urgent in front of me, add it to my watchlist and maybe I’ll get to it later.”

I still did have to add it to my watchlist and see if I get to it later, but much like how seeing the premier of a movie can move from urgent but unimportant, into being important because of who you share the movie experience with, the act of him sending me this video increases the chance that I will take in the lecture.

Certainly I watched two minutes of it to get a feel for it, and have something to say about it, and I know I would not have tried two minutes of the lecture if I’d come across it on my own.

Positive peer pressure. Positive social pressure. The use of urgency intentionally, to help us move energy from urgent but unimportant, onto the things that are important. A little manufactured urgency so that I get to it instead of putting it off.

I just got done with the library’s summer reading program. The challenge was to read and log 500 minutes.

That’s not really a ton of time for someone who reads for pleasure. But even for someone like me who asked for books for Christmas and my birthday I often do not take the time to read what I have stacked up.

It’s important.

But the challenge made it urgent.

Gym Buddy.

When we let ourselves do things completely on our own, that’s when important things are allowed to wither.

I don’t know how we can contribute to the world without some amount of being there for each other, it just gets our asses in gear.

The above post was an entry for Paul Scrivens’ 30 Day Prompt Challenge.

Prompt: What’s the biggest roadblock holding you back from getting what you want?