The curse of Jack

... Not captain Sparrow

Today I’d like to talk about something that not many people talk about regarding why it is so difficult to succeed in life, especially in Africa. I’m not sure whether we’re refusing to talk about it, or it’s just something everyone sees as common knowledge, and so not worth the time to talk about. Maybe it’s even that it’s so simple that most people don’t notice how it’s actually a thing. Okay, enough of the ambiguity.

I’m talking about a lack of focus

Most of the time when we talk about a lack of focus, we’re looking at it from a negative angle in the sense that we consider it as a bad trait people have where they’re not able to stay and live in the present, or in the case of this post, they’re not able to focus on just one thing. We fail to analyze it from the perspective of the person in question, and end up judging them wrong.

In Africa, one of the biggest reasons I’ve come to realize that people don’t succeed in life because of is that they lack focus.

We want to multitask and juggle many different tasks and aspirations together, so instead of mastering one trade, we end up becoming a jack of many of those trades, but a novice at all of them.

I call this the curse of Jack

Yesterday, a met up with an old friend to catchup and unwind, and this topic ended up surfacing in our discussion. He was telling me how he planned to dedicate everything for the next 2 years to one particular project he was piloting. The decision was born out of his observation that sometimes, our desire to be involved in many different things at once robs or limits our ability to focus on and become the best at it.

But can you blame us?

You really can’t. Nobody multitasks for the pleasure or joy of it. We do it because we live in a system where you can’t take chances on just one thing. The what ifs ringing in your ear are literally endless.

“What if it doesn’t work out”
“What if after the 5 years of dedication, I don’t end up successful at this, and my colleagues who explored different options and interests are doing better than me”
“What exactly should I focus on? School, entrepreneurship, my passion? What?”

And the fear of these questions force you to against your will, juggle the multiple jobs, or projects or whatever.

About 5 months ago, I wanted to start learning to code. I really wanted to do this because I saw it as something fun, and I thought learning it now and maybe getting some internships with it, I could branch out into IT or something like that. In today’s ever-competitive job market, experience in whatever you can find might just be what gets you a job or THE job.

Anyways, after about 3 days of working actively on it, I realized I started skipping out on the practice because I was serial job hunting, trying to keep my hive blog alive, and enrolled in an entrepreneurship workshop, as well as a digital class masterclass. Where’s the focus?

Of course, some people might argue that all this comes down to time management. I wouldn’t entirely disagree with this. But that’s the whole point of being able to focus – dedicating the majority of your time and attention to something.

Even now, there are things I know I want to do or pursue, but have put on hold because I’m just one person with only 24 hours a day. And for some of them, I am almost certain that if I was to give them my 100%, I’d eventually succeed in them. The problem is that we need to survive the present to be able to create the future we want, so whiles focusing on something that’ll pay in the long term is great and the best path to take, we need to find a way to survive first. So you’re in a constant struggle of going all or nothing.

All images used here belong to HOPin Academy and are used with their permission

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