By | Roselle Umlas | hackspirit.com
I was reading a book on leadership by Karen Joy Hardwick when I came across this quote, “We are a culture that confuses busyness with purpose.”
It made me pause and consider how intentionality plays a huge role in success. How, if we aren’t very self-aware, we could be investing our energy into the wrong things.
And that won’t get us anywhere. Our energy is not a bottomless resource, after all.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that highly successful people don’t waste their energy on certain things that many of us often get caught up in. In this article, I’m going to share these insights with you. Let’s dive in!
1) Worrying about things they can’t control
I’ll start with something I learned very early on in my life, back in my 20s. I used to be a preschool teacher, so that might have contributed to this early lesson.
You see, one of my rude awakenings in my first year of teaching is that there’s only so much I can control – my lesson plan, my classroom setup, the way I communicate with students, parents, and colleagues…
But I couldn’t control other things, like a child’s mood, their home environment, the cooperation of their parents, admin decisions, and other such issues.
So, I had to learn how to stop stressing about these things. It’s not like my worrying was going to change anything in those areas.
What I did instead was to just do the best I could with the parts I could indeed manage. And those parts I couldn’t? I learned how to adapt and strategize to deal with them!
Successful people understand this all too well. They know that their energy is a finite resource, and it’s best used when directed towards actionable items.
