Keeping the main thing the main thing & busyness
Focus can take you to great heights. Focus can also blindsight your journey by obscuring areas worth pursuing in the long term, which you can’t notice due to your current focus in the short term. That is especially the case when you focus on one particular aspect of your life or work (e.g., health and fitness, social relationships, earning more money in a year). When focusing on one thing, other aspects can suffer because there is always an inherent trade-off in existence: that you can only focus on a few selected things at a time, despite the gigantic number of other opportunities you could attend to. This is a foundational principle shared by Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
As a consequence of the fear of missing out (FOMO) caused by the trade-offs (restrictive choices) you make in everyday life, you may seek and advertise your busyness; the status you gain by juggling many things at once and lamenting how difficult it is for you to “have time” for some other things not included in your busy schedule because undervalued at the present moment. As Tim Ferris put it:
Being busy is a form of laziness-lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. And when—despite your best efforts—you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best feel this way sometimes. When I am in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
Indiscriminate action leads to busyness. The big number of opportunities that manifest themselves in your daily existence, calling for your attention, may feel like seductive ways to remove your inherent pain and suffering provoked by the human condition and your constant identification with thoughts. The ability to discern the few critical actions from the myriad non-critical ones is a practice you may never fully learn, similar to “becoming mindful”. The process itself is the thing. Not a way to get to the thing.
As Ravi Gupta remarks multiple times in his public appearances, “Keep the main thing the main thing.” Not the easiest job to apply in real life, particularly when you are not at the correct internal stage of life to internalize and feel compelled to implement this principle. Arguably the most important compass to internalize and practice when you have gone through the infinite pool of busyness-seeking choices, almost fatally sunk, and made it to the other side just in time for a new realization, like a fictional hero’s journey.