Opportunity or distraction?

[00:00:00] Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go!

[00:00:15] I was reading Syed Balkhi's annual review today. I'll pop it in the show notes, and I immediately had to record this episode. For those of you who don't know him, he is a pretty well known entrepreneur and business owner in the WordPress space. And I'm a sucker for a good annual review post, and he does really good ones.

[00:00:42] And right near the end, he writes this sentence that made me pause and think. And here's how it goes, "Remember, the most dangerous items in our to do lists are the ones that look like opportunities, but are distractions." Aw, man. I I read that sentence, and then I stepped back and just thought really hard, because I felt that sentence right in my soul.

[00:01:09] It was possibly one of the biggest mistakes I made last year. Opportunities that might be distractions and taking advantage of them, thinking I was taking advantage of an opportunity when really it was a distraction from my goals. You know, it's really difficult to figure out what is an opportunity,. A true opportunity and what is a distraction because lots of things are really distractions but they are opportunities and look like that because they could help us in some way and It's a matter of figuring out if they'll move the needle enough to be worth their cost.

[00:01:49] Which then, led me to thinking about something a person I work with said to me one day. He was telling me about how he makes hiring decisions and that when trying to hire, what he's trying to do is find reasons not to hire someone. Everyone is really cool and usually has lots of stuff going for them. So looking for the yeses can make hiring difficult.

[00:02:12] There'll be lots of different yeses. But if you start looking for reasons not to hire a person, you can bring a lot of clarity to the situation. When you find someone you can't find a reason not to hire, or when you find someone who has the least amount of reasons not to hire them perhaps, but ideally the former, not the latter, then you stop. You don't have to go any further because you have found your person.

[00:02:37] So perhaps when we are evaluating options and opportunities and, you know, which fork in the road to go to. Instead of thinking of why that opportunity is a good one, we should think of why that opportunity is not the good one. And that might bring us more clarity and reduce some of that FOMO we sometimes feel, or feel a lot, that fear of missing out.

[00:03:02] The opportunity cost of A is that you might not be able to do B. The opportunity cost of either A or B might mean it takes you longer to get to your end goal, or It might outright derail you and make it impossible to get there at all. The opportunities you should take advantage of are the ones you can't find a reason to reject. Those are the real winners.

[00:03:29] Because, you know, you can't do everything. And you certainly can't do everything all the time. We know this, you and I. We have been over this before. So, if we're going to take advantage of something new, it needs to be really, really solid, and its benefit must outweigh the cost with some serious margin for us to deviate from our plan.

[00:03:52] This way of thinking can be applied to literally everything you do. And I bet, as you've been listening, a particular situation or a set of situations popped into your mind. I know that it did in mine. And that's a signal, a sign, that perhaps there are things in your life you need to apply this idea to, and then perhaps drop, or take on.

[00:04:15] Uh, this is a bit of a short one, or maybe not a short one, but honestly, it's a simple and real, really simple idea. Really really simple. Not that applying it is easy, because none of this stuff is easy, but, you know, maybe it might stick with you in the many many ways you might have heard this before and are hearing this now.

[00:04:39] Hopefully it helps you move the needle in some part of your life that you are trying to make better. You know? It certainly gave me something to think about today.

[00:04:54] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?