Focus

Have you ever had a little piece of popcorn stuck in your teeth? Most of the time you’re in the middle of doing something when you first notice it. No matter how hard you try to forget it and focus on the task at hand, your tongue keeps going back to it.
 
George Lucas couldn’t leave Star Wars alone. He had to reissue the original trilogy with changes and fixes for things that didn’t bother most fans. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone.
 
An artist gazing at her beautiful painting sees all the things she did wrong.
 
I look at a post that’s 7 months old and worry about an error. (I fixed it.)
 
We focus on problems and can’t stop ourselves.
 
I took a writing class at the Loft and had to critique another student’s work. I read it through once and didn’t like it at all. There were too many grammar errors. The instructions for critiquing were to talk about the good things in the piece. Ahh, what to do? So, I reread the piece to find something good to say about it. This time I decided to ignore anything bad and just focus on what was good. To my surprise I found myself liking it that time.
 
What if we looked for the positives of our focus on problems? Is there anything positive about that? And if you look for the positive you can find it. That focus is what drives us to improve. Many of the things we depend on in our lives came from someone solving a problem. People who couldn’t leave well enough alone are responsible for most of the great inventions.
 
As in all things in life there are good parts and bad parts. Which one we focus on is up to us.​