Having Singleness Of Purpose

You may have a couple of things you plan to do, but you need to start with one to maintain focus. An adage in this part of the world emphatically says that "you cannot put your entire fingers inside your mouth all at once." What this means is that you do not need to put yourself in a position to do everything at the same time if you want to achieve the best result. There are times you will even discover that you tend to save time by doing things once at a time than trying to multitask unnecessarily. So try to have singleness of purpose to maximise your result.

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There was a particular scenario that I witnessed some months back that still reverberates in my memory because of the lesson it taught me. Even though it look casual, but I learnt a couple of things from it. I watched a little boy trying to fill up a bucket with water. The bucket was at the corner, so he needed to use small pan to be fetching the water until the bucket is full. What draw my attention was the way he was going about it. He tried to carry two pans at the same time, which was obviously more than his capacity. So it limited his speed of movement, then almost all the whole waters poured on transit. By the time he got to the bucket, the pan was almost empty, so the water he poured into the bucket was very small. He kept on repeating the same process with very little efforts.

After a couple of times, he decided to drop one pan and used only one to fetch the water. It was at this point that his efforts began to yield fruits. He did not only gain time but the water was no longer pouring away and the amount of energy he expended was reduced. In a short time, he was able to full the bucket. If he had continued with the former way, he would have continued to exercise in futility. In life, one of the reasons why it seems like some people do not achieve success is because they are trying to do many things at the same time without getting anyone done and at the end, they would have progressed in futility.

In life, you need consistency to achieve success, but consistency comes by being committed to a course and having singleness of purpose. Imagine someone starting a business today and tomorrow, he will abandon it and jump into another business and then the next day he will start another one, how will he make a headway in business? What some people may not know is that the point they back off from an action may be the point that is almost close to their breakthrough. A tree that must produce fruit must be positioned in one place and not being transplanted here and there.

When you focus on doing one thing at a time, you will give it your best, and you will see a better result than trying to multitask with many things at once. I remember sometimes ago that I wanted to learn a particular skill. So I decided to learn it with some other things that I was also learning at that point. However, I discovered that it did not work out that way and I struggled to concentrate in all of them. Then I decided to focus on one first, get it done, then go over to the next. With that, it became very easy and the result was amazing.

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When I was younger, there was this game we normally did. We would go to hunt bush rat inside the village with some other people. The way the hunting was done was that a disturbance will be created inside the hole where the rats live, and as they run out of the hole, we would chase and catch them. But I discovered that the first time I tried it, I could not catch any rat. So I asked one of the persons that went with me why I could not catch any rat and he told me plainly that I was not focused on one rat but on multiple rats, so I could not catch any. By the time the disturbance was created again in the hole and the rats ran out in their numbers, I simply ignored all of them and focused on one. I caught it and I was happy. It was then that I knew that success comes with focus and singleness of purpose.

I am not saying that you cannot do more than one thing at the same time; of course you can, but do not allow one to distract you from the other. More so, if doing something one after the other will bring better result than doing all of them at once, then nothing stops you from doing it one after the other.

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