How To Focus On What Matters
Colby Combs was 25 years old mountaineer in 1992 when he and 2 buddies, Ritt Kellogg and Tom Walter were on a steep climb on Alaska’s Mount Foraker attempting to claim a new route over three days. As the winds got stronger and visibility plummeted they had decided to abandon their plan to reach the summit. The upward ecsape route was a difficult one and they were further hindered by the porous ice rendering their securing tools fairly useless. The men continued to move upwards unsecured but tied together.
When Combs felt the line tied to one of is friends go slack he looked up just in time to see an avalanche nearly on top of him. He began sliding fast whilst trying to self arrest. He remembers hitting something and sailing through the air at which point he was knocked out cold.
When he came round he was in excruciating pain. His ankle, shoulder blade and two vertebrae were broken and he was suffering from concussion. The rope that led to his friend Walter was limp and he could see that his face was frozen in ice. His best friend was dead. It was not long before he discovered that his other partner Kellogg had also been killed.
He was alone.
Although now alone, devastated by the loss of his friends and hardly able to move without searing pain racking his body, he knew that he had to continue up the difficult technical slope to find safety. Every step was agony and he recalls thinking ‘I don’t care if my foot falls off’ and forcing himself into an ‘unstoppable mentality.’
Once he had reached the top of his route then came the descent. Six days of tortuous, agonizing, frustrating dead ends, getting lost, falling and self arresting – all with the accompaniment of the searing pain of his splintered bones. Even once he had reached the base camp he still had to walk a five mile crossing over a glacier.
He survived and spent three months in a wheelchair.
Combs quotes one of my favourite lines:
“Anything that gets in the way of success has to be eliminated – emotion, fear, pain. It’s the mental things that will impede your survival.”
Impede emotion? Why, it all sounds so cold and calculating surely?
I think of a lioness on the Serengeti Plains meeting an impala and her young ‘in. Then chasing and knocking down the impala’s baby, suffocating it and dragging it back unemotionally to her own children to eat. There is no ‘Is yours teething yet? Mine keeps me up all night…’ chatter between the new mums. It’s wham bam…not even thank you ma’am…just KILL!
It’s crude, it’s sad – (at least to us and the impala family), but the reality is, despite our higher intelligence, cognition and sad feelings towards the underdog, that’s how our lives are also. The survival of the fittest. It is not really a question of right and wrong. It is fact. It is nature.
To get what you want and depending on how much it really means to you, one has to clear the mind and pathway of clutter, nonsense, other people’s drama, our own drama and FOCUS.
We are often too involved in what does not concern us on a daily basis and this is one of the greatest impediments to our desired success.
We are bothered about what someone else thinks about us. We are overly bothered about what other people say about us. We are worried about things that may never happen. Instead of focusing on what we want we focus on the difficulty getting it. Ask anyone considering going on a diet.
I have always enjoyed and solicited the simple focus of Combs’s unstoppable mentality to acquire what I want from life. It is not always easy. Particularly when your attention is split in several ways because actually, quite a few things matter and deserve your attention.
It is interesting to note that notoriously private Steve Jobs decided to write a revealing book once he knew that he was dying, ostensibly to inform his children about who he really was, as his focus was often pointed in the direction of his remarkable business accomplishments and not at them.
It is no secret that life is not always easy, but it appears to be untapped enlightenment for many that consistently and persistently it can be simplified.
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24 Responses to “How To Focus On What Matters”
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Hi Pea,
You are quite right – very similar themes in our posts this week.
Great story about the mountaineer – of course having the mental toughness in a survival situation is completely different to every day life. But using examples like this, they provide excellent motivation to help us to push harder.
And as you say ‘It’s not always easy’ because we shouldn’t be so selfish as to forget our responsibility to others.
There is no point in striving for the top to find yourself all alone when you get there.
Chris Richards – Mindnod.com recently posted..How to develop mental toughness and become unstoppable
So true Chris. Life is a continual balancing game isn’t it?
