I know I can do better, we always know that we are capable of doing better no matter what we are doing. We sell ourselves short and somehow try to comfort ourselves that what we did is enough or at least good enough, especially when we know it’s not.
Whenever something is going well or we are doing great and pouring everything we can in our works and crafts, complacency is never far behind. We start doing less, the breaks become longer and before we know it, we are at a complete standstill doing nothing. We lose focus and struggle to get back at the necessary work that needs to be done. It’s not that we are not doing anything, we just happen to engage in a lot of trivial stuff that is not doing much to aid our essential tasks, we keep busy by doing something that is nothing.
Keeping focus is extremely difficult, it’s a skill that takes practice and requires mental toughness to be built over time and not overnight. It goes hand in hand with discipline, a certain level of self-discipline is needed to maintain focus long enough to complete a task, anyone worth something will tell you that it goes without saying, that you can’t have one without the other, or at least in many cases.
For better or worse, we have found ourselves with a lot of free time on our hands, especially the youth. With the whole country under lockdown and schools closed, or limited to online classes, keeping focus or being able to maintain focus is a valuable skill to have right now or alternatively to build up.
One of the consequences of the countrywide lockdown is that people find themselves with a whole lot more free time on their hands, more time than they know what to do with it. With what seems like all the time in the world, it’s easy to lose a little less focus and attention on whatever tasks we are working on, we can always get to it later right?
While we do get back to it at some point, in most cases we don’t, we lose focus and drive and, in many instances, we aren’t able to generate the same energy and ferocity we started with.
We can always do better, I know it and you know it, just keep and maintain focus long enough to get it done right!
* Olavi Popyeinawa
Twitter: @olavipopyeinawa
Email: olavipopyeinawa@gmail.com