Episode 296 · Sep 29, 2021

How to Engage in Focused Thinking and Design the Life You Want

Listen

George Wright III opens this episode of The Daily Mastermind with a question that stops most people in their tracks: when did you last sit down and deliberately think about the life you actually want? Not scroll, not react, not power through a to-do list, but genuinely think. George draws on a chapter from John C. Maxwell's book *How Successful People Think* to walk you through the practice of focused thinking and why it may be the single most underused habit among driven people today.

The premise is simple but uncomfortable. Most people are too busy to think clearly. They work hard, they give effort, but they never carve out protected time to plan, clarify, and develop the vision that would make all that effort worthwhile. Focused thinking is the antidote.

Why Focused Thinking Is So Hard to Find

George is direct about the core problem:

"One of the biggest problems that we have in life is that we don't devote enough time to focus on what we want our life to be like, what kind of person we want to become, or the goals that we desire to seek and achieve, because we're so busy."

Busyness has become a default mode for most people. Days fill up with reactive tasks, notifications, and obligations. The result is that the most important thinking, the kind that shapes your future, never gets done. Protecting time to think is not a luxury. It is a strategic necessity.

How Focused Thinking Harnesses Your Energy Toward a Goal

Maxwell's first point is that focused thinking channels your energy toward a specific desired outcome. The greater the difficulty or size of a problem, the more focused thinking it demands. If you never sit down to wrestle with a hard challenge in a deliberate, undistracted state, you are unlikely to solve it at the level it deserves. Busy effort without focused thought produces activity, not results.

Why Ideas Need Time to Develop

The second benefit Maxwell identifies is that focused thinking gives your ideas room to grow. George explains that moving an idea from concept to execution often requires a shift from broad, expansive thinking to narrow, selective thinking. You cannot force that shift in the margins of a packed schedule. You need time set aside specifically for developing your objectives and thinking through what it would actually take to reach the next level.

Bringing Clarity to Your Goals

Many people have goals that feel real but remain blurry. Focused thinking addresses that directly. As George notes, it does not just clarify your goals; it helps you define what you need in order to achieve them. A vague goal is very hard to act on. A clear target with defined requirements is something you can build a plan around. Regular focused thinking sessions move your goals from wishful to workable.

How Focused Thinking Takes You to the Next Level

"In order to achieve greatness, you have to spend time specifically working on things like your talents and your skills needed to achieve your goals."

This is a point George returns to throughout the episode. Many people want to achieve big goals and work incredibly hard, but they never dedicate time to developing the specific talents and skills those goals require. Focused thinking creates the space to identify skill gaps, work on your craft, and build the capacity to perform at a higher level.

Where to Focus Your Thinking: Priorities, Gifts, and Dreams

Maxwell offers a three-step framework for deciding where to direct your focused thinking:

Identify your priorities. List out the things that genuinely matter most, then apply the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of your activities produce 80 percent of your results. Find the areas where you are strongest and start there. Spending focused time on low-return activities, even important-seeming ones, is not the best use of your mental energy.

Discover your gifts. George borrows from the thinking of mentor Robert Stuburg here: narrow your focus to areas where you are both excellent and passionate. Most people spend the majority of their careers operating at competence rather than true unique talent. Competence pays the bills; unique talent builds a legacy.

Develop your dream. If you are unsure what your dream looks like, use focused time to ask a simple question: what do I want my life to be like? Do you want more freedom? A deeper relationship? A thriving business? Residual income? The answer gives you a destination. The destination gives you a direction.

How to Stay Focused During Your Thinking Time

Knowing you should think more clearly is one thing. Building the habit is another. George offers practical guidance: block specific times on your calendar for focused thinking, remove distractions actively, keep relevant materials in front of you, set clear intentions for what you want to accomplish in each session, and track your progress. Over time, you will see whether the time is producing insight and movement or whether you need to adjust your approach.

