Maximizing Your Potential

you permit them to touch your dreams and visions. To maximize your life you must declare independence from the opinions of others. 8. Distractions This is one of the principal enemies of maximizing potential. All of us have had the experience of walking into another room and saying, “Now, why did I come here?” We had a purpose when we decided to go into the other room, but something between our decision to go and the moment we arrived sidetracked us from our original intention. Or we may allow side interests to distract us from our main goal. Say, for example, that you set the goal of walking three miles every day to improve your health. The first day you walk three miles in a little over an hour. The second day your walk takes an hour, but you walk only half a mile because you keep stopping to pick wildflow-ers. Picking flowers isn’t bad. It’s the result of picking flowers—the distraction from your goal—that is bad. Satan uses distractions to stop our progress toward a goal, or at least to change the speed of that progress. If he cannot convince us that our dream is wrong, he’ll throw other things into our path to slow the development of our vision or he’ll push us and induce us to move ahead of God’s timetable. One of satan’s most successful devices is to preoccupy us with “good” things to distract us from the “right” things. Perhaps God has planted the seed of a dream that He wants you to accomplish 20 years from now. Between then and now He has many other plans for your life. Let that seed incubate, and proceed cautiously. As you stay open to God’s leading in that area, He will reveal when the timing is right. Never sacrifice the right thing for a good thing. Likewise, if God says, “Now is the time,” be careful to examine your thoughts and actions closely to see if they help or hinder the completion of your goal. If a plan or activity distracts you from accomplishing your vision according to God’s schedule, it is bad for you at that moment. The apostle Paul understood this truth. “Everything is permissible for me”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”—but I will not be mastered by anything (1 Corinthians 6:12). Everything that doesn’t help our progress, hinders it. This is true because obeying God too soon or too late is disobedience. Therefore, we must be careful not to get drawn into good activities that distract us from our overall purpose. God requires our prompt response to Him throughout the journey. Obedience part of the way is really disobedience. We must be true, then, to our whole vision over the long haul because true obedience to God is doing what He says, when