If you're a business looking to grow, click here.
Zooming out is the usual advice, and for good reason. If we’re too focused on the day to day, we forget:
- What really matters
- What doesn’t matter
- Where we’re going
And forget to zoom out enough to remember our mission, vision and purpose. The “why” for the day to day.
If you find yourself zooming out too much… Thinking of the future, writing, planning, strategising about the future. Solving problems before they happen. Thinking through each iteration of possible futures and how you’d react.
Then you’ve become too good at thinking at the zoomed out level. And if when you zoom back in, you’re focusing on every detail, every little part of a task, every single thing you have to do today, and then try to cramp it all in at once.. You’re zoomed in too much.
The solution is that there’s a happy medium. And without that happy medium, swapping from intensely zoomed out to intensely zoomed in, happiness might evade you too, just like what’s in between the two options does.
You need to be able to zoom in at x1.1, x1.2, x1.3, all the way up to x100. And you need to be able to zoom out at -x1.1, -x1.2, -x1.3 up until -x100.
If you’re only options are:
- Zoom in excessively to every little detail until you can’t tell what’s important and what isn’t
- Zooming out excessively to thinking years and decades into the future with 10 different plans and options you could choose
You’re never present. You’re never negotiating properly with reality. There’s no peace in either option.
Intentionally practice catching yourself when you need to zoom out a lot, or a little bit more, and the same vice versa. This level of focus is what’s needed to go from the big picture, to the day to day, so you’re able to actually make that big picture reality real.
This is a necessary skill to master because reality is created in the now, but only if you can zoom in and out at different levels sufficiently to be able to zoom in to see the right steps, and zoom out just a little to ignore the wrong steps and then zoom out to the max to review and re-iterate based on the results.