Family, work, ourselves, our desires, family needs and wants, money, leisure time…but most of the time we do alright and we should acknowledge that every now and then…Of course for a lot of folks right now it IS like survival mode albeit not necessarily physical danger.
Pea recently posted..How To Focus On What Matters
Great story. In our house, we have a saying, “Your emotions will betray you.” This is not to say that emotions have no value, but we endeavor to teach our children that the easiest path to failure is to only do what you feel like doing. I don’t claim to have the mental toughness of the remarkable Mr. Combs, but I’m constantly aware of how my mindset affects my ability to achieve my goals.
Candice recently posted..5 Reasons Why Joining A Gym Is Worth the Money
…And I think that is key. Being aware of our mindset and it’s effect on our past present and futures. Being mindful of our actions is not common enough and it is a big step in itself – although it shouldn’t be! I’ll be over to see about that gym you are referring to soon.
This is exactly the inspiration I look for… I often wonder how strong my will to live is… But then again I guess you only know when you need to.
David W recently posted..I Peed My Pants in College
Here’s hoping we never get to find out! – Although I believe that we are all capable of the super human stuff we all read about given the right impetus David. (And hurrah! I got your title on my blog page! It is my current Pavlovian trigger as it always makes me smile).
Simple question Pea. What does one do when more than one thing matter ? Pursue them and take care of them with focus ? I suppose it helps to have clarity and bring it down to a few things. It’s really just a handful of priorities that truly matter. It does have to do with clarity..
I shall tell you what I do Uzma. I realize that we have familial priorities and work priorities and personal priorities, but I cannot deal with them all at once with equal quality. So I simplify. As the brain cannot be strongly focused all the time I don’t try to make it do so.
I split my day into the most significant issue down to the least and and give each one my focus one by one. So if I had an essay with a deadline to write, that gets done first and acquires all my focus up until an allocated time, maybe four hours of writing with rests in between. As you go through the day your focus will naturally wane so you prioritize and do what is important early on. I try to avoid doing multiple things all at once badly.
This can be applied to workload, leisure time with the children or blogging after a day at the office. You really hit the mail on the head when you said ‘clarity’. Get clarity by simplifying. We are human and we can only do so much.
Simplify and cut away what is not truly important and choose carefully just a few things to focus on. This might even take a bit of time to free yourself from commitments you thought you could do but really can’t. But that’s okay, I constantly edit out the unnecessary on a daily or weekly basis. If I start feeling stressed or confused I know it is because there is too much going on and I cannot focus properly.
I enjoyed the story very much. I certainly believe in the same message of focus too. I have found that I achieved much more where there is focus.
Evelyn Lim recently posted..Law of Attraction Quotes – Thanksgiving Tribute
Thanks for popping over as ever Evelyn.
Pea,
I like thinking of life as a journey in many ways and that things you find along the way can help or deter your destination (whether or not that destination is attainable, but we won’t get too philosophical:) It’s a state of mind as well and what you put out in terms of your thoughts and expectations largely determines what you get in return. So optimism is a must as your first story illustrates so well.
Peace.
Sophia
Sophia recently posted..Venice as a "Leafless City." Diary entry: Venice, Nov. 4th
…And Viktor Frankl’s story and his book ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ is a great example of this:
Even in the degradation and abject misery of a concentration camp, Frankl was able to exercise the most important freedom of all – the freedom to determine one’s own attitude and spiritual well-being. No sadistic Nazi SS guard was able to take that away from him or control the inner-life of Frankl’s soul. One of the ways he found the strength to fight to stay alive and not lose hope was to think of his wife. Frankl clearly saw that it was those who had nothing to live for who died quickest in the concentration camp.
“He who has a why for life can put with any how.”
Frederick Nietzsche
Frankl wrote the following while being marched to forced labor in a Nazi concentration camp:
We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor’s arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his hand behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: “If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don’t know what is happening to us.”
That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another on and upward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look then was more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way–an honorable way–in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
In front of me a man stumbled and those following him fell on top of him. The guard rushed over and used his whip on them all. Thus my thoughts were interrupted for a few minutes. But soon my soul found its way back from the prisoners existence to another world, and I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered…
My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn’t even know if she were still alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, and the thoughts of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I still would have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of that image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying…
Wow Pea!
