When we create mastery in our lives, we create bandwidth to realise new potential, whilst still attracting significant returns on our initial investments.
The only way to do this however, is to ensure that we’re very clear on what we choose to focus on. Initially, this will require a sacrifice of both time and effort. We will miss out on things in the beginning, to enable ourselves opportunity to train and master a specific area of expertise.
Our biggest area of sacrifice will actually be the possibilities and potential we give up across a whole range of areas in the present, to allow us to focus on something substantial, for the future. This can be very frightening because it highlights our limitations and sets us on a path where we will be tested and likely fail, along the way.
We can’t do everything, however by choosing to focus on just a few things, we allow ourselves opportunity to gain mastery in these.
There is an upfront penalty to pay for creating value in our lives for ourselves, family, and within our profession. And you must pay this penalty via sacrificing opportunities and potential, which are abstract things and not real unless they’re actioned. And whilst this sacrifice in confronting, there’s a much bigger sacrifice if we don’t.
Life accrues interest. It hits us hard for staying small, but not immediately. If we stay small and don’t make sacrifices to focus on something we want to be big at, we end up being just average, or worse, rubbish at things. Life can take chunks out of us and that can be hard to recover from and/or replace.
We need to choose our focus, which in turn identifies the areas we need to sacrifice. Although initially, we may feel disheartened as a result of the sacrifices we’ve made by choosing what we want to achieve levels of mastery in, appreciating what it takes in the short term and how it will create bandwidth in our lives in the long-term, should reassure us of our decision.
When we pass through an area of narrow focus and gain a level of mastery at something, it gives us a return. We get something for nothing on the other side of the hard work and sacrifice.
There’s a great analogy in this practice, when we look at how red wine is created. It can take four to 10 years of tending a vine to create a good grape. But then, that grape can offer enviable returns for a further 30 to 50 years from initial investment.
This analogy reinforces that the upfront work to develop mastery in something can return us time, money and value, later on. We can now choose to double-back and rediscover some of the things we initially sacrificed. It also allows consideration around new opportunities and new possibilities, as a result of the greater bandwidth we have created in our lives.
There is truth to the statement, “we can’t do everything”. However, we can do the thing we chose to master, amazingly well. We just need to search for areas of narrow greatness that can be leveraged and used as bandwidth to help us take advantage of more and more opportunities down the track.
In summary, the key to realising greater opportunities is to first sacrifice areas of potential for the reality of a dedicated focus. This allows us to strive for mastery over time, creating bandwidth to realise new potential.
