Last year, I made my amateur Muay Thai debut. After a three-month camp I won my first mutual catchweight bout. Needless to say, my camp was extremely physically intense (as well as mentally, emotionally, and spiritually) and contained within it many, many push-ups. During one of the many PT sessions that made up this fight camp, I found myself lagging behind some of my fellow fighters during these push-ups. They would always seem to crank out their twenty or thirty much faster than me. Whenever I looked over, they were half-repping (sometimes less!). Now these were good fighters and had won a fair few fights already; so clearly they knew what they were doing. This led to a profound personal realisation: I wasn't training for a push-up competition; I was training for a Muay Thai fight.
I'm not suggesting that you cut corners or do things half-heartedly. You should of course strive to do everything to an elite standard. Rather, I am encouraging you to play the game of life with a bit more strategy.
Often in life, we find ourselves doing things simply because we're "meant to" or because we believe, at a superficial level, that they will help us to achieve some goal. We then fixate on the quality of these ancillary activities or skills rather than how they holistically contribute to achieving our high-level goal. This is especially exacerbated by the goal being lofty or ill-defined (as so many worthy goals in life are).
So today I encourage you to reclaim your focus by sheer brute force and reflect on whether what you're doing right now really contributes to what you want to achieve and, even if it truly does, are you focusing too much on the "thing" rather than the ultimate goal? After all, what you do today matters.
Maybe for you there's a tomorrow,
maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten,
so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like a coin through your fingers
so much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today.
And what you do today matters.
-- Before I Fall (2017)