Dream and Hustle

While You Put Out the Fires, Focus on Finding the Arsonist

Petty distractions are the biggest barrier to being productive and progressive in your life. One of the best things you can do is write down all of the stuff that goes on in your day to understand how you living. One of the things you should take special note is all of the petty distractions in your day, including petty thoughts. Then the most important thing you need to analyze is who the cause of this pettiness.

The average brotha or sista do not realize it but they have people in their life causing a bunch of fires for the brotha and sista to be distracted. I had cats in my circle where I’m telling them my goals and they want to downplay me hoping to have me put doubts in myself. I had chicks trying to BS me and put up silly “chase her” games as prerequisites to getting some. At jobs, I had jealous co-workers trying to create faults and illogic and then tried to say I’m not good because of all these problems they created and wanted to involve me in the faults. All of these cats were creating fires and wanted me to spend my time putting it out as they watched from a distance like an arsonist.

Then there are other factors such as poverty traps that designed to keep you in debt and perpetually pay only the interest. Don’t worry – these predators pull this same stunt with interest only mortgages and credit card companies that tried to trap you for making one mistake and jump to 27% interest rate. All of this are institutional fires these corporations put in our lives to disrupt our financial stability so they can profit. Then the government tries to find ways to get you a speeding ticket or a fine putting fires for you to pay off and they setup cats all the time.

So you got friends and family trying to put drama in your life to be distracted, you got financial institutions and the government trying to find ways to get at what little money you had. So you spend your life putting out fires other people are causing and not getting any progress done. Then you notice new bills come out of nowhere and need to get paid and your money is always short or barely making it. So how do you handle it? Here is what I had to do:

Write Down Your Day. That means if you wake up and forget breakfast, didn’t pack lunch and have to buy something at work, your kids got you running around for their stuff, your friends calling you about some reality TV show that feature Black women, a bill collector calling – write it all down and start taking note. Be in charge of the events in your life and take record of everything entering your life, your space.

Assign Value to the Events. If you are at work and they always got some stupid ish happening where you have to spend most of your day correcting an issue, then you ain’t learning anything new on the job to advance your career. That is the kind of analysis you have to make. One of the analysis I make with sistas is how she uses my time and money and quality.

Keep what’s Valuable and Remove what’s Worthless. The guy with the ego that thinks he better than or the sista that is too sanctified and has too much damn pride, drop their ass. The family member who live nearby but won’t show up when you race for the Cure to support your college friend who has cancer, just keep them in the background. The credit card bill that you know they will try to settle for pennies on the dollar before going to court – throw it at the bottom of the pile. Focus on the things that add value and the best way to add value is to remove the things that don’t add value.

Learn to Detect Arsonists. These are people who are not on a mission or a goal, plain and simple. Trust me, someone who is working full-time to start a side hustle do not got bandwidth to see how they can f*ck up your life because they fighting to get their own life to take off in some kind of direction. It’s the “alright” and “blessed” cats who ain’t got ish going on that involve themselves in trying to see how they can put drama in your life so they can have something to talk about. Anybody who ain’t about nothing special and just sitting there – don’t let them into your life and keep it moving.

Let Some of that Ish Burn! If you have a lot of active fires going on around you that you have to put out, you will spend all of your time fighting those fires instead of getting to the root cause. Sometimes, you got to sit back and let ish burn itself out and don’t get involve. Instead, sit back and find the arsonist and deal with them directly.

The key thing when dealing with all the negative drama and crap showing up is to find out who are the arsonists behind the scenes. You will soon realize they are people you thought were your friends and also family members who got nothing going on in their lives. You will also find cats at your job or in your field as a competitor try to distract you with fires also. But also, keep in mind a lot of these financial companies and the government like to generate revenue finding ways to get you caught up.

Write it all down, then next to each issue you going on, write down how you going to fight back, write down who is responsible and also write down how you never going to let it happen to you again. Now you can go out and know for certain you ain’t putting up with people trying to impress you instead of have something impressive about themselves and focus on what you want. When a bill collector call, you just hang up on them while they talking because you know they ain’t the ones who can enforce the debt. Then you will be just as happy putting out fires because that is a path to your progress.

If you didn’t realize, the best CEO, head of companies and leaderships – their jobs is to put out fires effectively and focus on the mission. This is what you going to have to do in your personal life. You will be surprised what you can accomplish once you learn to deal with the distractions and take out the arsonists that keep causing fires to pop-up in your life.