…everything else doesn’t matter.
We know the benefit of clarity well enough: Getting clear about what matters in a relationship of any kind, or any other context, means we can focus our energies in the most effective way. Once we’ve decided what’s most important, we can concentrate on that.
All pretty familiar.
At least as usefully though, great swathes of less important matters can be ignored once we know—truly know—what’s most cared about, by ourselves or by other people.
And so we can take all that saved energy and apply it in the most important place, or to the most important relationship.
As Henry David Thoreau wrote, if we are not careful, “Our lives are frittered away by detail.”
Sometimes the benefit of knowing what matters flows as much from what we don’t do as what we do do.