Where to Focus Your Attention for Self-Development: 5 Key Areas

AVAlexander Volchek

Today, I want to tell you about five important areas of life where you need to maintain a constant focus. Where we feel however we feel, very often bad, and suffer, so there's a carrot at the end. We heard endlessly about this as children at school, about the importance of learning. How can I earn thirty thousand dollars a month instead of three thousand? What kind of motivation do you need in your life overall? They know their manager is authoritarian and impossible to negotiate with. They narrow their entire professional life down to this one company. That means the issue isn't whether you earn the money or your wife or husband does. It isn't whether you travel together or separately. It isn't whether one of you is happy now and the other unhappy. This isn't a question of professionalism; it's a question of your inner state. It's a question of your ability to do it. Your desire to do it. Remember this. Write it down. Watch this video again. Hello, everyone! You're on my channel. My name is Alexander Volchek. I've spent more than twenty years in business, in technology businesses, managing very different companies.

I live in the United States of America. My channel is about life, business, and spirituality. Today, we'll talk about an important component of expanding as a person: which areas of life to look at and pay attention to in order to expand and develop. We often try to focus on just one thing. The modern world talks endlessly about this. There are many videos and books about how important it is to focus and do something specific and right. Today, I want to tell you about five important areas of life where you need to maintain a constant focus if you want to expand and develop. I'll make a brief comment right away: on this channel, within my worldview and what I talk about, by “expanding and developing” I mean a person's movement through life as a whole, in keeping with their state and their values. Here, expanding and developing doesn't mean performing a set of actions while feeling any which way, very often bad and suffering, so there's a carrot at the end, some result in ten or twenty years, a year, or three months.

By expanding and developing, I always mean that, of course, you're moving toward various goals and achievements in life. At the same time, your state at every moment along the way is very important. In essence, what matters in expanding and developing is life itself and its flow. So, five areas to pay attention to. The first, probably quite clear and familiar to everyone, is professional development. I'll start there because our lives are full of guidance, details, training programs, and everything else about it. We heard endlessly about this as children at school: the importance of learning, how to find a job, how to look for one, needing a steady income or a high income. People constantly talk about it. Professional development can basically be divided into components. For people running their own businesses, these can include business ownership and business management: actually managing it and carrying out particular operations. An important point is that people often associate their professional development directly with the job they hold at that moment.

As I talk about all five areas, I'll keep trying to bring your attention back to this: your current job or business is only one parameter, one focal point within your professional development. Again, whether you're a businessperson or an employee doesn't matter much here. What matters is remembering that there's an area you're paying attention to. When you make decisions through the lens of professional development—for example, how to earn thirty thousand dollars a month instead of three thousand; or you've been unemployed for a whole year and want to start working; or you're terribly dependent on money, with huge loans and expenses, and don't know what to do, years go by and you don't know how to get out of it; or you're earning an income now and are terribly, terribly afraid of losing it. In recent years, people have experienced that intensely: the fear that they're earning something and could lose it at any moment. When someone experiences one of these states I've described, they associate it with their current professional activity.

I keep telling you to try to distinguish your professional life as a whole—it's your life, part of your life, a large space—from the particular business or job within it. I've had many businesses and many different jobs. As a student, I worked as an administrator at a computer club, as a programmer at a pharmacy, as a programmer at a French company, and as a project manager at a French company. I had my own software development business. I had a small business while I was still a student; we tried selling phones. I had software development businesses in very different countries with different partners. I was CEO of Megaplan in the technology market. I had a business and was also managing partner and CEO of Business Molodost. I had Agro24, where I was also the director of that technology-based trading company. I had a stake in a legal services business. With a partner, I had an education company, A2life. I was CEO of the education business GeekBrains.

I have a real estate business, a psychology education business, a continuing professional education business, a personal growth business, and a trading business. There is a broad professional life, but it doesn't end there. I'm forty-one now, and I understand that a thousand times more could happen in my professional life over the next ten years than has already happened. I can begin focusing only on the new things that will happen. Even just now, I didn't mention every project, only some of my projects in life, and to me they've become little flashes in the past. So, in terms of personal growth and moving forward, expanding specifically as a person, always remember that you have a professional life, and within it there are different areas. In business ownership, for example, you'll need to pay attention to partnerships, business development, choosing a market niche, strategies for security and moving forward in the business and business partnership, and a high-level understanding of the business team.

