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You have an amazing ability to focus by filtering. By simply following the instructions, you actually should have missed the moonwalker. On the other hand, awareness of everything usually means understanding of nothing.
Billy Chapel, Kevin Costner’s pitcher character in “For the Love of the Game” understood that. Prior to each inning, he would say to himself, “Clear the mechanism!” With that, all crowd noise went quiet. There was one, and only one, thing to be aware of.
“I don’t think I’m good at much of anything right now,” I told my friend Brent last week.
“No,” he said, “the problem is that you’re good at too many things.”
I need to clear the mechanism.
Paul understood that. “This one thing I do,” he said (Philippians 4:13). Translation: “This myriad of possible things I don’t do.”
Without the challenge of the specific instructions, I would have seen the dancing bear. Heck, I would have seen the black team, the white team, the fuzzy guy, the color of the floor, the number of basketballs in play, the racial and gender breakdown of the players, and who knows what else.
In other words, I wouldn’t have remembered a thing.
Filter. It’s the only way to focus. In the end, success isn’t about all the things you can see, do, or accomplish. It’s about the things you choose to ignore while you focus on the one thing that matters most in the moment.
