Live Life Focused on What Matters the Most

One way I’d describe life is that it comes at you fast. There’s always something new vying for your attention or something changing from how it was before. Clutter accumulates, tasks pile up, and the world keeps humming right along with or without you.

It’s easy to see why so many people are stressed and experience the world as a place of chaos. If you aren’t deeply grounded in what you value and resolutely focused on your goals, you’ll end up tossed around by the waves of those moving around you.

My solution to this has not been anger—wishing the world were different—or resignation—hiding behind my favorite comforts and distractions—but rather a life focused on the few things that matter the most to me.

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Focus Without Fear

Don’t let a fear of missing out or an addiction to novelty distract you from the goals that you know will still be important to you in 10 or 20 years. These long-term goals should be your guiding star. Deciding what to focus on is an important choice, but thankfully, it’s not one that you should have to make every morning you wake up. At most, you can reevaluate your commitments each year so they are protected from your passing moods and whims.

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6 Personal Examples of Focus

1. Raising kids who feel loved and share my values. When I’m gone from this earth, one of my legacies will be the children my wife and I leave behind, along with their families. I take this responsibility seriously and seek to pass along cherished values to my kids, leaving them with hearts overflowing with the love we’ve poured into them.

2. Growing closer with my spouse through every passing year. The closest relationship that many of us have is with our spouse. Why wouldn’t you want that to be the very best it could be? So much of your present and future happiness is tied up in each other, and your focus should reflect that huge potential. No matter what’s going on in my life, I try to connect with my spouse each day in a non-superficial way, a practice that I recommend to all married couples.

3. Anchoring my life around my faith and its community. I’ve never been shy about how central faith is in my life. It’s the foundation of most of what I believe and the choices that I make. For those who share a similar faith commitment, I recommend imagining yourself on your deathbed and asking if there’s anything that will seem more important than those transcendent hopes that you claim to believe. If not, then your actions today should reflect that priority.

4. Prioritizing my health and mental well-being. One piece of advice that I hear again and again from my elders is to take care of your health when you’re young because once good health is lost, few things will matter more to you. That’s why, even in my 30s, I’m treating my body as if I want it to last another six or seven decades. Whether or not that happens is beside the point—I want to enjoy the years I have in the best health I can.

5. Building and creating things that are useful to others. Few things bring me more daily satisfaction than creating something that others find useful. Whether writing articles that others read or designing workflows that help make a task simpler, I take pride in doing good work that others can see and enjoy. It’s not always easy to prioritize these actions as there are so many distractions that seem more appealing on a minute-to-minute basis, but when I stretch out my time horizon, I see how valuable these investments are.

6. Pursuing a lifetime of learning and growing in wisdom. When it comes to leisure time, there are two main ways that you can spend it: active engagement or passive enjoyment. There is a time and place for both. If you’re like me, doing things that take a little more effort, such as hobbies or reading, leaves your heart and mind in a better place than other fallback options such as watching TV. Knowing this about myself, I focus on these activities over easier ones that promise more instant gratification.

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