Guy Reams (00:01.186)
Today is day 174. What does it mean to prioritize? So there's a pretty interesting paradox in that there's this temptation to extend your reach as far as possible, so you can visualize or have as many opportunities as you can possibly get. So we cast a very wide net, putting our fingers into a whole bunch of things, hoping that something will hit.
We have this idea that by increasing our access to opportunity, we will get more. But the paradox is that you get exactly the opposite. If you keep up this mindset, adding more and more and more in this vain hope that you'll get more quality opportunities, what actually happens is you get reduced quality because you're unable to spend the time of energy and effort that you need to really get a quality opportunity.
So you're spreading yourself too thin and getting a whole bunch of opportunities that are less quality. So that's the paradox. So this is at the core of what I would consider prioritization. You know, if you were to talk to any military general, it's pretty obvious that fighting a multi-front battle is not good for your army. You would have your resources spread thin, your supply chains spread out.
It's better to have one primary front so that you can focus your energy and your military on one front. The same is true in our own lives. When we continuously add, we invite ourselves to spread out our attention span. So it's pretty easy for us to lose focus. So it's better to have fewer options so that you can stay focused and honed in on
the best opportunity that you have at the current time. So I would say that the first rule of prioritization is that less is more.
Guy Reams (02:10.71)
What is true focus? Working on just a few things is an easy idea, but it's not enough. That's not prioritization. When you prioritize, yes, step one is to narrow down what you're doing, but you're probably gonna find out that you cannot just choose to do less. Because if you only choose to do less, then you'll end up not getting, you'll not get an increase. So what you need to do is,
focus down on a fewer things, and then secondly, increase your energy, your effort, and your talent, and focus them on a fewer amount of opportunities. By doing both of those things, you'll end up getting better, more high quality results. However, you will also discover that potentially the opportunities that you were working on before, so let's say you had 10 things you were working on, you narrowed it down to three.
You're going to discover those three things might not have been that high quality. They may not have been the best things for you to focus on. So I think there's another step that you have to take, which is critical. You're going to narrow your focus, true, but then you need to establish criteria by which you will say yes to something in the future. So if something comes along your way that is better than what you're currently working on,
you should already have in your mind what criterion you would accept a new project. Anything that doesn't meet that criterion, you're going to say no to. So here's what happens. Over time, you're going to realize that the opportunities you had already that you were working on were not that great for you. But rather, as you narrow your focus, set up criterion, you'll discover a couple of new opportunities that are much better.
Guy Reams (04:04.054)
The right opportunities that meet the right criteria, and you're only working on a few of them, and you've focused and magnified your attention on them, that's what prioritization is, and that's what drives you to have the most success. So the second rule of prioritization is to select with purpose.
So once you narrow down your options, once you've decided what would make an option good for you, you can now pour your time, energy, money, passion into that project, and you can expect to get good results. Thank you.