Reject World’s Distractions — Make Decisions to Stay Faithful to Your Covenants Throughout Your Career and Life.
“I encourage everyone, young and old, to review goals and objectives to exercise greater discipline. Our daily conduct and choices should be consistent with our goals. We need to rise above rationalizations and distractions. It is especially important to make choices with our covenants to serve Jesus Christ in righteousness.” (Elder Quentin L. Cook)
This world is full of distractions that often obstruct our ability to achieve our goals. When you have clear goals and objectives, you can better reject distractions and focus on what matters most. In August 2026, I was thinking about my life and the things I was doing to take care of my spiritual, physical, and mental health. Every time I planned on them, many things distracted me from my objectives. These things made me stop the progress and not keep going with my goals. So, I started to wonder, why is it so difficult to stick to my goals and keep progressing with so many distractions around? With this question, I decided to set long- and short-term goals and have a clear daily plan to work on them. The first few days were difficult. However, two weeks after I started, I felt that even if I was tired, I just needed to stand up, ignore distractions, and keep my eyes focused on my goals.
As we make covenants with God, we have clear objectives of what we want to achieve. We want eternal life with our Heavenly Father and our eternal families. There will be many distractions that try to keep us from our promises to God and, as a result, block the blessings we can receive from obedience. Elder Quentin L. Cook said, “I encourage everyone, young and old, to review goals and objectives to exercise greater discipline. Our daily conduct and choices should be consistent with our goals. We need to rise above rationalizations and distractions. It is especially important to make choices with our covenants to serve Jesus Christ in righteousness.” His words encourage us to make daily choices that support our goals.
When I think about his words, I realize that we often fail to achieve our goals because we don’t stop to think about how our actions support them. If we want to be faithful to our covenants throughout our careers and beyond, we must avoid the distractions that may lead us away from our objectives. We can decide today to be faithful to our goals and identify anything that does not support them or may lead us away. As we do this, we will be able to recognize those distractions. As a result, we will act as I did with my personal goals in August. Even though we feel tired, we will keep moving forward until we achieve them. This will enable us to receive the blessings we need as we move toward our ultimate goal, which is eternal life.
