Living the Significant Life (11 page)

No one wants to fail, but failure is simply part of life. The real failure comes when we let our fears paralyze us and keep us from moving forward. If we let that happen, how will we ever find success? Brad knows he still has a long road ahead and is likely to face many challenges as he continues the journey he's begun. But he's ready to put his fears aside and step out into the unknown.

We'll check in with him one more time, but for now, we're ready to move forward as well, toward the next key to unlocking your significant life: focus.

PRINCIPLE #5

Sharpen Your Focus

Focus: point at which an object must be situated so that a well-defined image of it may be produced. In Latin, it means “fireplace” or “hearth.”

—The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology

The smallest bit of action separates the high achievers and people who find true happiness and fulfillment from everyone else.

The difference between the gold medal and second or third place in an Olympic swimming event is often measured in only hundredths of a second.

How much better is the .300-plus hitter with a multimillion-dollar big-league baseball contract than a second-string, .265 benchwarmer? One to two hits a week over the course of the season is all that makes the difference.

The winner of a major golf tournament like the Masters often wins by one stroke—a difference for the four-day tournament of less than 0.4 percent better than the runner-up.

These examples are all from the world of athletic competition, but they are indicative of the tiny-bit-better-than performance percentage that separates the winners from the losers in any field of endeavor: sports, business, relationships, you name it.

The difference between success and failure is actually marginal—measured in a fraction of a percent
at most.
What is it that makes this difference? What quality does the winner have more of than the runner-up or the loser, the person for whom happiness continues to be elusive? Let’s answer that with another story.

A master archer was in the forest with two students. As both students were notching their arrows, preparing to shoot at a target off in the distance, the teacher interrupted them and asked each one to describe what he saw.

The first archer said, “I see the sky and the clouds above, I see the fields and grass beyond. I see the different trees of the forest—oak, beech, pine, poplar, and maple—and I see their branches. I see the leaves. I see the target with its colored rings. I see—” The teacher stopped him midsentence and said, “Put down your bow, my son. You are not ready to shoot today.”

He then asked the second archer, “What do you see?”

The student replied, “Nothing save the goal at the center of the target, Teacher.”

“Then let your arrow fly,” the teacher directed. And it did—dead-on to the very center of the target.

The difference between the two students’ states of mind was a matter of
single-minded focus.

And the Blind Saw Anew

We want you to do a demonstration of focus with that we learned from Og Mandino, one of the most inspirational writers and speakers of our time. He has written, among many other titles,
The Greatest Salesman in the World
, a book that has sold more than twenty million copies in at least a dozen languages.

In one of Mandino’s speaking presentations, he asks someone from the audience who requires reading glasses to come up and join him on stage. The person removes his or her glasses and attempts to read a page from the newspaper. Of course, it’s impossible for that person to see the words.

Then Og (people refer to him as Og) hands him a white three-by-five-inch card with a tiny pinhole in the center. That’s what we want you to do, even if your vision is clear. Make a white card with a pinhole in the middle and look through it at a page of small type—what designers call “mice-type”—that is difficult for you to read or see clearly. Hold the card out in front of you a couple of inches from your eye and move the page of copy back and forth until it comes into focus.

The fascinating thing is this: almost anyone, no matter how poor his or her eyesight is, will be able to read every word through that tiny hole. The type will appear as clear for you as if you had perfect twenty-twenty vision.

The reason is
focus.
That little hole causes your eye to focus. It cuts out all the extra stuff you don’t really need to see, bringing all the power of your vision to bear on a small focused point, which dramatically increases your ability to see the letters and words. That’s what a pinpointed focus can do in any aspect of your life.

When you learn the ability to focus on anything about yourself, you will master that thing itself. Focus your thoughts and master your mind. Focus your emotions and master your heart. Accomplishing all of this will have you being a master of possibilities, a master of life.

Mastering your mind is the key. Once we train our focus sharply on our goals and desires, our minds act like heat-seeking missiles, leading us through all the lessons we need to learn, through all the trials, tribulations, and celebrations necessary for us to arrive at precisely where we want to be. This is true for as long as we maintain our focus. Yet most people don’t maintain their focus. Why not?

Let’s do a little experiment. Read over the following statement. Do it quickly and read it just one time.

Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of many years of experts.

Now read it again and count the number of
F
s in the text. Give yourself fifteen to twenty seconds to do this. How many do you see? Three? Four? More?

If your answer was three or four, go back and reread the statement, but this time, look for the number of times you encounter the word
of.

There are actually seven
F
s in that statement, but in a typical group of people who’ve never seen this demonstration before, most notice only three
F
s. They don’t focus on the
letters
in the statement. What gets in the way of their ability to focus, even with clear and specific directions and even with very straightforward black-and-white information, is that something disables or distracts their focus.

Most of us learned to read phonetically—and
of
appears as “ov” in our “mind’s ear.” Because we learned to read that way, because we all tend to read by speaking the words aloud in our heads, because we are creatures of habit, because we make assumptions about nearly everything in our lives, and because we lack real and true focus uninterrupted by our constant self-talk chatter, interpretations, meanings, opinions, judgments, and editorializing, we don’t see what’s staring us in the face. We miss the correct number of
F
s.

This is truly an in-your-face lesson; it’s not necessarily polite or kind, it’s the kind of wake-up call we all need now and then.

None of us have any hope of success unless we can honestly and truly focus our attention on the task at hand—whatever that task may be. There is much unlearning, much baggage, and much habit that we must discard, replace, or refine before we can approach mastery of the life skill of focus.

Just for fun, here’s another one. Read the following familiar passage quickly:

Did you catch that one? We bet you did.

After doing this dozens of times on a flip chart up in front of a room full of people, we can tell you that 80 percent of the time people don’t see the double
a.
The reason you saw it now was probably that you were more attentive and focused because of the previous exercise. That just shows you how easy it is to keep a keen edge on your focusing ability. Like everything else, all it takes is a little practice.

Synergy: 2 + 2 = 1,640,209

One powerful way to stay in focus is to use a principle described by Napoleon Hill in his masterpiece of success literature,
Think and Grow Rich
: the concept of the Mastermind group. Hill describes his Mastermind group as “the coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.”

It’s vital that you find a group of peers—we suggest between four and six, including yourself—with whom you can discuss all of your challenges, seek solutions to your problems, and figure out how to optimize your opportunities. You will find that five minds together have the sum total of much more than those five minds. They are the equivalent of one supermind.

The mechanism at work here was best explained by a man with one of the most astonishing minds the world has ever encountered: the American engineer Buckminster Fuller. If ever there was a model of empowering beliefs, universal values, extraordinary purpose, and every other quality we’re writing about here, including focus, it’s Dr. Fuller.

He created a scientific explanation of the principle of synergy, the ability of something to be greater than the sum of all of its individual parts. Fuller realized that relationships themselves have a certain magic that can transform each individual ingredient, making the whole even more powerful than the mere number of its parts would indicate was possible.

He created a formula for the synergy of a group of people together that goes like this: P
2
– P ÷ 2 = S. This means that the number of people (P) squared, minus the number of people and divided by two, equals the number of synergistic relationships (S) present in the group.

Following Fuller’s formula, if you have 100 people in a room, squaring that would be 10,000; minus the number of people, 100, equals 9,900; divided by two would be 4,950. So in a group of 100 people, there are actually 4,950 relationships in the room.

If you’ve ever wondered how a church service, a workshop, or an opportunity meeting can be so powerful and exciting, this is why. There aren’t simply 100 people there. There are 4,950 relationships. And if all of those relationships are equally engaged in the same uplifting possibility, the lid can come off that room with ease.

We recommend that you have four to six people in your Mastermind group because synergy kicks in with four or more people.

Using the synergy formula, if you have only three people, that’s 3 squared equals 9, minus 3 equals 6, divided by 2 equals 3. But look what happens with just one more person: 4 squared equals 16, minus 4 equals 12, divided by 2 equals 6—six relationships in a group of four people, two more relationships than there are people present. How can that be?

Just look carefully at the numbers. Draw a line connecting all the relationships in the hexagon of six dots below.

You should have fifteen lines when you’ve finished (see page 107 for the solution). This corresponds exactly with Fuller’s equation: 6 squared equals 36, minus 6 equals 30, divided by 2 equals 15. As you can see, the key here is the relationships, not simply the number of people present. That’s the power of the Mastermind group: synergy.