The Main Thing
It was my former co-worker Bill Blair1 who first introduced me to the phrase “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. Bill has served as a mentor to countless teens and young adults in his career as a minister and outdoor enthusiast/life coach. He was a good friend, counselor, and jam session buddy when I was in my mid-20s and trying to figure out who I was.
It was also his wife who introduced me to my wife, though I ignored her for about six months because I didn’t feel like being set up with anyone.2
I want to say that it was a mentor of Bills who first introduced him to that phrase, but maybe he took it directly from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Either way, I remember that he had it on a poster in his office at the church where we both worked3, so whether I wanted to pay attention or not, it was burned into my memory.
Being a Highly Ineffective Person4, I never really considered that phrase to be a mantra of my own. Looking back, that’s probably because I learned it when I was a weird little 25ish-year-old recovering from a depressive episode who wasn’t sure what he was doing on a day-to-day basis. I mean, forget looking to the future, the present was enough for me to try and deal with.
It’s funny the things that you hear when you’re younger that stick with you. Here I am, nearly a decade removed from that job, and that phrase is still burned in my memory even though I have never read a self-help book5. It’s like those song lyrics from your childhood that you will always, always recall, but it’s a struggle to remember any of your loved ones birthdays6.
Somewhere along the way, I think that lesson accidentally took root in my life. From what I understand, the way Stephen Covey7 meant the phrase was in a business perspective: setting goals, ignoring distractions, etc. I’ve always preferred the way my friend Bill would apply it, in that life itself has important things and unimportant things and humans have this weird habit of making the unimportant things more important than they actually are. I’ve fallen victim to making unimportant things more important than they should be and letting the “main thing” fall by the wayside, and the result was always a depressive episode.
Money and material goods aren’t as important as we like to make them. Positions of power aren’t as important as those who desperately strive for them think they are. Trophies collect dust, records are “made to be broken” as they say. As Switchfoot once wrote 23 years ago in their song Gone, “all the riches of the kings end up in wills”8
That was one of my favorite songs when I was in high school forever ago. And I think that’s why last week, as I wrote a few congratulatory cards to some of my graduating students, I found only one specific lesson I thought important to emphasize to each of them: “Always remember to keep the important things important, and the unimportant things unimportant.”
Looking back, I should have told them to keep the main thing the main thing. It’s much easier to remember, and it’ll probably stick with them much longer.
Bill is a 6’3 redheaded Kentuckian who plays a mean blues guitar and loves a good catchphrase. He is not the 6’3 Kentuckian who coached in the NBA for twenty years. I think that’s his uncle, though. The Bill that I know is one of the best people I’ve ever known. I’ve never met the NBA coach.
Oops
That’s a generous statement, he basically made a job there for me.
Book coming….someday. If I get around to it.
And I never will!
My wife’s birthday is sometime in September, from what I’ve been told
If that even is his real name
Speaking of old lyrics that stick with you over the years.