LIFE can be very busy. Many things fight for our attention, time and resources and if care is not taken we can get so consumed with ‘living’ that we will get very busy and still not be ‘living’. With the myriad of activities we are faced with in our lifetime, care must be taken that we do not get lost in the maze of life. A life that will count must be a life that is lived consciously and purposefully pursuing set goals and objectives. This will demand boldness and wisdom to know what needs to be done and what need not be done. When we give all our attention to everything we end up not achieving much.

We must never forget we all have just one life to live and we must be determined to live it to the best of our ability. We must understand that the greatest fulfillment comes when we live our lives on purpose and we achieve our set purpose. We must resolve not just to pass through history but to make history. For us to make history we must focus our energies and resources on only critical things. Our focus must be on critical issues and our spare time, if any, can be spent on non-critical things.

Critical things are things, issues and situations that are important and have a decisive role in the success or failure of our main objectives. It talks of things, issues or people that are crucial, vital or essential to the success or failure of our purpose/dreams in life.

We must come to the point when we can divide whatever we do into critical and non-critical issues.

We need to regularly sit down to assess what we do to check what things are critical and what things are not. Understanding critical matters and giving them the right attention is a major key to making our lives count. In whatever we do, career, business, academics etc, we need to locate what issues are critical and what issues are not. We must find out the essential things that if we do not do them, everything else will collapse. We must know exactly what constitute the brain, the soul, the essence of what we do – take that out and all that will be left will be an empty shell.

The critical essence of what we do is what should be our main focus and the object of our emphasis. The critical essence of what we do is our main goal and it is where we deploy the best of resources - personnel, finances, equipment, time etc. The best of the best of our skills must be deployed to the critical essence of what we do. Not understanding this puts us at risk as we might be putting emphasis and spending valuable resources in the right areas but in non-critical areas which will result in undesirable output. We must endeavour to do all we can to ensure the critical essence of whatever we do is successful and achieving the desired result.

The critical essence of a student is to pass his examination well. He must understand that if he fails his examination or does not do as well as he ought to, his academic career is in jeopardy. This, therefore, means a student must devote the best of his time and effort to passing his examinations well. He knows every other thing like partying, socializing are not critical, so he knows how to prioritize his time. The critical essence of a businessman is making profit so he ensures he does all he can to provide quality services/goods and the enabling environment to ensure profit. He knows if he does not make profit he is out of business.

What is the critical essence of what you do? Next week we will look at the other dimension of our discussion on critical things is the issues of identifying and properly relating to people who are critical to what we do.

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