Then there's business management, with its own internal divisions that require your attention. You need to pay attention to customer acquisition and marketing. You need to pay attention to sales. You need to pay attention to the product. You need to pay attention to everything connected with managing the business overall, to development. You need to pay attention to finance. You need to pay attention to security, including legal, tax, and accounting security. Why am I giving examples of these divisions within business and your professional life? If you don't own a business, you need to pay attention to—

Your relationship with your manager. You need to pay attention to the company's current goals. You need to pay attention to the market and its competitors. You need to pay attention to your employment offer and compensation system. You need to pay attention to the team you work with. You need to pay attention to the region you're in. Why do this? Why know these areas and details? When you know that your professional life contains these divisions—the people you interact with, the incentives, the competitive environment, your manager—then, when you make decisions, act, set goals, or come up with ideas concerning your current job, you won't base everything only on that job. You'll see a slightly broader range: which teams you're willing or unwilling to work with, what kind of motivation you need in your life overall. Are you willing to work only with a monthly income and a fixed salary?

Or are you prepared to work entirely on a bonus-based system? In which countries are you willing to work? In what formats? You'll pay attention to this a little more broadly, without tying it to your current job. When someone works somewhere, certain conditions apply. For example, they go to an office and earn a thousand dollars a month. They know their manager is authoritarian and impossible to negotiate with. They narrow their entire professional life down to this one company. It's important to understand that the world contains every possibility. There are all kinds of companies. Some managers are authoritarian; others will chat with you about cats and dogs. Some teams become your friends, while with others you won't be able to exchange a word; even discussing work will be difficult. Some jobs give you a degree of inner freedom to act and make your own decisions. In others, you can't make a single decision. Sales calls are fed to you every second, and all you do is talk for eight, ten, twelve, or fifteen hours a day, however many hours you work.

There are many details within professional life. It's important to distinguish expansion in your professional life, and the factors that support it, from your specific job. This topic may seem abstract, but I want to emphasize again that it's one of the areas you need to look at in life. You look at the professional sphere through the lens of these different states. In today's video, we're looking at five such points, directions for your attention and your life, so you can truly expand and develop. This channel is about five months old, and I'll certainly keep posting a great deal of information about life, business, and spirituality. It would probably be strange to say that a person's life consists only of business. Or only of YouTube, or Amazon, or e-commerce. Or only of partnerships. The broader your perception, the greater your opportunity for substantial development. Broader perception automatically opens up tens of thousands of different lines of action for you. Not because you've thought them up or generated them: automatically. When you develop through one very narrow detail, you have one road.

You can't choose among ten thousand roads; they simply don't exist. That's why I cover a broad range on this channel. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss videos. YouTube is going through various updates now. Support the channel by liking the video and leaving any comment: “Fire!” Share a reflection on this video, on what's happening with your attention in life, in absolutely any area. Let's continue. The second direction for expanding and moving forward in life is personal development. This may seem abstract: you might say, “Wait, expansion is personal development, and personal development has internal areas.” I'll separate professional activity and set personal development apart as a whole block of its own. Of course, these areas don't exist in isolation. One makes up another, another makes up the previous one. One is a cause, another an effect, and at the same time, what is an effect is also a cause. Everything is closely interconnected. Today, I want to give you some of the subdivisions within these areas. So, personal development. What topics does it include? Restoring your inner state, expansion, goals and strategy, meanings in life, breadth of perception, and values. Again, why is it important to distinguish personal development from professional activity?

In this particular context, to understand that when you're examining values at work, you might have a problem: you don't know how to escape the feeling that you never have enough money, and it's been going on for who knows how many years. It's important to distinguish your current job, with its particular circumstances, from professional life, with its strategy, meanings, and values. Separately, within personal development, there's the meaning of life. There are separate values: values in professional life and values in personal development. They're distinct. Don't mix them up. People ask me, “Can I work with my friend?” I always say: if you know how to separate friendship, acquaintance, or a family relationship with someone from your professional work, then no problem. A truly expansive person, a person of broad scope, can perceive more widely and choose at each moment to distinguish these relationships, empathize calmly, and say, “You're my employee,” even if that person is family, because you agreed at the outset that at certain times they work for you.

