Pick Your Rabbit

The art of simplifying your pursuits

When I was coaching, I was fascinated by Tony Holler, a high school track coach who obsesses about top speed more than most racecar engineers. From him I learned a famous proverb: “If you chase two rabbits, you will catch none.”

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

This saying fit into Tony’s general philosophy of simplifying training to a single goal and pursuing that one thing every day. I was already headed down the simplification path, always trying to find ways to make teaching and grading more efficient. The rabbit thing clicked with me. So I took the idea and have attempted to utilize it as widely as possible in the years since. Lately, I have relied on this thinking to push forward my passion projects. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned along the way:

1. Ignore Most Rabbits

There’s no shortage of people out there happy to tell you what you ought to be doing. Some of them even have pretty good ideas. Get to $1 million net worth as soon as possible. Start a business, doesn’t matter what it is. Get in the best shape of your life, every meal and spare minute. Read fifty books this year because your brain needs it.

Any of those ideas can breed excellent results and are probably worth a shot if you have nothing better to do. However, if you have a strong inkling of what you want, your first step toward it might just be ignoring other people’s good ideas.

Instead, identify the small handful of things that interest you and narrow your focus onto them¹.

2. Rank Order Your Desired Rabbits

One of the first areas I employed this principle was in essay grading. Typically a high school essay can be graded on format, structure, argumentation, citations, and grammar. When I applied the red pen to all of the above, the average 2-3 page essay took fifteen minutes to grade. Eighty of those papers could eat up the time between dinner and midnight for a week. Upon return to their owners, there was a glance at the grade, and the paper was promptly deposited in the trash. Needless to say, this left me looking for a better way.

The math teacher at that school suggested only grading one of those aspects on any given essay. Simplify. Focus on one thing that can be improved. I tried it out and found that student writing improved significantly faster when focusing on one thing at a time. All the elements are still addressed, but we follow a logical order that gives each its time.

On a more existential level, figuring out how to spend your life requires the same discrimination and hierarchy. What’s the thing you most want to do? What other things do you want but not quite as much? Make them into a list. Remember, keep it narrow. You’re only chasing one at a time.

So, let’s say you’ve identified three or so rabbits. Time to rank them. Which one is most important right now? For example, my current rabbit desirability rankings:

1. Substack newsletter

2. Sci-fi story

3. Sports card collection

3. Carve Out Time To Chase

Time is hard to come by. Work and family eat up most of each day, as they should, and there is a never ending creep of distractions keen on sapping your drive and focus. So how do you make time to pursue your chosen targets?

In my experience, there is Made Time and Found Time. This is a tried and true method available to virtually anyone. For me, Made Time looks like getting up early and working on things before the family and work obligations start. Sometimes it’s rearranging your daily schedule to open up some gaps. This is where the concept of time blocking comes in handy.

Found Time comes from those moments when things don’t go according to plan. An appointment gets cancelled, you decide against taking that course you’re already signed up for, a rainy day wipes out your plans. Sometimes things just don’t happen when you thought they would. Those are good times to make a little progress.

4. FOCUS!

Doug Collins always said that basketball players “make layups with their eyes.” Focus determines whether talent and skill translate into success or fall flat.

So let’s say you’ve picked your rabbit for today. Your time is blocked off. For the next fifteen minutes, half hour, hour, or whatever you’ve carved out, you have one simple job. Get after it. Write your story, lift your weights, buy the stock you researched. Focus on that rabbit to the exclusion of everything else. Getting lost in the chase for a little bit can be pretty fun.

Every day isn’t about reaching the goal but rather doing the things it takes to reach the goal. All the little work sessions you put in are arguably more real and desirable than the thing you’re chasing anyway.

5. Don’t Forget To Celebrate

Inevitably, you’ll look around and see other people seemingly achieving what they want, possibly even what you want. Don’t worry about that. Look back every once in a while and take stock. You’ve been making progress, and it’s likely more than you realized. That’s good. Take a minute to celebrate.

1. The same principles apply to daily work and household tasks, though in this essay I’ll be focusing on elective pursuits.