A few years ago, I was chronically distracted. I won’t bore you with the details, but I remember having a list of all the things I wanted to do—earn my degree, start a blog, change careers, change myself, buy a house—and feeling completely overwhelmed because I thought I had to do all of them immediately. I was focusing on everything, so I wasn’t progressing in anything.
Then I read the advice Derek Sivers said he would give his 30-year-old self: Don’t be a donkey. I realized I didn’t have to (and couldn’t possibly) do everything at once. All I had to do was focus on one thing at a time.
In Tools of Titans he explains,
“Don’t be a donkey . . . I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? They get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing, because they want to do them all: ‘Why do I have to choose? I don’t know what to choose!’ But the problem is, if you’re thinking short-term, then [you act as though] if you don’t do them all this week, they won’t happen. The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another . . . don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.”