We all strive to work smarter and not just harder. Unfortunately it’s not always clear how to do that because we don’t know what we don’t know. But we figure out pretty quickly that quality is more important than quantity, so to work smarter, we need to improve the quality of what we’re doing. The easiest way to do that is to reduce or eliminate what we shouldn’t be doing. Whether we like to admit it or not, we know exactly what that is. We just have to have the awareness and discipline to resist the temptation and do it.
Worrying about the future and living in the past can be exhausting and merely a means to distract ourselves from what’s really important. While there’s great value in crafting a vision of what we want our lives to be and learning from our histories, we can also become imprisoned by these uncertain potential realities and already determined past outcomes. To be truly free we must let go of both what waits ahead and what lies behind and focus on being mindful and aware and present in the moment. These are the greatest gifts we can give to ourselves and to those around us.