Or you agreed that you work for your relative. Are you able to distinguish the space at home from the space at work? Can you do that or not? That's a very good measure of your scope as a person. If you can't, if you constantly throw everything into one mess, if you tell your husband, “Behave that way at work, not at home,” if you tell your friend—and feel hurt—that they didn't pay you for work you'd agreed on, because they're your friend after all. Or you tell an acquaintance they should have invited you into their business because you're all close, but they invited another friend. That means you can't separate these spaces. The third area of attention that's very important for development and expansion is family. Again, it may seem strange that personal development doesn't contain family, but it's important to distinguish them. Personal development is personal development. Family means coming into contact with other people, quite different people. Family has internal areas: your husband or wife, or girlfriend or boyfriend; your children; your parents.

There's also a fourth factor within family, a fourth parameter you can identify separately: the people you consider your family. You'll often hear me say that, for me, family doesn't always mean people related to me. I probably don't even consider all my relatives family, while people who aren't related to me become my family. There are people who—

Family. There are people who are my family; I consider them family. They fall within this area of attention. It's a separate, large area of attention for a person, again for their expansion, development, and growth. Someone says, “I don't have children now, so this isn't a focus of my attention.” Again, I'm not talking only about the current moment, or a point twenty years from now when someone says, “I'm looking twenty years ahead. My children will have grown up, and they won't interest me.” The question is where your life is now, where it will be in ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years, somewhere at the end or at different moments. What points in time will keep arriving? And what is your state throughout your life in relation to this space? At least these four internal directions are an abstract division for you to hear now. You need to keep them in your attention and understand: if you want to expand and develop, you need a focus on your parents. If you want to develop and expand, you need a focus on your wife or husband, but a very broad focus, not just the current one.

That means the issue isn't whether you earn the money or your wife or husband does. It isn't whether you travel together or separately. It isn't whether one of you is happy now and the other unhappy. This is an abstraction. It isn't whether one exercises and the other doesn't, whether one is smarter and the other isn't, whether one studies and the other doesn't, or whether one likes cooking and the other doesn't. The question is what your relationship is like throughout your entire life, at every moment, and how it changes. Everyone has experienced disliking a food at one time and liking it now. As a child, I couldn't eat zucchini fritters; now I do. I didn't like green or black olives; now I eat them. When I was little, my grandmother would make lots of salad from the garden at the country house. She seemed to gather every leaf growing on trees, on the ground, everywhere, even underground. She'd chop plants and roots, make a plate for my sister and me, and pour oil over it all. I'd look at it and wonder who ate that. Now, if I go to a restaurant and they bring me a plate of mixed greens like that, especially unfamiliar leaves, I'm willing to pay two or three times as much for it.

Preferences change. It's important to understand that your state as you move through life with your significant other will change. Whether that person is here now or not—and if not, your attitude to that will change. Your desire for, and experience of, continuity with that person will change. Someone says, “I don't need a lasting relationship.” Someone else says, “I only want a lasting relationship.” Everything will change. At the very least, everyone is without a significant other at some point. At some point, every couple will end. Someone may die first, for example. People don't die together. Of course, some do in disasters, but generally it happens differently, at different times. I'm not even talking about the many marriages people may have. Remember that besides professional development, your life contains family, and family has many directions of movement. I recently released a video about children. A close friend told me he hadn't watched it, even though he watches all my videos and is involved in interacting with me, including sometimes choosing the role of a student, with me becoming his teacher. Not always, but sometimes he does that.

