Fueling the Right Fire

Our time and energy fuels the fire we focus on.

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You become what you give your attention to.

Epictetus

Focus fuels the flames of both love and hate.

The more we focus on something and the more energy we give it, the more space it occupies in our lives.

We can choose to focus on things that we hate or we can choose to focus on the things that we love.

If we focus on things we hate, they will consume our time and energy, and we’ll become increasingly frustrated and unpleasant to be around. If we focus on the things that we love, we’ll become interesting and passionate people.

Ignore Bullshit

If something bothers us, we should ignore it. The more we focus on something we hate, the more it drags us down.

When something bothers us or we feel wronged, it’s human nature to fix it or complain about it. In most cases, we can’t fix it, so the only thing we can do is complain, which makes life worse for ourselves and everyone around us.

If something is bothering us and it’s within our control, we should by all means fix it, improve it, or change it. As long as it’s within our sphere of influence, it’s our responsibility to make a change instead of complaining.

When something is outside of our control and we can’t fix it or change it, our instinct is to complain about it and share with the world how unfair or annoying it is. While we may feel justified in sharing our woes with the world, all we’re doing is adding fuel to the fire of negativity.

As difficult as it is, the best thing we can do with the things we hate is ignore them entirely. Forget they exist, never talk about them, and remove them from our lives. If we starve them of our focus and energy, they will not bother us.

Embrace Passion

To become interesting, passionate, and happy people, we should invest as much time and energy as we can into what we love.

The more we love something, the more we should focus on it. Focusing on the things we love adds fuel to the fire of passion.

Passion is what makes us capable and interesting people. It makes us enjoyable to spend time with, inspires others, and adds to the world instead of detracting from it.

When faced with a decision on how to spend our time, what to discuss with friends or family, and where to invest our energy, we need to ruthlessly focus on what we love and ignore everything else.

Life is both too long and too short to waste our energy on bullshit. Move on. Ignore it. Avoid it. Forget it. What we don’t know about things that don’t matter won’t hurt us.

Instead, we should focus on the people and things we love and enjoy every day to push the world forward instead of holding it back.

Prompts

1. What do you waste energy on that bothers you tremendously?

2. What do you love that you don’t focus on enough?

3. Who in your life do you need to ignore, and who do you need to embrace?

Deep Dive

• Letting Go by David R. Hawkins

  • A guide to letting go of challenges and hardships from a world-renowned psychiatrist.

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Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin