Why You Should Focus More On The One Really Important Need You Have Rather than on The Many Others That Occupy Your Attention

Why You Should Focus More On The One Really Important Need You Have Rather than on The Many Others That Occupy Your Attentio

BynBill Cottringe

“We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it.” ~James Matthew Barrie.

We all really just have one fundamental need that gets blocked out by all the amusing, animated other ones. This one prominent need is to be happy and successful. This is the ultimate outcome we all want from life (it is the only real pot of gold at the end of the rainbow) and the satisfaction of all the other needs are what contributes to this one collective need being fulfilled. So for Heaven’s sake, if life has something important to say, the best place to begin is at the end. The main challenge in life is in figuring out how to meet this one big need—how to be happy and successful.

There is certainly no shortage of useful information and valuable knowledge about this common need (especially how to satisfy it) but the ‘main-street’ transformation away from trying to meet multiple needs, towards this primary one hasn’t quite taken hold yet, despite the power of the positive psychology movement and the mega marketing impact of books like “The Secret” and “The New Earth.”

Of course the title to this article really represents a very tightly wrapped counter “belief” that is very resistive to being openly embraced, despite growing evidence to support it.

What the heck am I talking about here? Quite simply that you can’t ever be happy and successful until you get a grip on reality as it really is. All unhappiness and failure stem from believing in and acting on false realities, or situations you don’t have your facts straight on. Get reality right and be happy and successful, get it wrong and be everything else.

Life is a humongous mainframe that is pretty simple to understand once you stop over-focusing on all the intriguing delusions and illusions, including having a multitude of needs you have to satisfy. Where is that written in stone? The road to the land of simple, where we all want to be, starts with asking yourself a few-point blank questions:

• What do I really want from life?
• What do I really believe is true?
• What false beliefs are holding me back?

Only then are you beginning to shift your focus towards what matters most—knowing you only have one basic need and then getting busy finding out how to best live it. Things either work to bring you happiness or they don’t. That is instant feedback that doesn’t require a Harvard education or a million-dollar savings account to figure out and to re-arrange more to your liking. And if the outcome experience itself isn’t clear enough, you always have feelings about it—either positive feelings or negative ones. The positive feelings say “yes” and the negative ones say “no.” The “no” meaning is just to let you know that you may have used the wrong approach (most always seeing and acting on an incomplete or incorrect perception of a person or situation). Then the challenge becomes how to see the situation correctly and respond to it the way it is in order to be successful and get the results you want.

Yes, this is all much easier said and done, but we all make it much more complicated than it really is. Life is the simplest system there is and that is so obvious it takes a while to see. The bottom line is that we couldn’t have ever invented computers if they weren’t the way life really operates—with a simple on-off, yes-no, command-complete process. And in the end, as the great philosopher Epictetus said, “It is not the things in life that bother us but rather our opinions about these things.” After all, opinions rarely have anything to do with reality. But just in case, what’s yours?