Starve It

Attention is the oxygen that keeps any agenda alive. Good and bad.

Give your attention to a goal and watch it grow. You think about it, work on it, move towards it. Your focus becomes its fuel.

But the same is true of your problems.

Every conflict you replay in your head, every difficult person you obsess over, every situation you keep returning to mentally, you are feeding it. You are keeping it alive. When you fight a problem, you breathe life into it. When you starve it of attention, you suffocate it.

This is the distinction most people never make. Between problems that deserve your attention and problems that deserve to be ignored.

Not every battle needs to be fought. Not every perceived slight needs a response. Not every conflict needs a resolution. Some things, left alone, simply fade away.

We have been taught to confront, solve, and defeat problems. Yet, no one tells us that, in a surprising number of cases, the most powerful thing we can do with a problem is to look away.

If something is occupying your mind today, pause and ask yourself one question. Does this deserve my attention, or does it deserve my indifference?

That single question might be the most useful thing you do all day.