The world provides a lot of opportunities and gives us the chance to try many great things. Doing so, however, can stretch our time too thin. As Adam Grant, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, points out, when we gain almost nothing when we try everything.
Picture: I’m Perfect Lazybones (Shutterstock)
I had an office hours conversation with a student who had just joined her 17th club. There’s no way you can meaningfully participate in seventeen clubs. This is the “fear of missing out” concept. It’s perverse, but the more you fear missing out, the more you actually miss out. Then you are peripherally participating in a bunch of things and have no meaningful engagement in anything.
Focus takes effort. You have to make choices and let things go. When you have so many goals and so much you want to achieve, saving something for later doesn’t come easy. Nevertheless, you get no value out of a wide breadth of tasks when you tackle them all at once. Unless we prioritise, we gain very little from our efforts.
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