He also makes a harder point: you may need to give something up. If you are genuinely committed to building a better life, you will likely need to sacrifice some activities you currently enjoy in order to create the time. Short-term trade-offs for long-term design.

Action Steps

Block a recurring weekly session, even 30 minutes, specifically for focused thinking with no phone, no email, and no interruptions.
Apply the 80/20 rule to your current priority list and identify the top two or three areas where your unique strengths and passions overlap.
Write down a clear answer to the question: what do I want my life to look like in three to five years? Use this as the anchor for your thinking sessions.
Identify one to three skills or talents you need to develop to reach your next goal, and commit focused time to working on them.
Track your progress monthly: is your focused thinking producing clarity, momentum, and better decisions?

Successful people do not wake up every morning wondering what they are working toward. They have a plan because they took the time to build one. If your life is worth living, it is worth finding the time to think carefully about how you want to live it. It is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. I hope you're having an amazing week. I want to start today with our Daily Mastermind quote of the day. If you have not downloaded the Daily Mastermind mobile app, I'm going to have to encourage you once again to do that. It's a ton of free resources for you to use on the go, basically to help you in every area of your life with your daily rituals. So the quote of the day today is by Jack Canfield, and it's, if you ask enough people, eventually someone's going to say yes. And I believe that is so true. If you ask enough people, eventually someone's going to say yes. So today I want to talk to you about something that's been on my mind a little bit, and I've been kind of thinking about a few situations that have come up with individuals I've been helping. And, you know, it's how to engage in focused thinking. Because I believe one of the biggest problems that we have in life is that we don't devote enough time to focus on what we want our life to be like, what kind of person we want to become, or the goals that we desire to seek and achieve, because we're so busy. We're just so busy with day-to-day life. And I want to share with you some wisdom from a book that I have on my desk here by John C. Maxwell, and it's called How Successful People Think. Changing your thinking, change your life. And I'll tell you, he has a chapter in there about engaging in focused thinking. And I believe that most of us, in order to be successful in life, relationships, business or personal, I believe we need to strive to find more time to sit down and specifically engage in focused thinking about what we want our life to be like. Maxwell says that in his book, he says that focused thinking will help you to remove distractions and mental clutter so that you can concentrate on an issue or think with better clarity. And he says you can do a lot of different things for you. And I really believe that many of our problems could be answered by focused thinking. So he gives us a short list of things it'll do for you. Number one, focused thinking harnesses the energy toward a desired goal. See the greater the difficulty or size of the problem the more focused thinking is going to be required And we deal with challenges every day but we don spend enough time really sitting down and putting clarity and helping us to get to our desired goal. The second thing is that focused thinking will give ideas time to develop. You see, sometimes to take ideas to the next level, you need to shift from, you know, the big general thinking, being expansive, to thinking very selectively. And this requires focused time for you to spend on your objectives. In order to be able to get, you know, ideas developed and go to the next level, you've got to focus your thinking. The third thing he talks about is focused thinking brings clarity to the target. You know, we all have these goals and sometimes our goals are not very clear, and to attain your goals, you need to focus on a real clear target. But focused thinking will help you to not only clarify your goals, but it'll help you to define what you need to achieve them. And so bringing clarity to the targets that you're seeking is a very important benefit of focused thinking. And the fourth thing that he mentions is that focused thinking will take you to the next level. You see, in order to achieve greatness, you have to spend time specifically working on things like your talents and your skills needed to achieve your goals. You know, so many of us want to achieve our goals or we work hard or we give a ton of effort, but we don't dedicate time to working on the talents or skills or abilities we need in order to achieve those goals. And focused thinking will help you to do that. But the, you know, sort of the question starts to form for most people, where should you focus your thinking? Like what specifically should you spend the most time on? And Maxwell in his book tells us that you should focus your thinking in four main areas. The four main areas that you need to focus your thinking are going to be leadership, creativity, communication, and intentional networking. And he goes on to give us several steps to kind of help you determine what those key areas should be more specifically for you. Because we all have different things