Hello! Seiiti Arata. Have you ever tried to change some area of your life and ended up feeling lost without knowing where to start? Or were you overwhelmed with the huge to-do list to reach a personal or professional goal?
For example, you thought about organizing your finances, improving your diet, getting in shape… but got tired just from researching everything you would have to do to achieve those goals.
If you are lost with so many details involved in improving your personal and professional life, there is a way to make it easy. You can move faster by focusing on the fundamentals.
Focusing on the fundamentals is focusing on the basics that work
Focus on the fundamentals is a philosophy of putting your efforts into what really works. Ignore the small details that bring small results.
Today we live in an age of information abundance. With a few taps on your phone, you can access texts, videos, scientific articles, infographics, interviews, and even entire books on just about any topic you want.
This abundance of information has a positive side and a negative side. For one thing you can have high quality knowledge about different subjects. But now you risk being distracted by details that matter little.
For example, let’s say you have a personal goal to get in shape and gain muscle. If you type WIN MUSCLE MASS in an internet search engine, you get endless results. You will find content teaching how you can eat, how you can exercise, what supplements you can take, and more.
This would be very useful if all the content found pointed in the same direction. But that is not what happens. While one content will put you in direction A, another will put you in direction B. One will tell you to eat food X, while another will swear that food X is actually bad for you.
Worst of all, this content is often dealing with details that have little impact on the bottom line. It is the right angle you have to hold the dumbbells. It is the amount of spice that will make you burn an extra calorie. This is just a small detail bringing a small result.
The result of this information overload is that you may be confused or paralyzed by so much conflicting information. You risk always seeking more and more information, trying even contradictory strategies, without reaching your goals.
When this happens, it is time to get back to focus on the fundamentals.
Put your efforts on the little things that give the most results.
Think for a moment how a building is built. First, the land is prepared for construction. Then come the main pillars of the building. And only after the walls and windows come the finishes: the painting, the decoration …
Taking this metaphor to personal development, focusing on the fundamentals means that you must focus all your efforts on the basics that work. Don’t worry about decoration details if you haven’t even built the main pillars of your project yet.
The Pareto Principle is a statistical rule that says eighty percent of your results come from twenty percent of your efforts. So it is in this twenty percent that you have to put all your concentration.
Whether you want to achieve a personal or professional goal, don’t waste your time and resources on the small details.
Instead, focus on the fundamentals. Stay focused on doing what works.
4 examples of how focusing on fundamentals can help your personal development
To illustrate, let’s look at some examples of how focusing on fundamentals can help your personal and professional development.
1. Lose weight and gain health
The pursuit of weight loss is one of the best examples of how things can get complicated when you don’t focus on the basics that work.
If you want to lose weight, stop wasting time looking for miracle diets, fat-melting pills or five-minute magic exercises.
Instead, focus on doing a true dietary reeducation. In order for it to work, it must be definitive, that is, without a final day. Your eating strategy should also be flexible and with low-processed food and high nutritional density.
If you do this day by day, you will gradually see fat go away and health come naturally and permanently.
2. Enrich
Financial enrichment is another area where simplicity is better than trying to do complicated things.
The foundation here is to spend less money than you earn and invest the difference consistently and wisely.
In other words, your focus should be on making a budget to live a little below your means. Thus, there will always be a difference at the end of the month for you to invest.
This difference need not be invested in some secret stocks, a miracle fund, or the latest cryptocurrency.
Instead, you can simply invest in index funds.
Give yourself time, keep making your monthly applications and reinvest the earnings. Then just wait for the effect of compound interest to act and then see your financial equity grow exponentially.
3. Receive a pay raise
The salary you receive is defined by the most basic law of capitalism: the law of supply and demand.
If you are a professional similar to all other professionals in your market, you tend to receive a average salary. Since there is so much labor available, it will be hard for you to earn a salary above others who can do the same thing as you.
Therefore, the focus on the fundamentals here is to improve as a professional to become a rare item in the market. It is investing in yourself, improving yourself, taking courses, studying on your own, improving your professional skills and even your personal skills.
Remember the law of supply and demand. The scarcer the work you do, the rarer you are as a professional in your field, the higher the salary you deserve.
4. Produce more and better
In the field of productivity, the basics will also work much better than the complicated ones.
If you want to have more free time, simply switch to time management to see what activities are consuming your day.
Then reduce or eliminate these activities. You will probably have to learn to delegate some tasks, reduce time wasted in traffic, social networks, and other distractions.
Focusing on the fundamentals will make you meet your goals
We could make this list of examples much bigger, but I’m sure you already got the idea. For any area of your personal or professional life that you want to see steady development, keep the focus on the fundamentals.
It is not the small detail that will make you differentiate or stride forward. On the contrary, the key to steady growth is to further refine the fundamentals.
If you focus on the basics that work and maintain consistency to let time produce results, there is no doubt that you will meet your goals. Stay focused on the fundamentals and the details will become irrelevant.
Staying focused on a world full of distractions is no easy task, but it is a goal that can be achieved if you focus on it.
Arata Academy has a course called FOCUS exclusively aimed at those who want to concentrate more on a single activity.
FOCUS is a quick course that you will be able to complete today and be a more focused person. I invite you to visit https://arata.se/focuscourse