The Things You Love Aren’t Distractions From a Successful Life

There’s a piece of advice we hear all the time in business: stay focused.

Know what you’re trying to accomplish, be disciplined about where you spend your time and don’t get distracted by things that aren’t moving you toward the goal.

There’s obviously value in that. You can’t chase every idea or interest and expect to get very far with any of them.

But I do think we need to be careful about what we start calling a distraction.

When you're ambitious and building a career, it makes sense that work gets a significant amount of your attention. There are goals you're trying to reach and responsibilities that come with them. The problem is that it can become very easy to justify almost any amount of time spent on work because it's productive, while the things we simply enjoy doing get pushed to whenever we have more time.

And most of us know how that goes.

I also think we have a strange relationship with doing things that have no obvious outcome attached to them.

If someone decides to take a course that will help them professionally, we understand the investment immediately. But what about taking a course because you're fascinated by the subject? Or spending months learning to play an instrument when you have no intention of ever performing? Or writing something you may never publish?

We seem to want to know where it's going.

I've even noticed how quickly we try to turn interests into businesses. If someone is good at something, the conversation often moves almost immediately to whether they could make money doing it.

Why?

Some things can just belong to your life.

You can take them seriously without turning them into a career. You can want to become good at something without needing to become exceptional at it. You can spend time on something that gives you absolutely nothing you can measure in return.

I don't see any of that as a lack of focus.

In fact, I've never really understood the idea that a person needs to pick a lane. A business may need clear positioning. A human being doesn't.

We can have a career we're deeply committed to and still be interested in things that have nothing to do with it. We can be an expert in one part of our lives and a complete beginner somewhere else. We can follow an interest simply because we want to know more about it.

And sometimes those seemingly unrelated parts of our lives end up influencing each other in ways we couldn't have planned anyway.

That's part of what makes curiosity interesting. You don't always know what you're going to do with what you discover.

I think this becomes particularly important as we become more successful, because work has a way of expanding. There is almost always something else you could be doing. Another opportunity worth considering. Another problem you could solve. Another goal you could set.

If we wait until all of that is finished before making room for anything else, we'll be waiting a very long time.

That doesn't mean every season of life will have the same amount of room. There are times when building a business, raising a family or dealing with whatever life puts in front of us genuinely requires more of our attention.

But there's a difference between a season and a default.

At some point, I think it's worth asking what we've been postponing simply because it doesn't seem important enough.

What would you learn if it didn't have to improve your career?

What would you make if nobody needed to see it?

What would you try if you didn't have to be good at it?

What have you been telling yourself you'll get to someday?

Those things aren't competing with a successful life.

They're part of the reason you wanted to build one in the first place.