FOCUS

Margaret Mead once said, "What people say, what people do, and what people say they do are entirely different things."

     What a difference is makes to have a one track mind when it comes to certain things in your life. In 1999, I became a big Major League Baseball fan, and I loved watching Tony Gwynn play baseball. I used to take baseball hitting classes every week and I would always try to mimmic him (Sadly I never could). Tony is one of the best hitters the world has ever seen play the game of baseball. At the time he was the greatest hitter in all of baseball and he is a definite future Hall of Famer. In his career, he batted a tremendous .339 and he has won an incredible eight batting titles (only Ty Cobb has won more.)
     Tony Gwynn loves hitting a baseball, and he DEVOTES himself to it. Several times each season, he would read Ted William's: The Science of Hitting, which  is a book he first found while in college. He watches film of himself hitting from previous games and has a library full of his hitting tapes. The guy even reviewed tapes of previous games while he was traveling on the road. Heres a fun thought, back in 1999, they didn't have the technology we have today. Tony would take VCR'S with him, EVERYWHERE. Gwynn just cant get enough and thats because hitting is a joy to him. I remember hearing stories of Gwynn arriving to social events with a batting glove in his pocket. Gwynn is Mr. Consistency, he has cultivated a kind of concentration for baseball unknown to most people.
    So, what does it take to have the focus that is required to be truly effective in your personal life? The answer to this question is simple: priorities and concentration. A person who knows his priorities but lacks concentration knows what to do but never gets it done. If he has concentration but lacks the discipline of prioritizing his life, he has excellence without progress. Now if that same person does both of these things, he has the potential to achieve great things.
     Are you a Tony Gwynn when it comes to your life or are you the kid in a batting cage trying to mimic his movements like I was but never achieving what you set out to accomplish? We can learn a lot from Tony Gwynn by looking at how he concentrated on his strengths while prioritizing his life so that he could become one of the greatest baseball players in all of history. Tony didn't focus on stealing bases because that wasn't a strength of his. He focused on hitting because that was what he was great at. So, what things in your life are distracting you from fulfilling your true potential for your life? Don't be the guy who chases two rabbits because both will get away.