Clarity comes through action and experience. Thus, you should focus on getting started and taking action more than you focus on the perfect end result. Optimize for the starting line instead of the finish line.

Instead of committing to a giant, year-long undertaking. Commit to something small and simple so you can get started and get some experience. Then, when you have more clarity about what you are doing and working on, you can continue to mature and build upon that idea, or you can pivot.

There are 8 Laws of Focus. As we enter the final few months of the year it’s important to remember The Law of Tradeoffs.

As David Allen said, you can do anything but you cannot do everything. In order to give your perpetual devotion to any one thing it will require the perpetual neglect of many other things. Focus, therefore, requires tradeoffs.

You can only focus on so many things at a time. And you can only focus for so many hours during the day. Instead of ignoring the limitation on your energy, embrace it and find ways to routinize and automate the non-trivial areas of your life so that even when you are not giving them your full attention and devotion, they are not being fully neglected.

(“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”)

“We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.” — Gretchen Rubin

When you have something difficult on your plate — an activity or responsibility you must do but which you don’t want to do — ask yourself this:

How it could be easy? How it could be fun?

(h/t Jenny Blake)