The Timeframes For Clarity

One of the most important ingredients to a fulfilling life is clarity. Tom Bilyeu has been quoted saying that “success is being presented with 1000 open doors and our job is to know which 999 of them to close.” If we don’t have a clear idea of what we want or need, we’re going to have a hard time confidently deciding which door to go through.

When most people talk about clarity they talk about it facing the future, meaning that we seek clarity of where we’re heading. It’s having clarity on the type of lifestyle you want to have so that you can make adjustments or set boundaries to create it. It’s clarity on the direction of a company so that everyone can rally around a shared vision. It’s being clear on what role different people play in your life, and even who you want to spend more or less time with.

All of that is very important but it’s also incomplete - A version of clarity that I think is equally important that most people overlook is clarity in the present.

It’s not enough to know where we want things to be, we need to be clear on how things are. The path to achieving a better future passes through many moments, and if we don’t have a clear understanding of our current performance within these moments then we certainly can’t expect to get to where we want to go.

This is why getting feedback is so important. Data and feedback help to tell the story of how things are going. It provides insight into your efforts and if they’re producing the results that you want. Want to have a fully vegan diet in 5 years? How many non-vegan meals did you have last week? Want to hit a certain revenue goal in your business? How are your current strategies performing to achieve that goal?

Success is a process of optimization. Our first pass at achieving anything will not be 100% correct. So even if we have a fully built out plan that leads us to our clear desired future, it’s guaranteed that we need to make adjustments along the way. And the only way you can know what adjustments to make is to have a clear picture of your performance in the moment through data and feedback.