This is quite a powerful image. Thanks so much for sharing it. So much to learn from it. I love the ‘conversation’ that he has with his wife and the belief in that being nothing but real, and giving him strength. Love it:)
Sophia recently posted..Venice as a "Leafless City." Diary entry: Venice, Nov. 4th
Pea — I got the story about Comb. When faced with survival, we must focus only on it. Even our body does this naturally by conserving the warmth of the blood for our essential organs. There is simplicity in that action.
I also agree about the importance of focusing on where we WANT to go and not as much on the difficulties of getting there.
What stopped me in this post was the brief story about Steve Jobs. I wasn’t really clear how his story could be compared to Comb’s survival story or even focusing on where we want to go. As humans, we have the ability to focus on more than one thing and still accomplish a lot. Our brains can balance and juggle.
Steve Job made a choice about where to put his focus; he wasn’t in a life or death situation. Whereas Comb’s story inspired, Job’s story was simply sad, at least to me. Focus can help us simply our lives, but if it comes at the price of the people we love, then I’d rather my life be complex and complicated.
However, what I love about your posts is they always make me think! I’ll be thinking about this one for quite awhile:~)
Sara recently posted..Being Thankful
Interesting…my aim was not really to compare the two sets of focus against each other per se, I was just pointing out another form of extreme human focus. Jobs achieved what he did because, as with a lot of people like him, his focus came at the expense of human relationships. I understand Jobs mentality because there is a side of me that identifies with it. Maybe, like me he realized that he cannot comfortably split himself in multiple chaotic paths and chose to focus on one. Sometimes maybe it is not as easy as a selfish choice as our brains work differently for each of us. And yet, maybe it was indeed a simple selfish choice.
Jobs was a super-accomplished person, so although you rightfully say we humans can accomplish a lot, average accomplishments would not suit this character type. It is not enough…and I’m talking about the Michael Jackson’s, the Mother Theresa’s and the Madonna’s of this world where a shrug of acceptance of less than exacting perfection simply won’t do. But as I have not read Job’s book I can’t say much more about that – only that his traits are very recognizable to me. I personally would not have made the same choices with family that he made but as with everything different balances suit different people.
Always happy to see your contribution Lady Wordsmith.
Life aint always easy…. aint that the truth. Sometimes I fall short of staying focused on the journey and the inspiration. We have so many outside distractions. This story really puts it all in perspective. Thanks for sharing!
Hey Meg, that is so true about distractions and frankly that is just one reason it is so nice to have found a network of talented blog writers to read regularly. Sometimes we already know the message but they constantly remind us in their varying styles. It’s all good.
Hey again Pea. Your reply to Sophia is so beautiful and powerful. Viktor Frankl’s book and message really taught me something too, when I read it. The greatest freedom is the ability to choose our reaction to a situation, was the message that stayed with me. Thank you for reminding me of the other messages too. God bless.
Uzma recently posted..‘The Sun never says’; A lesson in love and happiness
You are always welcome Uzma. Yes, that’s the clear message right there, that even in the most dire situation it is still our own choice to be a victim.
Thank you for being my zen haven. Sometimes it comes with a push in the right direction, and other times it comes with a comfy chair!
Normally when I think of simplicity I think of easy. It’s not. It takes as much effort, if not more, than mindless acquiring things.
Ever since I discovered your blog, I’ve always looked forward to the next post. Because of that, I’ve chosen you for the Liebster Blog Award today. It’s a way to pay our gratitude forward for a well-written blog and to help expand our audiences.
Tammy recently posted..Defining Success
You are too kind Tammy and yes it’s not always easy to simplify mainly because of all the opposition we meet every day from so many sources. Businesses, advertisers, people, governments who have more to gain from complication and lack of clarity, but we solider on…
Great motivational story about the mountaineer thanks really helps to push harder on doing things.
Thank you Pauline and welcome. I rather like your flying Twitter bird on your site!