"FOCUS"
“The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus. Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand.” — Alexander Graham Bell
I hate the way that the average person thinks about work. The word “work” fills them with dread. It might fill you with dread too. To the average Joe, work means sleepwalking through life, contributing to things of little value.
Do you click around and switch tabs from 9AM to 5PM?
Do you create 0 value for yourself, the business, and the world?
Will you die miserable and filled with regret?
Focus is a state of consciousness that only transpires when you do the right work in the right way. You must open your mind and realize how wonderful it is to work on the right things. The world needs your energy and individuality. Work is a big part of our lives, and it can be filled with liveliness and purpose.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you. You can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use” — Steve Jobs
Remember this. Your work is not just your job. You can create your own work, any time you want. Pursue the things that you find opportunistic or meaningful. If you can create real value, the free market is willing to reward you with uncapped upside.
You just need to learn how to focus.
The right work to focus on follows three golden rules.
Rule 1: It must be yours.
You must be your work, and your work must be you.
What skills does the market think are valuable? What are you uniquely excellent at? What do you love? Find your intersection between these three questions in this order. If you can’t think of anything, that’s okay - you only need to answer the first question.
Most of the time, you don’t even have to be good at anything. In today’s world, the drive to be good at something is arguably more important than already being good at that thing. Your “slope” > your intercept.
Secondly, you must own your work. Focus requires you to possess a sense of responsibility for your results. As a proxy for ownership, ask yourself this question.
How well does my reward scale based on my results?
Human nature requires incentives. If you work at a deadbeat corporation, your reward might be loosely uncorrelated to your results. If you’re in sales and paid a commission, reward scales linearly. If you’re a founder, reward often scales exponentially. You must play the right games.
Rule 2: It must be narrow.
Everything great is built by small actions executed consistently. Your vision may contain dozens of complex moving parts as a whole. But on a day-to-day basis, you must isolate the simplest, highest leverage part and concentrate on doing it right.
Rule 3: It must take time.
Hard fact: if you want to be good at anything, you must dedicate time to it. There is a considerable amount of depth in every skill. The depth will differentiate you, but you must spend time to acquire it.
Hard problems unlock insights that strengthen your intuition. Other people who do not work as hard as you will not earn those insights. Don’t underestimate how simply spending time on something compounds.
If you do not go deep, you will be outcompeted by someone who can.
Focus is like Water…
Life is continually chaotic and complex. We must impose structure upon it to become effective people.
Here is my simple, actionable advice on how to focus.
Sit down for 10 minutes. Organize your life into buckets and cups. Buckets are big, meaningful life areas. Cups are sub-habits of each bucket.
Example Buckets: Health, Career, Side Project, Relationships, Spiritual Life, Hobby
Focus is inherently about knowing what to deliberately ignore. Take your buckets and cut them down to ~2 (4 max). Everyone has a personal # of buckets that they can manage exceptionally well. Find your balance.
Side note: Everyone should be prioritizing their physical health (exercise, diet, sleep) as a non-negotiable. It will meaningfully enhance all of your other buckets.
Inside of your buckets, write down your cups. Oftentimes, you’ll find that most buckets consist of 1-3 habits that generate most of your returns. For example, if your bucket is relationships, your cups might be texting people and organizing hangouts with them.
Example Cups (Health): Fitness, Diet, Sleep, Supplements
Tiny habits compound over time. Find a way to make those habits possible within your daily schedule for just a couple of hours. People will pray and fantasize about the opportunity to chase their dreams, but they won’t wake up an hour earlier.
…Let it Flow
A clean space augments your focus. Eliminate physical and digital clutter. Sit down. Take a deep breath through the nose. Stop thinking about yourself, your mood, your desires. You are here to work. The only thing that matters is the work in this moment. You are going to attack the work with conviction and intensity, like waves crashing down on a canyon. Let the focus flow like water. You must stay present. The mind tries to conceal your genius behind dirt and distraction. Like a gold panner, you must use the water to sift through the mud and gravel to find the gems.
Let your intuition guide you. Let inspiration strike. It is crucial that you act upon inspiration with urgency and precision. If not, these ideas will flow to your largest competitor, and they will execute it first. Life-changing opportunities are abundant, and the world rewards those who capitalize upon them. You can accomplish incredible things in much shorter timespans than you think.
You just need to focus.