Name: How to Focus Your Priorities and Narrow Down Your Interests - College Info Geek
Uploaded: 2016-12-27T09:46:02.000Z
Duration: 5 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The superlative

One of the biggest sources of stress in my life is that

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I have too many interests, and I often find it difficult

To-infinitive

And I get a lot of questions from students

and viewers who have the exact same problem.

So if you feel like you have this problem as well,

and it's often been referred to as the "Paradox of Choice".

One person who has done a lot  of research on this problem is

the Columbia School of Business professor, Sheena Iyengar.

And she summed this problem up really well when she said:

"There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us."

"For me, the clearest example is that the more retirement fund options a person has,

the less likely they are to save for their old age."

How do you narrow down this ridiculous amount

Well, there's a story about the billionaire investor Warren Buffet

The story goes that Buffet was talking with the pilot of his private jet

and the pilot asked him about how he could narrow down his career goals and really focus.

He said, "First, write down your top 25 career goals."

"Then once you have that list, circle the five most important goals on the list and come back to me."

and essentially at this point he had two lists.

List A, which were those five most important goals.

And List B which were the 20 other goals that weren't as important.

"The five that you had me circle are the most important things I should be focusing on,

whereas the 20 I didn't circle are less important so I can practice those intermittently when I have some spare time,

"No. The list of twenty items you didn't circle is now your Avoid-at-all-Costs list.

"These are goals and interests you have that have enough pull on your interests

that they will distract you from the five most important goals."

"If you want to be superstar at something,

you can't afford to be diversifying your attention across all these interests."

Now, it is likely that this story is actually fake.

that Buffet himself has said that he didn't

didn't give these instructions and have this guy do this exercise,

I think the exercise is actually still useful to do.

You can definitely go through that exercise,

but I want to share something that I discovered last week

a number of years online named Derek Sivers,

and the founder of a company called CD Baby.

And he's had a lot of success in his life,

so I've been really inspired by his writings

and especially this book   note section on his website

And last week, I saw that he put something on his website

It's basically a page where he writes "What I'm doing now".

He lists out a few of his main priorities

like being a full-time dad, being a programmer,

answering emails, and writing blog posts.

And then he says, "These are my priorities right now.

And because of that, I'm not going to accept new opportunities."

"I don't want to speak publicly, and I'm gonna focus my time on these things I've listed."

So this page serves as a couple of different functions.

Number one. It's a public declaration of his main priorities,

which can help him justify saying no to other opportunities

and explain that to other people who bring those opportunities to him.

of what he should be focusing his mind on.

Now, I think this Now Page is a fantastic idea,

so just like the impossibilist concept that my friend, Joel, came up with,

And now, you can go to Collegeinfogeek.com/now

On that page, you'll see a similar layout to Derek's page.

with a few different priorities listed out.

Since I'm a bit earlier on in my career than Derek is,

about saying no to new opportunities on that page than he has been.

On mine, I say that I'm still open to new opportunities,

but 90% of my time is still going to go towards those main priorities.

So if you're a student, or you're early on in your career,

and you want to use this page for your own purposes,

my suggestion is to be a little bit more open

to other opportunities and take a stand in that camp,

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How to Focus Your Priorities and Narrow Down Your Interests - College Info Geek

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