Why the best leaders don’t let the urgent crowd out the important

Let’s be honest. You and I do this all the time. We get overtaken by the ‘moment.’

We start out in life — even our days — with a plan. And then ‘life happens,’ and all our plans seem to fly right out the window.  That’s what I mean when I say that the urgent often crowds out the important.  The important is planned, and then the urgent just seems to overtake us.

This may be okay when it happens for a moment, or maybe even for a day or a week. But when it becomes a habit to live in the moment of the urgent, you will find that you are alive, but you are not living.  

You will find that you are constantly moving, but you may not be making progress.

You will find that you may feel like you are winning the battle, but I guarantee, you are losing the war.

Don’t think this is you?  How many times have you made a New Year’s Resolution, only to find that within a week or a month, you cannot even recall where you placed your resolutions, after dutifully writing them down?  Now you don’t have to feel bad alone here. I have done this same thing myself.  And the reason is simple. Fear overwhelms us.

Few things are more powerful than fear, as fear renders reason useless.

Worse still, when you live your life in this way, you are effectively re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in your life. The ship is sinking, and you and I are busy picking deck chairs and drapes.  Not good.

When the urgent crowds out the important, you will find yourself ‘chasing your tail,’ almost daily.

Your days and weeks will feel like they are rushing by, but you will not be all that clear what you accomplished.   Often, you will have accomplished nothing but treading water. Meaning, you are no better tomorrow, than you were yesterday. Why? Because you are not actually solving anything when you are dealing with the urgent alone.  You are a human fire extinguisher, and then even that becomes tiring. Extremely, tiring.

Unconsciously, you know that you will run out of energy before you run out of problems.

Worse, you begin to have this sinking, stinking feeling that the problems — the urgency stuff — is slowly overtaking your joy.

And then the depression begins to set in.

Not so long after, we begin to unconsciously give up on our dreams. We begin to settle for surviving, rather than thriving. Life becomes a grind.

To quote my friend  and fellow Global Dignity co-chair Professor Pekka Himanen,“What do we fear the most? We fear ourselves….”

So, what do we do about this?   The answer won’t sound like it makes any sense at all.  The fear that is crowding and clouding your brain will not allow it to make any sense.  But it is the only answer.  You simply have to stop.

No more ready, fire, AIM. 

No more living in fear.  No more.  More often than not, the worse thing to fear, is simply the fear itself, as was famously said.

You just have to just stop the drama, and believe that the world — your world — will not come come apart of come to an end simply because you stopped constantly dealing with only the urgent, and began to focus on the important too.  Stop reacting to life, and start responding to it.  

This will not be easy. It just may be the scariest transition of your adult life.  It may rock every sense of faith you have, but I guarantee you that it will be worth it.

No more of the fear hijacking the essence of your life.

No more of the fear sapping you of the very inner energy you need for your dreams.

No more regretting a life both un-lived and un-loved. No more.

Remember, as I said in Love Leadership, “courage is nothing more than your faith reaching through your fear — displaying itself as action in your life.”

That’s it.  You just have to stop, pivot and roll.

Move from an agenda of 90% urgent, and maybe 10% important in your life, to a commitment to 90% important, and at most 10% urgent.  Life is 10% what life does to you, and 90% how you choose to respond to it.

Do this and watch all the power in the lighthouse of your life come right back on.  Maybe for the first time since you were young.

It’s time to be young again. It’s time to turn on the lights.  It’s time to focus on the important.

The urgent never killed me once. But not dealing with the important in life, truly is the beginning of the end.

Remember, fear is failure’s agent.

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: John Hope Bryant is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Bryant Group Ventures.

Image: People stand on a platform at a train station. REUTERS/Yuya Shino.