Hippie Logic

adapted from the post at CopyBlogger.com

A young man was struggling in everything.

In school, she was getting decent grades, but could never get the 4.0 semester he worked for. He had friends, but there was no one he felt really close to. he had a job, but felt like things were on the fritz and he was about to be let go.

When she saw a successful classmate of hers, she would wonder “how do they do it?” The girl in question kept a 3.9, had tons of people that loved them and a few she considered true friends, and she had an offer to stay at her job when she graduated.

Halfway into the semester, the struggling girl finally got over her pride after class and asked her classmate. “How are you able to have such an incredible life? How do you excel at everything you’re doing?” She asked if he would like to talk about it over coffee tomorrow. She was cute, so he quickly made the date.

After ordering their drinks from the bag-hatted girl behind the counter, they sat in the corner booth. She of course saw a couple people she knew so said hello and started on her latte.

“So how is it that you can do everything you do and do it so well? I’m a pretty active guy and I’m ok in school, but you seem to do things so easily.”

“From what I can tell, you’re doing it all right,” she says. “Well then what’s the difference? How come you are able to excel easily and I struggle just to get by?”

Another sip from her latte.

“You’re looking everywhere, but you’re not seeing anything.”

“I knew it was some sort of hippie logic.”

“No, no. Let me explain. Take a look around the coffee shop. What do you see?”

“I don’t know. Art, laptops, hipsters, the usual.”

“How many salt shakers did you see?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t really looking for them.” He turns and scans again and realizes that the room is full of salt shakers. One on almost every table.

“So what’s your point?”

“My point is that you’ve been looking at everything, like your schoolwork and relationships, but you haven’t really seen any of them. You’ve been falling flat because you don’t know what you’ve been looking for. When you can focus and only look for salt shakers, they will be easier to find.”

The reason I struggle sometimes is because I try to do everything at once. Some people call it multi-tasking. I’ll never be good at that, so instead I do one thing at a time and I do it well.

Single tasking. My boy Leo talks about it over at Zen Habits.

So my advice is to stop multi-tasking. Look at and focus on the one thing you are doing right now, and do it well.

What do you think?

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