The Paradox of Abundance: Constraint

Welcome to another episode of Halftime Talks. My name is Rahim Rasul, and you’re listening to the podcast where we recognize that in the middle of our game of life, whether up by 10 or down by 20, each of us needs a halftime talk to uplift us, inspire us and challenge us to bring that level of performance that you and I know it’s gonna take to win the game. Mr. Dalbellina, Mr. Ballina, Mr. Dalbellina, Mr. Ball davelina, Mr. Paul Domino. So yeah, man, we’re back for another episode of halftime talks and how we get started each time is with a little bit of appreciation. Today, I want to appreciate the thoughtfulness and intention that goes along with capturing the moments of our life now time is this consistent thing that moves forward from the center of now and capturing those moments we can do with our phone, we can do with camera, journaling, letter writing, and making sure that we capture the full essence of the moment, giving it context to what built it up, to why we appreciate it, to why we understand why it’s powerful and relevant, that maybe sometime in the future, this can be the touchstone that activates the same feelings that brought it about, because we vacillate, sometimes high emotionally and sometimes low, and in those low moments, capture in these moments allow us to connect with our true possibility, and that’s what I want to appreciate today.

I absolutely love these appreciations. They give us a chance to reflect inwardly and appreciate what goes on all around is sometimes it’s taken for granted. And today we have an excellent in my estimation episode for you. We’re going to be talking about focusing within infinity, allowing constraint to accelerate us, going forth in the coming years, in the coming decades, and what seems to be an exponentially growing sense of momentum with technology. How do we focus? Okay, so without further ado, I need you to strap in your seat belts, focus your mind if you’re going to take notes, make a mental notes. Because guess what? Here we go, and we are back.

We’re back for another episode of halftime talks. And I want to begin by asking you some questions. Have you ever found yourself midday, midnight, any time of day, with remote control for your TV in your hand, and you’re flipping through channels, the next thing you know, you’re spending 2020, minutes searching and searching and searching, not knowing what to find on Cable. It’s like the more channels you have, the less focused you can be, or you’re on Spotify, and you have all these options available to you, and you don’t know what music to play, but you’re in the library and you see all these books or a bookstore, you see all these books and magazines, and you get pulled in so many directions that you don’t know where to focus.

That seems to be one of the challenges that is arising at an exponential pace today, and that is what I’ll call the paradox of abundance. When you have so many options, your mind begins to entertain too many things at one point, thus making the ability to be decisive a little further from arms reach, you know, constraint has a relationship with essentialism. Going back to the basics, like calling together the primal ingredients that make something possible, going through a recipe book, you’re going to have to understand what you have a taste for, and that is an essential skill moving forward. Because I remember 1993 I received my first boombox.

It was a CD boombox. And at that point I had a ton of cassette tapes that I dubbed from friends and some that I bought and I recorded off the radio. But now. So I was beginning to amass a collection of CDs. And at that time, I didn’t have the complexity of so many options. Even then, I didn’t know if I wanted to listen to my first CD, which was, what was my first CD, the menace to society soundtrack, or the funk dubious, a try call quest. I had about 10 CDs, funk, dubious, the alcoholics, like a whole bunch of really awesome classic early 90s hip hop.

And now I look at my collection today, and it is not, it is hardly, it is hardly 10 CDs, and add a comma after that 10 and put a couple couple zeros. I probably have five to 10,000 CDs. And how do you choose within all of those options? It’s really asking yourself a question is, what do I have a taste for like even technology has got so advanced that there is an algorithm that recommends within this infinity. But what I’ve come to understand, what I’ve come to know through all of this, is part of how we make decisions, and the easiest way that we can begin to focus within this paradox of abundance is by asking ourselves first, what is relevant.

In an understanding what’s relevant, it automatically excludes the inclusion of preference, the inclusion of relevance shows you what’s on the outside. As soon as you identify what’s on the outside, cut it out. That is the origin of the word decisive, decir a to cut off options, the more that we’re capable of cutting off options, focusing and filtering and filtering, we end up with constraint. Do we have the self discipline and self control to deliberately narrow down our options, and as we do, we’re faced with a smaller subset a universe that is capable of being molded, manipulated and maneuvered through without taking into consideration everything, and for everything to make sense, we must focus on something.

So before you go to Spotify, have a notion for the taste of music that you want to experience, before you go into the bookstore, understand the type of book you’re looking for. It requires you to have a level of intentionality, a level of focus, a level of recognizing and respecting what relevance truly is. It’s hard. How many times have you scrolled up and down the menu not knowing what you wanted to eat? How many times have you flipped through the cable channels and just incessantly, just kind of addictively, scrolled through hundreds and hundreds of channels? How many times have you looked through all the CDs you can listen to, the books that you can buy and not made a choice.

You’re you’re paralyzed, and it becomes this paralysis through analysis. Our brains are processes, and when we’re giving too many calculations to process our Ram, our brain RAM runs out. Get stuck. We start going slower. But if I give you a simple task, and I define the task, if I define the variables within this big universe, and I say we’re only focused on three things, it’s easier for you to focus a lot of times, when you have less resources, you can get more creative. I’m not taking into consideration so many things, and so I would ask you to begin to look at the big things that you want to accomplish, and dial them back, create a sense of constraint, and that constraint will boost your creativity.

It will give you things and by hold by self imposing a. Set of constraint rules on any challenge, on any aspiration, on any creative project, it actually breeds a level of creativity. It breeds a level of productivity because we are given ways to think outside the constraint box to see how things can come together and interrelate with each other within a small batch subset of things. Constraint boosts everything. It allows us to have a level of focus, a level of clarity, a level of decisiveness, a level of engagement and immersion into any subject matter, knowing the direction that we want to take. So I challenge you going for it.

Obviously, this is a stream of consciousness episode, but I know that you can relate like when you have abundance in so many ways. And right now, we have an abundance of information. We have a whole internet that, think about it, everything has been written and uploaded, written and just put out there. But for you to be your best, you have to find what’s relevant to the task at hand, what’s relevant to your interests, what’s relevant to your skills, what’s relevant to your passions and your obsessions. And you focus within that, you have to find constraint. You have to collapse infinity into a point and expand from that space.

Or else, if you’re focusing on everything, you are focused on nothing. That’s about it, man, just a little something from Rahim to you. Halftime talks to you, hopefully it can aid you in the things that you want to accomplish. So until next time, my name is Rahim Rasul, thank you for listening to another episode of halftime talks. I know we’ve been a little sparse lately, but we’ll pick that up in 2019 and yeah, thanks for listening. Make sure you share with a friend. The more who knows, the more we grow in 2019 we’re gonna flip it up a couple ways. I’m still trying to figure out how, but I definitely enjoy these, these monologs, these dialogs, these conversations with you, the audience. I love you guys. Stay safe, stay cool, stay clear and stay focused. Man 2019 here we come. Man, peace, you