Frustrated that you cannot focus? What if I tell you that it is NOT YOU who don’t have focus? In this video, I will share with you the truth about the “marshmallow” distraction and give you 3 TIPS TO INCREASE FOCUS and help you get your life back!
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Full Transcript:
Welcome to the Sourcing Warrior podcast, I’m Yuping. We make sourcing easy, fun, and profitable for you. This episode was originally aired as a video on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/goodlifewarrior. As always, high quality, professional sourcing content delivered to you with passion and my unique Chinese accent. Enjoy.
Hello, beautiful friend. Welcome to the Good Life Warrior channel. I am so happy you are here. Now, tell me, how much money do you have in your savings? $100,000? 1,000? It doesn’t matter how much you have, you want more. How much more only you know. Now, there’s one obstacle that is standing between what you have and what you want. That obstacle, it is not that you don’t work hard, you don’t have a degree, or you don’t have that great product idea. That obstacle is that you don’t have focus. But that is not the truth. What is the truth? Let’s find out.
Hello, I’m your friend, Yuping. You can always count on me to give you straight up, 100% honest answer everything, that includes, of course, the sourcing warriors courses that I teach. On the subject, whether you do or you do not have focus, my honest opinion, it is not fair for anyone to expect the mass population, that means us, the mass population, to have focus when we are constantly being given marshmallows. Why marshmallows? If you don’t know the marshmallow study, let me give you two seconds review. The marshmallow test is probably one of the most famous experiment in the history of psychology. It goes like this, a group of young child, four years old, each was in a room, and was given a marshmallow, a delicious marshmallow. The instruction to the child is this, “If you don’t eat your marshmallow now, when I comes back in 15 minutes, I’ll give you another marshmallow.”
Now is the hilarious part. You should see and watch that child. Some of the child couldn’t resist, they just pop into the mouth and they eat it. It’s done. I ate a marshmallow. It tastes delicious. Some of the childs, they fight so hard to resist the temptation. They look at the marshmallow, they look away, they look at the marshmallow, they look away, and they cover their eyes and they try to squeeze the marshmallow and they fight it. What’s the point of the study? The point is to see if the child ability to exert self-control, to resist the marshmallow, whether this ability will influence their later years of success. So they followed these children and this is what they find out.
12 years later, the children who were able to resist the marshmallow temptation, they demonstrated much higher self-confidence, self-resilience. And get this, they scored 200 points higher on SAT because they take future into account when they make present decisions. They wait to get two marshmallows instead of eat one marshmallow right now. Wow. When I watch this experiment, I know I need more self-control. I need to exert more self-control. The problem is as an adult, we were given marshmallow test 24/7. This brain is so overstimulated, overloaded. There’s no way we can demonstrate any focus anymore. I’m going to give you three tips to help you fight off the marshmallow temptations and distractions to increase the focus so we can get our life back.
Tip number one, undo. In order to increase your own focus to get what you want, you have to get rid of a lot of existing temptations and distractions. That means you have to undo a lot of things you did in the past. What does that mean? That means you have to unsubscribe a lot of emails, unsubscribe a lot of YouTube channels, unfollow people, leave some of the Facebook groups, turn off the notifications. Get rid of that. I watch that has the notification zip you every 15 minutes. If you are more serious, power off your gadgets when you are concentrating to do some productive work. Better yet, unplug the power on your TV so you don’t just turn the remote on and watch 10 minutes and then become a 30 minutes. This is a war. If you don’t fight back, these marshmallows, these distractions, temptations is going to consume you and take over your life, that you will never ever have any focus to do what you want to do to accomplish what you want to accomplish.
The second tip to help you increase focus, that is to-do. There’s something funny about our brain. After we get rid of all the distractions and temptations, now this new brain need a new anchor. The to-do list is the new anchor to help us stay focused on the task. But if you want your to-do list to be an effective to-do list, there are two things I must warn you about. Number one, your to-do list has to be written out. It cannot stay in your mind because you are going to either forget or change your mind. Something about writing out a to-do list give more clarity and definition to the task. Second warning on the to-do list is trying not to write a long, unachievable to-do list, because you’re going to get into a habit of breaking your own promise. Your daily to-do is your promise. If every single day you’re breaking your promise, you are getting into a bad habit, especially as an entrepreneur. In life, if you want it to be successful, nobody, nobody in the world can hold you accountable except yourself. So this daily habit of making and delivering against your own promise is very important.
Third tip, you guessed it, just do. There’s no amount of thinking or planning can beat doing. If you wanted to write a book, sit down, write the first sentence. If you want to do product research, turn off your iPad, stop watching product research video. Instead, just sit down and research. If you wanted to find the supplier, stop scrolling up and down, just send the supplier the first email. Only when you are in the doing mode, the brain neurons will start to fire together and wire together a path. That path is your focus muscle. That is what you’re developing through doing.
Like I said at the beginning of the episode, what stand between what you have and what you want is not that you don’t work hard, you don’t have the IQ, you don’t have the perfect product idea. What stand in between the true obstacle are the distractions. If you cannot overcome these distractions, then you won’t be able to stay focused to achieve what you want. I hope this video helped you recognize the dangers of these distraction and help you increase the mental focus.
