The Complete Guide For How To Focus On Yourself (Part 1)
It is not selfish to focus on yourself.
This is the first post in a seven-part series on how to focus on yourself.
In a world that continues to move faster and more people are trying to get your attention, the best thing you can do is start to focus on yourself. It is not selfish to focus on yourself. When you focus on yourself, you will see results in your own life. As you focus on yourself, you will discover that you will achieve your goals faster and be more successful. Rather than worrying about what other people think about you, you can work towards internal validation when you start to work on yourself. Here is the ultimate guide for focusing on yourself in a busy world fighting for your attention.
It is not selfish to focus on yourself.
Overview
This post is broken down into eight sections. The first part focuses on distractions. The second part of this article focuses on good habits that you can develop in your life. The third part is on mindset. The fourth part breaks down the different areas of your life you can focus on yourself, from your physical and financial well-being. The fifth part is the different relationships you can have and work to develop. The sixth section focuses on community. The seventh section of this article breaks down financial health and the other areas of finance. The eighth section is about the different types of relationships. After reading this article, you will understand the various places you can focus on in your life. It is then up to you to develop the area that needs the most work.
Part 1: Distractions
You can continue being distracted by external things. You can continue to receive validation from other people or work on developing internal validation.
External Distractions
There are many different types of external distractions. An external distraction keeps you distracted, so you lose time that would better be spent investing in yourself. Some common distractions people encounters are politics, news, bad relationships, social media, and wasting time doing activities that do not benefit them. When you focus on external distractions, you will remain stuck where you are in life. These distractions do not provide any benefit to you. They only take time away from your life that you could direct to better yourself.
Society makes us believe that the institutions such as politics, mainstream media, and others are worth our attention. Your view is automatically labeled as wrong or incorrect if you don’t pay attention or have an opinion about current events. The problem is that all these things are merely distractions from keeping you from achieving your full potential in life. Instead of embracing your uniqueness, when you spend your time and energy on external distractions, your distinctive personality gets lost by going along with the masses.
Society says institutions help you when the central institutions you were raised to believe instill fear into your life. The reality is that only you can solve your problems. When you stop believing that these institutions and people, who all have their self-interests, are there to help you and start to focus on yourself instead, you will begin to see your life improve.
Politics
Society raises people to place politicians on a pedestal and treat them with the utmost respect. Politics is also a waste of time. You are trusting someone in a power position with their self-interest. Politicians are not public servants, and they are not leaders. Politicians do not contribute anything beneficial to society. If they did serve the people and not the big corporations, it would be less likely that politicians on both sides of the political aisle, such as Austin Scott, Dan Crenshaw, and Nancy Pelosi, would beat the S & P 500. We'd be thrown in jail for insider trading if you or I did what these politicians did. When you stop paying attention to politics, you have more time to focus on developing yourself.
Mainstream Media
Society raises people to trust people in authority, including the news anchors in the mainstream media. They would never lie to you, right? The mainstream media is not in the business of giving you accurate news. The mainstream media’s job, be it Fox News or CNN, is to make you fearful, spread propaganda, and keep you distracted by pushing the current thing. The fear-mongering has been evident over the last two years; then, the mainstream media moves on to the new current topic to keep you distracted and in fear. It does not matter if it is a pandemic, a threat of nuclear war, Roe V Wade being overturned, or whatever the next thing is.
If you watch the mainstream media, you will more likely be in fear. You will also be more distracted by wanting to keep up with the news. Fear and distraction are two vital things that will prevent you from accomplishing what you need to get done.
Social Media
Social media further drives this problem because you see the reality that people want you to think about them when it is a projected reality. In other words, it is not real. There is nothing social about social media. According to Uswitch, Americans spent more than 1,300 hours on social media. Facebook was the most used social media platform.
Social, or digital, media is a popular distraction that most people use, from scrolling through their social media feeds to watching YouTube videos when that time could be spent on more productive tasks. Another distraction could be to keep putting things off until the last minute that you know you need to do, but you do the fun activities before the complex tasks.
Entertainment
Entertainment is another external distraction. Whether you enjoy watching YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon, it is entertainment. It can be nice to relax from time to time. However, if you spend most of your day watching mindless entertainment, you waste valuable time that you could use to be productive and improve yourself. If you have multiple subscriptions to entertainment services like YouTube TV to Amazon Plus, those subscriptions are cutting your budget. Instead, you could choose to cut back on your entertainment and invest your money in stocks, self-education, or other ways that will help improve your life.
People Who Waste Your Time
People who waste your time can be another external distraction. These could be people you may or may not enjoy spending time with. One of the best lessons to learn in life is to tell people no. You can work to sift through the people who waste your time while you work to surround yourself with like-minded people. When it comes to people, find people who share your values and tell people no. When you tell people no, it shows that you value your time, stay busy, and it is a sign of strength instead of always going along with people by being a people pleaser.
This is the end of the first post of a seven-part series on how to focus on yourself. If you want to receive the following posts in your inbox, subscribe to Secure Single’s Subtack.
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