It was a new moon last night but I didn’t even think about it until I was writing in my calendar diary before bed roughly outlining some goals for today and noticed the icon on my calendar.
New moons are useful times for new beginnings so I’ll share a tool I’m picking back up in a new way.
I remember listening to Earl Nightingale’s “The Strangest Secret” audioprogram while sitting by the pool and in the restaurant at Malvern Spa in England. The story of the ‘6 most important things to do today list’ was shared and prompted a custom designed Christmas present for my ex who largely adhered to the $25,000 idea mentioned therein.
The premise of the story is that an efficiency expert was called in to work with the president of a little-known steel company who shared they already knew what needed to happen, they just weren’t getting as much done as he knew they could. Ivy Lee gave that leader multi-million dollar advice.
Lee gave the man a blank sheet of paper labelled “6 Most Important Things To Do Today.” He told him to write down the six most important things to get done the following day, which took the man less than 5 minutes.
Then Lee told him to put those tasks in order of priority which also took less than 5 minutes.
Lee told his prospective client to keep the list in his pocket the next day so he could stay focused on the most important task of the day until completion or as close to completion as possible, before moving onto the next priority on the list and applying the same strategy. He further recommended that once he had gained confidence in the process to share it with his team and bring it into the corporate culture of their business.
Within a few weeks Lee received a cheque worth $25,000USD for how his simple advice had benefitted the President and the company he was leading, and that was many years ago.
Having known this advice for nearly a decade and not adhered to it fully, shame on me. And yet today is a new day so as the famous Chinese proverb goes “the best time to plant an oak tree was twenty five years ago. The second best time is now.”
The current energies feel subdued right now and yet the unrest is growing and I believe things are about to get bat shit kinda crazy. As I’ve shared many times in videos and messages of late, the best way to win a war is to let the people turn on each other and then come in to clean up the mess and take over.
That isn’t fear mongering because it’s truth, as cruel as it may be. Intelligence and empathy are not codependent but our culture has made us that way with a great many things.
Our outer circumstances reflect our interior so realize that the above war strategy has been used to keep us confused and distracted while the “6 Most Important Things List” is designed to bring order to the chaos.
I still have some room in the coil ring notebooks I had made for my ex and I but I really like the idea of keeping that list in my day planner so moving forward I can keep track of all that I’m devoting myself to over the course of the year. I love journals for that reason and have admittedly fallen out of the habit, but now is as good a time to get back into it as ever!
May you enjoy a productive tomorrow by setting yourself up for success today!
Much love,
Laura JeH – Namaste
PS. The title of the list I had made reflects my lack of understanding the specific utility of this exercise. There’s a big difference in what I wrote and was using it for and the explanation I found to help with writing this message. Live and learn! And once we know better, may we do our best to do better!