He definitely watches my videos. I asked, “Why didn't you watch the one about children?” He said, “That topic doesn't interest me. I don't have children.” But the point is that it should interest you, because it's a source of incredibly significant growth, expansion, and development for a person. Again, we've covered three areas, and there are two more. Keep watching. Look carefully at this broad range of points of attention for genuine expansion and development: professional activity, personal development, family. The fourth area is key and fundamental for me. I don't separate it out; for me, it's the foundation. I've separated it out in this video simply to show it to you. It's spiritual development, spiritual life. Recently, a woman I know well—we also have roles in the spiritual sphere where she's the student and I'm the teacher—said I'd spoken some time ago about the importance of seeing that the spiritual world doesn't stand alongside business or alongside family. Business exists within the spiritual world. Personal life exists within it. Family exists within it. Professional development exists within it. Everything is inside it. It's the source, not the other way around.

She said, “I've begun understanding this a little differently. I can see that it means everything is completely different.” Today, though, we'll look at spiritual development as an area to pay attention to if it's the foundation of your life. That's something people rarely arrive at, because their perception is narrow; they can't perceive or see it. Consider it alongside the other areas. Briefly, spiritual development can be divided into a few internal directions for you to pay attention to. One is what's called meditation practice. Another is what's called spiritual science. Separately, I'd identify deep immersion in knowledge: deep, genuine, extraordinary immersion in knowledge. A long, deep immersion. Take mathematics as an example. You could study mathematics at school like everyone else, go to university to study it, or devote your life to it. You could attend a few piano lessons, go to a serious music school, or become a musician in life. When I say deep immersion in knowledge, I mean living in it your entire life. This isn't a question of professionalism; it's a question of your inner state.

It's a question of your ability to do it. Your desire to do it. With food, for example, I'm deeply immersed in the experience of preparing and eating it. I probably once read books about how to do it, saw others doing things, or tried small things myself. Then I studied a fairly broad range of cuisines and tried things in practice. But overall, for decades now—honestly, about thirty years, since I was twelve or fourteen—I've cooked a great deal. What haven't I done in the last thirty years? I'm constantly at ease within it. If I need to cook for twenty people, I do it easily. I'm deeply immersed in this area. It has become automatic. There's attention there; it's a habit. Today, I'll talk about habit as a way to notice whether you're truly in a state of expansion and development. The fifth and final area, present within the other four, is another one to pay attention to. Today, we'll call it “team.” Let's look across the different parts of that team. There are people who are acquaintances of yours. There are people who are your friends. There are people you interact with professionally or in business.

Your family is also your team. Then there are people who are with you throughout your life, and that's something different. These are people who have moved from one sphere to another, or occupy different spheres. Some may be friends, some family, some were in business with you, some were part of your professional development. But they've been with you for a long time throughout your life, and you see the connection with them, the cause-and-effect connection. It's very important to pay attention to your team from different angles throughout your life: keep reflecting, keep reconsidering. And—

Reconsidering, directing energy and attention there. Imagine: we've discussed five spheres, five areas of life, and within them twenty, twenty-five, or thirty subdivisions or parameters. When we talk about genuine expansion and development, it means constantly reflecting on all these areas and subareas. Within these parameters are further parameters, and further ones inside those, and still more. You constantly bring them into contact with one another. You don't single out what's more important and what isn't. You don't single out what's more important and what isn't. You try to understand that each point, each word, each area and direction plays an enormous role in your life. Most importantly, it broadens your perception. The broader your perception, the more you move toward expansion and development. Remember one interesting and important point: the areas, spheres, and parameters that become habits reflect your calm perception of life. If your habit is suffering, self-pity, egoistic suffering; if your habit is self-regard; if your habit is discussing other people; if your habit is restlessness in your head; if your habit is arguing; if your habit is constantly thinking about how to get some rest, then that isn't genuine, broad attention and perception.

Each of these areas should be reflected in your life through observation, when you perceive it with awareness and strength, when you can create within each area. You create in sales, in your own motivation, with the people you interact with. You create with your parents, with your husband, in your travels. You create through your meanings in life, your values, and your experience of every moment of life. Remember this. Write it down. Watch this video again. Watch it again in one month, two months, three, and four. Each time, you'll find a new point of perception, because you can't absorb all of them into your mind at once. That absorption takes time. It's important to begin acting in many of these directions. See you next time! Watch the next video. In it, I'll use business as an example to explain in detail what drivers of development and expansion exist and how to find them. Subscribe to the channel and be sure to leave a comment.