Everyone has their thing. Your thing could be fashion, or cooking, or hosting. Your thing could be anything, but your thing can’t be everything.

It’s the first Tuesday of the year! You may be reading this thinking, “Mmmmmm, but everything is my thing, that’s what makes me unique.” I hate to be the person to deliver this news, but that is not the case. You can have one thing, you can even have two things. As you master one and move on to another, you may develop many different things over time. BUT everything cannot be your thing at all times. You have to choose. You may have heard, ‘jack of all trades’ as a compliment before, but the full saying is, ‘jack of all trades, master of none.’

Before 2021 ended, I was sharing goals for the new year with a friend and he sent me 23 goals he had set for this year. While it seemed ambitious, that amount of goals made me a little nervous, so I asked, “ Do you always set this many goals?” To which he responded, “Not necessarily, but I wanted to give myself a lot of things to strive for next year.” My thought process is, why set goals you’re not going to achieve? Why waste your time? Who are we trying to impress by setting more goals to create the image of achieving more than we actually intend to?

Choose one thing, potentially your thing, and become an expert at it. Your thing isn’t necessarily your vice or nor does it have to be your purpose, it’s just your thing. It could be something you’re skilled at or something you want to become skilled in. The truth is, you could pick your thing, then realize a few months later that maybe that wasn’t actually for you. But you learned something and now you can take that experience and apply it to your next chapter. That’s the point, to learn and grow. In bouncing around from one thing to the next, you gain a little bit of everything, aka a whole lot of nothing.

I was listening to a training recently and the speaker said, “The problem is when you’re trying to market to everyone, you’re actually marketing to no one.” This sums up my thoughts and part of a philosophy I’ve built for my life, but couldn’t quite put into words. I apply this to myself in so many ways. I even find it reduces my stress and anxiety when I have one thing to focus on, instead of ten. I also apply this same thought process to many situations I see where people are clearly lost, because they haven’t developed priorities.

When you develop a point of focus in your work life, personal life, relationships, goals, social media, finances, or any area of your life, you give yourself something to work towards and a measurement for your progress. You give yourself your wins. You’re not measuring it up against statistics or anyone else. Just you, focusing on something you choose for yourself.

Pros of choosing one thing to focus on:

1. You build skills toward expertise.

2. You develop discipline.

3. You learn more about yourself.

4. You create your own measure of success.

5. You are more equipped to take on your next big risk.

Travel Tip #25: Choose focus.

Whether or not you’ve set your goals for this new year, I want you to think about what your thing is. If you have no clue what it is, make a list of things you think you might enjoy and randomly pick one thing to focus on. It could be style, hair, finances, health, ANYTHING, but pick one of them and go hard for it for the next month.

Once you pick your thing, I want you to do 3 things:

1. Write an affirmation for yourself about your thing.

2. Find a way to include it in your daily life. (Not weekly, not weekdays, but every day.)

3. Create a way to track your new habit each day.

This week, tell me what your thing is. What one thing do you want to focus on? It’s so easy to get scatterbrained and think about 14 different things at once, but I wonder what would happen if you tried to focus on just one at a time.

Send your responses via email, text message, or in the comments.

Find your thing,

Mai

P.S. I’m not sure of what my thing is in this chapter yet. I’m between reading, writing, and traveling. I think my one thing to focus on will be writing. I’ve already started writing each day and keeping track of it. Now, I just need an affirmation to put some power behind it.