You’ve heard it all before:
Success requires ownership.
You must take full responsibility for your life.
Although true, in my experience most men don’t suffer from lack of ownership, but from OVER ownership.
Out of duty, they accumulate commitments and responsibilities over time, until they are caught in a web of obligation so thick they become numbed and paralyzed.
It’s a conundrum: as men, we are energized by taking on new challenges.
But when you “own” too many commitments, your wits, powers and creative forces are dissipated, and your life loses both joy and impact.
To truly OWN your life at a deep level, you must narrow the path and actively “disown” the commitments that are not essential to your mission, that do not reflect or support your deep loves.
Your passion is finite: there can be no deep ownership without commensurately deep disownership.
The steps are simple:
1. Pull out a piece of paper and write down a list of commitments you would like to disown.
2. Circle the 3 to 5 items on your list that are most numbing to you AND the easiest to stop doing from a practical standpoint.
3. Have the courageous conversation with whoever will be inconvenienced by your disowning (in many cases this person will be YOU).
Tell them you must now say “no” to the commitment because a bigger “YES” is calling, and you have decided to answer the call at the deepest level.
Michelangelo said “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
In the same way, the key to unlocking the impact you crave lies not in pushing yourself harder, but in making the courageous decision to cut away the “worthy yet extraneous” distractions around you, that you might tap the vein of magic that only comes from digging deep and narrow.
So make the list, take a deep breath, and start cutting.
Things are about to get a whole lot easier.
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