Day: June 4, 2017

The title is a phrase from the oath of office that each coauthor has taken multiple times during our military careers. Most American citizens don’t think a lot about the domestic part of that oath even though we have had reminders throughout our history from Benedict Arnold to Timothy McVeigh who represent this portion of our oath. Sometimes the enemy isn’t someone but something.

I believe this to be the case in our national security apparatus currently and I think true self-sacrifice is being overshadowed by the need to act on short-term ___ in order to maintain long-term security and stability. More specifically, I believe our LTG H.R. McMaster has made some short term sacrifices, including spinning stories for the administration, with the long term objective of keeping his job and maintaining the ability to influence and direct what little strategy comes out of this administration. He is not alone. Scores of individuals have been pressing on through silliness and self-absorbed behavior to continue serving the nation. This is a true dilemma of integrity that not many of us have to face on this grand a scale, but I believe we all face from time to time in our lives. This is when we find out what really matters to us and what we are willing to sacrifice personally for the benefit of others.

I missed today’s post because I was too focused on something else.  Having total focus is not necessarily a bad thing…except when you have other things to do.  Most of the books I’ve read on being successful talk about perfect focus.  Rick Pitino (for the non-sports types – he was a very successful college basketball coach) in his book, Success is a Choice extolled the virtues of focus and how it helped him be a successful coach. Phil Jackson (winningest coach in professional sports) in his book, Eleven Rings spoke about the absolute focus that Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant had on his championship teams. They had that amazing ability to see the whole court when they needed to, but also to focus when they took a shot.

Focus can be a negative though – many of the most focused people I know can’t seem to manage more than one thing at once (call it good or bad). Achieving a perfect balance between focus and being able to do more than one thing at once can be hard. The book I recently finished, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr spoke about the myth of multitasking.  Experiments have shown that when college students were asked to do more than one thing, such as listen to a lecture while watching TV, or surf the web, and then tested on the material from the lecture– they did significantly worse than those who focused on the lecture. Even though they all believed they were great multitaskers.

We are all trying to find balance in our lives– which brings me to the point of this post. It can take a lifetime to find the balance between opening your aperture to see things around you  and having perfect focus – and that’s okay. Remember to see the forest and not get too focused on the trees (yesterday’s post), but also be in the moment -focus on what you are doing – and be happy.