Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy.

by Bob Goff

Look for virtues, not flaws, in the people around you, and you will find a beautiful path forward in your life.

If you play the cynic, please stop, for your sake and ours. I know you think you are being helpful, but the hard truth is, you are not. You may not realize it, but you are a distraction.

You’ll know you have found the right community when all the talk is about Jesus and what He did with His life—not someone’s opinions about what you ought to be doing with yours.

If you’re going to live an undistracted life of immense purpose, it must begin with brutal honesty.

It is refreshing and freeing to tell yourself the truth.

Distraction can capture your calendar and hijack your happiness.

The trick in aviation is to have a quiet cockpit. By that, I mean you need to avoid getting distracted by what is going on outside the cockpit and losing track of what is going on inside.

Quiet down your life if it has become loud.

Here’s a surprising thing though: Most of us never decide to be happy.

get fully engrossed in something lasting we care about, eliminate some of the decisions we make, and find our joy again.

If we want to live more undistracted lives, we need to get real and admit that busyness is actually hijacking our joy.

Do this with some urgency too. You don’t have as much time as you think you have.

The days are long, but the years are short. If you fill your days with trivial stuff, you will look up one day and a year or a decade or a half-century will have passed.

Don’t wait until you are old to ask yourself: What have I done with all that time? Why not ask yourself right now? What am I going to do with all the time ahead of me?

We tend to think that happiness is something out there that we need to attain.

People who are happy and filled with joy get a ton more accomplished than people who aren’t.

If you choose happiness and joy, then kindness and empathy and engagement are the outcomes.

We are not going to get to the important, courageous, purposeful work of being the most priceless versions of ourselves if we aren’t being nice to ourselves or the people around us.

Remember this: Most disagreeable people out there don’t think they are mean. They think they are right.

If you are a person of faith, at some point you’ll need to decide whether you want to be right or if you want to be Jesus. Choose wisely, because you are picking more than just an argument; you are picking your legacy.

When being right gets in the way of being kind, we need to catch our breath and decide who we want to be all over again.

If you want to make a big impact in the world, stop throwing pine on the fire in your life and burn the oak instead. Play the long game.

Lose the handheld distractions. Think of phone use as cheating on your family.

If you want to see change in your life, take a realistic look at where you are right now. How are you spending your time? Write down on a paper plate how much time you spend with your family.

Surround yourself with reminders of who you are and what you want.

When you overload your life with decisions that seem important but aren’t, you forgo the chance to choose happiness and joy.

Declare yourself completely free from those distractions and habits and activities that have become familiar but are no longer serving you.

You will only be as free as you actually believe you are.

Write your “Declaration Against Distraction” and then buckle up. You have just created the space for an abundance of joy and purpose to come flooding into your life.

Be captivated with purpose and you’ll care less about everyone’s predictions.

He learned some hard and no doubt painful lessons, but he turned these setbacks into something beautiful in our lives. That’s what people living with purpose and joy decide to do.

Finding your life’s purpose will entail some failure and more than a few pushbacks along the way.

People are going to fail; I am going to fail; you are going to fail; we are going to fail.

Show me someone who does not appear to fail, and I will show you someone distracted by maintaining an ego driven by appearance over vulnerable authenticity.

When we make a mistake, we have a chance to take His grace out for a drive.

The challenge is this: What will you believe about yourself after a failure?

Will you let approval and applause be your barometer for success, purpose, and meaning?

The only script God has for us is Jesus.

It’s hard to get my arms or my fingers around that kind of math. So why care about the grades your best friend makes or the car your neighbor drives? Why carry around those negative predictions and proclamations from the doubters?

Get busy seeing yourself the way God sees you.

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Some of us might need to ask ourselves why we keep heading for the predictability and obscurity of the rafters rather than moving a little closer to the action.

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Lesson one here: Don’t let your great idea wither as you wait for approval.

An undistracted life filled with love and joy and purpose and faith might just be the duct tape you need to hold your dreams together.