You're Not Overwhelmed, You're Just Focused on the Wrong Goals
There’s a breakthrough idea that saved my life and marriage.
Too many people are overwhelmed.
Their daily lives are chaos, worse than a Mad Max movie. Trying to get out of chaos is too exhausting. Just the thought of change makes them fearful.
So they stay the same.
Stuck on a hamster wheel they self-built. There’s no way out. Life looks pretty hopeless. So they attempt to justify their position. Or they numb the pain with useless Netflix tv shows or alcohol.
I know this life well. I’ve been overwhelmed for eternity. There’s a breakthrough idea that saved my life and marriage. Let me share it with you.
Pick the right freaking goal in the first place
Most of us have goals.
We’re building stuff. Doing stuff. Answering emails. Often the to-do list, though, is pointed at the wrong goal.
Let me give you an example. I spoke to a guy last week. He says he has no time. He’s managing a divorce with a 5 year old stuck in the middle. He only has bandwidth for one goal. So he chose publishing a book on Kindle as his goal.
He has zero social media following, no savings to buy ads, and no email list.
When I challenged him on how he would sell books, he broke down. He just hoped people would buy his book. He doesn’t have a strategy. He somehow thinks the magical Amazon fairies will promote his crime novel for free to strangers.
In other words, he chose the wrong goal.
The question that saved my life is, am I working on the RIGHT goal?
If your goal is financial freedom and you’re going to publish a crime novel to no one with no help from a professional, then you’re up Sh*t Creek without a paddle. There’s no hope for you. You’re literally wasting your life.
This is how most people live. Including my former ugly self.
Job goals are no better. They’re guaranteed to lead to overwhelm.
Another big reason we’re overwhelmed is because of a 9-5 job.
In 2019, I got fired and had to choose a new job. The boogie monster that made me poo my pants daily was this: “Yeah but how many hours do I have to work?”
I was petrified of choosing a job where I’d be working long hours. Then I had a huge realization: If someone gives you a job they determine how many hours you work.
You start out in a new job as a little froggy swimming in a pot of warm water. It feels manageable (by design). But at any moment your boss can tell you to work more hours.
But they’re sneaky buggers.
Most bosses don’t say “I need you to go from 8 hours of work a day to 12.” Nope. They just load you up with more and more tasks until you’re forced to work longer hours.
They monitor based on whether you’re getting the work done, not how long it took. Using this mechanism the truth is this:
Any job at any time can double, triple, or quadruple your work load and there’s nothing you can do.
Now, the critics will say “Yeah, but Tim, you can quit and find another job.” Sure, but then you have a career gap and the next employer says ‘why did you only last in that job 3 months?”
There’s one other secret.
Most people are too afraid to quit their jobs.
They could change employers but it’s too much work and there are too many unknowns. It’s better to stay where you are and hope and pray things get better.
Employers know that sunk-cost fallacy (being too invested to quit) will stop 80% of their workforce leaving, so they can get away with overworking people, knowing they’ll likely not quit.
A 9-5 job has overwhelm baked in by design. You can never say no. Squeezing out as much time and work from you as possible is how businesses make a profit.
You’re not special enough if you have a job to escape this. It’s a matter of when, not if.
Working a job is just building someone else’s empire instead of your own.
How to choose the right goal to obsess over like an addict
Choosing the wrong goal is a bear trap.
A key mistake is to choose a goal based on a trend or what some guru says. But you must be more disciplined than that.
To choose the right goal you need to do more investigation than feels comfortable. If you just wing it and hope, you’ll likely choose the wrong goal.
My strategy is to start with curiosity. What do I love to google? What are my current habits? What can I NOT shut up about at a dinner party?
When I’m aligned with my curiosity and what I care about, it’s easier to find the right path. Initially I thought I was passionate about startup culture. So I tested the theory by doing written interviews with founders.
It didn’t feel right. Something was off.
Then I pivoted and went from writing about startups to self-improvement. That felt better. As I stayed on this journey I, bizarrely, developed an obsession for writing online. But it didn’t start there.
When curiosity helps you find the right goal, it’s more likely you’ll reach the promised land of obsession.
Stop having more than one goal
Being focused on the wrong goal is part one. But people go and piss all over themselves by trying to win at multiple goals simultaneously.
I’ve never seen this strategy work. Never.
The top 1% don’t try to be extraordinary at every goal because there aren’t more than 24 hours in a day to do so. They focus on one goal.
It leads you to live a weird life.
Right now I have a book deal with a major publisher. Most people would give their left leg to get one. Not me. Writing a book isn’t one of my goals. Sure, it’d be nice, but my goal is to help 100,000 people start writing online.
Trying to do that plus a book is a guaranteed way to murder my happiness.
So I say no.
Most of my day is spent saying no to everything. I can’t remember the last time I said yes to anything. I’m still trying to delete all the yeses I gave 2 years ago.
The more I’ve deleted all my other goals in life and gone all in on one goal, the more success I’ve had.
There’s no match for extreme, obsessive focus.The same applies to you. Multiple goals are the fastest way to reach overwhelm and join the average at the bottom of the ladder.
Overwhelm is a sign you have too many goals. Pick one.
No one wants to hear that the goals they’re chasing are BS. It’s offensive.
Whenever I’ve tried to point out to someone (like the guy at the start) that their goal is perhaps BS, they get offended.
They’re mad at me because it’s easier than taking responsibility and changing.
People delude themselves into continuing to chase the wrong goal rather than make a change. Especially when it comes to 9-5 jobs. Critics will rip me apart in the comments. They’ll try to pretend a job is the holy grail of life.
But if you look at the data, it’s clear at some point, everyone wants to own something and have full control over it. It’s human nature. There’s no escaping it. Again, it’s a matter of when, not if.
So you can be mad you picked the wrong goal. Or you can treat yourself with kindness and know we all start with the wrong goal until we do the work to discover the right goal. Choose wisely.
Being mad and offended leads to the loser life.
Better to admit you walked through the wrong door than spend your life in the wrong room
– Grant Cardone
The daily operating system that pisses off the productivity gurus
Productivity gurus complicate chasing a goal.
They tell you to do yoga, chant, meditate, take a cold shower, ma$turbate, procrastinate, get ready to work, and turn on a Pomodoro timer. Not me.
I wake up and start working on my goal. LOL. That’s it. By 6:30 AM, I’ve done more work than most people do in a day. Focus enables me to cut out the noise.
Psychopathic focus is extremely powerful.
To take this big idea and dumb it down to an operating system, I ask myself one big question every day:
"If I could only accomplish one thing today, and it would be a win, what would it be?"
That question runs my day. My to-do list has one big task—that’s it. If I do that, then everything else is good.
Tell me in the comments section whether you still believe people are overwhelmed.
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Tim, I love your writing routine. I've tried to write first thing in the morning too but it doesn't always work for me. It feels like sometimes I need to gain a few impressions from the day before an idea comes to my mind. Who knows, this might change if I write for a decade like you.
This really hits home. As a multi-passionate person, staying obsessively focused on one goal can be hard. I have to constantly remind myself that I can accomplish many goals consecutively, but not simultaneously.