going on in our life. We have different cycles we go through, whether it's business or relationships or family or maybe a new project you're trying to launch. So he gives us kind of a three-step kind of pattern to follow. And the first one is start by identifying your priorities. You know list out all of your priorities that you have in your life and I talking about the really important things that you want to focus on and then start to narrow it into areas of your strengths and areas and I thought this was very unique because many of us just have these huge priority lists, but Maxwell talks about beginning to narrow your list into the areas of your strengths and areas that you can best use your talents and abilities, because why not prioritize areas that you're going to get the highest rate of return. Some of us think it's super important to do various things with our business or our work, but we're not great at them. And as a result, the time required gives us a very low return on our investment. So you can follow the 80-20 rule. We know that in any given day or activity or list, 20% of our activity is really what generates 80% of the results. Find the 20% that you are the strongest at and focus on those first. So start by identifying your priorities. Second, discover your gifts. See, most people are unaware of what their real strengths are. They think they know and maybe they've heard people tell them in the past, but I like to follow the advice of one of my mentors and partners, Robert Stuburg, who always talks about narrowing in your time and your attention on your area of unique talent. And remember, your unique talent is the area that represents areas that you are excellent and passionate about, not just great at. See, most of us spend a great majority of our lives in areas that we're competent at or that we're good at or we're great at, but we're just not passionate about. And it's so important for you to narrow your list down to areas that you have gifts in. And then third, develop your dream. I talk a lot about clarifying what your dream is, but Maxwell talks about using focused time to discover what your dream is, even if you're unsure what it is. Use this time to clarify specific time. You know, I like to ask myself the question, if I'm ever stuck and I don't know what my dream or my vision for my life is, I just start asking, what do I want my life to be like? You know, what specifically do you want your life to be like? Do you want more time and freedom? Do you want to have a relationship? Do you want to have a business? Do you want to have leverage or residual income? Do You want to have investment income. Ask yourself what you want your life to be like, and then that'll help you to form where you want to go. Now, the next step in implementing this whole idea of focused thinking in your life is to actually stay focused while you practicing these specific times on a daily or weekly basis And you can do this by removing distractions find specific time that you block out for your focused thinking keep items in front of you that'll keep you focused during that time. Don't have a lot of distractions. And then also set some goals of what you want to accomplish with your timelines and question and track your progress. Find out if you're making progress when you're spending this time focused on your thoughts and your life and where you want to be. And finally, if you truly identify that you can have some time to do this, you've got to give up and you've got to find areas that you can sacrifice to make time and commit to your focused thinking. Look, if your life is worth living, then it's worth finding time to focus on creating your best life. And I know you can find areas, maybe it's even areas that you have to give up that you love. but give up a few things that you love in the short term in order to focus on creating the life and the quality of life that you ultimately want to have. You know, maybe just ask yourself this simple question. Am I dedicated to removing the distractions and the mental clutter so that I can concentrate with clarity on creating the life I really desire to live and becoming the person I want to be? That's the question. And if the answer to that question is yes, then I highly encourage you to find time for focused thinking. Because successful people not only focus on their thoughts, not only work on personal development, but they find specific time to blueprint their life, to create and lay out the plan that they want to have for their life. And then you don't find yourself getting up every morning wondering what you're working on today or every week or every month. Successful people have a plan. You can't create a plan unless you actually spend time working on it. So that's my thought for you today. I hope that gets your thought process thinking, gets you focused on blocking out quality time. And if you have any questions, feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Hit me up on The Daily Mastermind on Instagram or The Daily Mastermind on Facebook. We're going to be jumping back into, I mentioned a few episodes ago, some marketing and some financial education later on this week. I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling, but I definitely want to hear some feedback from you on things that you can benefit from, areas that you'd like us to focus on our time with these episodes. So have an amazing day. Once again, this has been George Wright III, and this is The Daily Mastermind. Talk to you soon.