Focus

On the 4th July holiday weekend in 1991, Warren Buffett met Bill Gates.  The story of their introduction as written in The Snowball is a great read so I won't ruin it for you here, but I will repeat a comment that Warren Buffett made about it:

"Then at dinner, Bill Gates Sr. posed the question to the table: What factor did people feel was the most important in getting to where they'd gotten in life? And I said 'Focus.' And Bill said the same thing."

About 10 years ago, I first came across the notion that genius is not an accident of birth, but 10,000 hours of work. Aparently, this was proven in a scientific study in 2008 and written about in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  

Last year I read Anthony Robbins' book Awaken the Giant Within.  It includes a process for working out which goals to focus (there's that word again) on.  In the last step of the process, you write down what you are going to do each day for the next 10 days to work towards your goals.

At the time, I was pregnant and suffering with morning sickness.  By which I mean, I suffered food poisoning for nine months except it wasn't food poisoning, it just felt like it.  The upshot of this being that I was not feeling particularly motivated, so I decided I would do the absolute bare minimum for each of the 10 days.  For example, if I had to spend one minute looking up something on a website, that would be it for the day.  As a result of doing the absolute bare minium for those 10 days, I got more achieved in those 10 days that for the entire rest of the year.

Following the quote about focus by Warren Buffett, the author of The Snowball, Alice Schroeder, waxes lyrical about Warren Buffett's ability to focus like its a form of magic.  But I think she is wrong.  I think its a very straight forward thing, the more time you spend developing your skills the better your skills will be.  I think we all like to over-complicate things and assume successful people are inately better than us - but really, its just that they got off their arse.

In my last post, I wrote about the success I have had using the feng shui silver box.  You could not be blamed for thinking that the silver box is a form of magic, but again I don't think it is.  I think it is a ritual for developing your focus.  First you have to think about your goal and refine the wording down to one sentence.  Then you write out the words on a card and place it in the silver box.  Silver is a precious metal, so again the importance of this goal is highlighted to you.  Each time you see the box, which stands out in your home because it is silver, you are reminded of your goal, so your attention is focused on it.

The two silver box goals I have had success with both required my focus.  The first in gathering all the information required and filling out the extensive form for the Baby Bonus.  But I knew in advance that I was eligible.  I also had a fairly good indication that I could pass the test to join Mensa based on result of career apitutude tests and I was aware that, as with all tests, the more practice you do, the higher the score you will achieve.  So I was spending a least an hour a day doing practice tests leading up to the formal examination.

Even if I win the house in the lottery, I will still not be convinced it's magic, because someone has to win and there are only 80,000 tickets.  Yesterday I was given a tattslotto ticket for next week's $20 million draw.  I have put the ticket in the silver box.  If I win the $20 million, with odds of 1 to 8,145,060, then I may concede that there is something more to it.  In the meantime people, I recommend you follow Nike's advice and Just Do It!

So how are things going with the silver box?

Way back in May, in my first post on decluttering, I wrote about a fung shui "cure" involving using a silver box to "attract" things you want to you. So far I have used it three times:

1. to get the Baby Bonus - a $5,000 grant from the government available to anyone who has a baby and earns under $75,000 in the six months after the birth - as discussed in previous posts: Successful
2. to join Mensa - I am constantly coming up with ideas of things to do that I regret when the time comes.  For example, I can't tell you the number of early Sunday mornings (when it is just wrong to be out of bed) that I have found myself standing in a crowd of properly fit people waiting to start a (no-)fun run and thinking "why the hell do I do these things to myself?".  It was this same spirit that led me to decide to try and join Mensa - the club for people who's IQ's are in the top 2% of the population.  Success or failure would not really have been an issue for me except for some strange reason, after sending off the form to do the entry test, I then updated my Facebook status to tell people I was doing it.  So of course then I had to get in.  So I got out another card and put it in the silver box just to be safe, and the result? - Successful
3. Every year the Royal Melbourne Hospital runs a serious lottery where you can win some truely amazing prizes.  This year the first prize is a house and not just any old house but a 370 sqm (that's 3,984 square feet to our American friends) two-storey, fully furnished, four bedroom, two-living room plus a home theatre, double garage and a lap-pool house in one of Melbourne's most expensive suburbs. I want it. I want it in the way only someone who lives with two other people in a two bedroom flat can want it.  The prizes will be drawn on 19 Oct 2010 or (if all tickets are sold) on the early bird prize draw date 28 Sep 2010. Status: Pending

Note: further details of the lottery and tickets can be obtained here: http://www.rmhhomelottery.com.au/main.php

Spot the difference

No really, I have been working on this ...

Anyone who has questioned the buddhist maxim "everything is connected", clearly has never tried to declutter their house. I know a comparison of the photos requires a magnifying glass to see the changes, but most of the things crowding the room are required for regular use, while the wardrobe has been packed (with extraordinary and disheartening efficiency) with all the things we never use. 

So over the past fortnight I have been concentrating on moving things out of the wardrobe to a storage locker.  There are now 12 things in it, including golf clubs (used once over the past 11 years), a box of video tapes (last watched over 6 years ago), a christmas tree and decorations (at least they get used once a year).  This will allow me to create a home for the things we do use in the wardrobe and get them off the floor.

Another tricky aspect about decluttering is that it opens your eyes to how much clutter surrounds you.  So I have also been working on other areas of the apartment:

• the two guitars and two violins we own are now safely housed in my parents' back room,
• my Thomas Gannon coffee table is now a giant toy box, while the 3 year old magazines and newspapers that were in its draws are now cleared out,
• a collection of stray homeless items are now in a "find a home" box for dealing with as I progress.

The silver box I discussed in my last post appears to be working.  In these types of things you can never sit back and wait for the universe to come to you, so I called my boss so he could give me the phone number for HR and wrote it down on a catalogue while talking to him. Of course I ended up throwing out the catalogue before I called HR, but then I thought, "OK silver box, lets test you out".  I decided I would look under the silver box to see if I could find the piece of paper with the phone number for HR (and my employee number, which I would also need).  The silver box was sitting on the desk with nothing underneath (you can see it in the second picture above, on the left hand corner with a CD-ROM box sitting on top of it).  So I opened the draw below it and pulled out a bunch of papers.  The last piece of paper was the one I was looking for.  I called HR and 10 minutes later they had emailed me my pay slips.  I now just need one of my husband's payslips, and I have all I need to apply for the baby bonus.