How to Find Focus
thesephist.com
thesephist.com
If you look for greener pastures whenever your organic focus starts to wane, you'll never make it through the challenges that create real value.
This resonates with me strongly. As someone who's started and stopped a lot of projects, I've often been afraid I would never settle on one thing. But now, even though I'm in a difficult phase with it, I feel more committed than ever to my current project.
I think this is in line with the post: I spent a lot of time in a "divergent phase", exploring options and testing possibilities (multiple smaller projects). Now, I'm in a "convergent phase" and focusing on just one thing for multiple years, even though it's hard.
However, I think the article is implying that deep thinking about your values and interests when you step back can help keep you from switching focus for shallow reasons. Perhaps you re-engage with a renewed sense of purpose. However, if you do switch after deep thinking, you'll hopefully be more resistant to further randomization.
Think about what you could do for hours as a child. What kept you so interested that time just passed by?
Then examine what wish, image or interest underlies these activities. You will often find clear links to your current occupation.
The assumption underlying this is that our interests are unique and not random, and that we have to find or rediscover them as they tend to get overshadowed over time, which removes us from feelings of flow and focus.
I went on listening to other interviews with him on Apple Podcasts where he touches this and other ideas, but eventually got one of his books that is specifically about burnout (“Vom Burnout zum Flow”) as an audiobook, where he describes such imagery exercises in detail. I also liked how he chooses his words very carefully.
It’s all in german however, a lot of his books have not been translated yet. He often mentions that C.G. Jung influenced him, but I’m not familiar with his writings at all.
When you don’t have enough money to take care of all your needs for a long time, for example, you wind up doing things others ask you to do. And you have very little control over how much of your time and attention that will take up. You are forced to multitask and your mind is distracted.
Not only that, but your switching costs are very high. Like a person with a small poker stack, you can’t afford to take regular-size risks, only tiny risks. Any bad risk can set you back.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/making-sense/analys...
This is why a UBI can raise the national IQ level, reduce stress, improve public health AND make us more productive and make better choices.
That is also why limited liability for entrepreners in USA is a great thing.
A person working overtime at McDonalds to make ends meet is not benefitting society as much as a person using some of that time on things not valued immediately by the market, such as spending time raising their kids, learning science, contributing to open source software or wikipedia etc. Their job will be gradually automated anyway, and we as a society will try to slow that process down because many consider wages to be the only “moral” way to get money to the people.
At the other extreme, having “f u money” you can say no to lots of things.
The “costly signal” that identifies a successful person with many options in a given area, is that — unlike the one still starting out or scrambling — they pass up perfectly good opportunities and are instead focused on actively avoid potentially inconvenient opportunities. While a person who is just trying to “make it” will have the opposite approach. They will pursue a lot of false negatives.
>A person working overtime at McDonalds to make ends meet is not benefitting society as much as a person using some of that time on things not valued immediately by the market, such as spending time raising their kids, learning science, contributing to open source software or wikipedia etc.
I've come to believe that some types of work constitute an intellectual travesty on a societal scale, precisely for those reasons.
People need way more unstructured time than what they're currently getting.
I wrote this sort-of on a whim after having lots of conversations with friends/coworkers about motivation and focus. One point where I felt I've grown this year both personally and professionally was that I'm more confident that the things I'm spending time to work on are the "right" ones for me, and I spent some time musing internally about how I got to that point, and how to explain that process.
Glad it resonates with others :)
Also, it gives new meanings to the term ‘on the same wavelength’.
> To earn confidence (and the focus that comes with it), we need to explore our options, try things out, open all the different doors in front of us, and then say, “this is the best option for me, so I’m going to do this.”
Build team member confidence and focus by brainstorming a full list of pain points and possible projects then discuss those ideas within the context of given goals and constraints.
> Paradoxically, this means attaining focus requires us to become less focused for a little bit, exploring our options enough to develop some conviction [...]
This is the hurdle because there are usually some teammates who want to dive straight in and start "working on things".
It takes practice and effort to drive the process and avoid getting stuck in the brainstorming phase but the resulting team buy-in, ownership, conviction, etc... are worth it. People feel heard, involved in decision-making, and they understand why they are working on a specific project.
Building this alignment and confidence at the start helps to avoid the situation the author describes:
> If your choice isn’t based on the confidence you have in that decision, your focus ends up pulled apart by the worry that you’ve missed out on the roads not taken.
It took me four years of divergent exploration to go from program management in Big Tech to becoming a solo woodworker, and was worth every diversion along the way.
It's a point of pride, glad you noticed :)
My site isn't open source (b/c unfinished content) but in case it's helpful, it's based on this Hugo template project - https://github.com/thesephist/carlisle
Newsletter wise, I can't be super helpful because I roll my own infra through Mailgun, but I think in general the simpler the better, especially in the beginning. Substack seems popular these days.
Focus, especially in our modern society, is a quality/trait that is quite difficult to re discover as adults.I say re discover because I "think" children have more focus than adults.
My hypothesis is that we lose focus as we get older due to the amount of interests and setbacks we get as we grow out of childhood.
What I am trying to say is that we should not find focus but choose our goal/interest and just focus on it.
An interesting article on focus and achieving personal goals is https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/set-your-personal-go...
I think it’s more like the feeling you get in times of real and potentially catastrophic danger, when the brain slows down time perception and you focus in on the situation and how to survive.
I once felt this when I accidentally backed into and fell about 25 feet into a 50-foot drainage pit. As I fell I had the time to map out the pit in my mind and think about what I suspected, but didn’t know, could be parts of its construction like drainage pipes and other dangers to my falling body. Based on those thoughts I decided to curl my legs underneath me and pitch my upper body forward in hopes that I could land with my lower body first instead of headfirst. My brain also had time to complete one of those “life flashes before your eyes” compilations and I felt an upswell of emotion around images of me and my family, especially my mother for some reason. I hit the water mostly feet first and made my way back to the surface, then swam to a safety ladder as my manager yelled at me to get the hell out of the pit immediately. He later told me that the pit was indeed lined with drainage pipes and that I was incredibly lucky not to have landed on any of them.
I have no recollection of any of the actual physical aspects of the fall and I didn’t immediately thereafter either. All of my focus was inward, and - impossibly - I had enough time to both think about how to fall the best way and to reminisce about the life I might soon be leaving. It was only because of the circumstances that was possible, and I’ve only felt similarly during other high stakes situations like a car accident since then.
It seems like an immediate and physiological response to danger and the extreme narrowing of potential futures (life or death), and one that countless others have detailed throughout history. The end result is an incredibly narrow focus that completely changes everything from perception of time to clarity of thought and emotion. I think the same is true on a more macro scale of life, where it’s much easier to focus when potential futures are limited.
Right now my potential futures (and the related decisions, thoughts, anxieties, workload, etc associated with each of them) have been artificially limited because of the pandemic. I have vastly fewer options in almost every area of life as a result. And with the removal of all those extraneous potential areas of focus or distraction I end up with a surplus of focus for whatever I’m working on or toward. I’ve been working toward the same exact things and nothing has changed to make them more of the “right” things to focus on, and yet my focus is undeniably much stronger because of a lack of other things to focus on.
When the horizons inevitably expand I expect to be in the same position as I was before, looking and mostly failing to find focus for what I need to work on. I don’t plan on casting about for something else that will hold my focus, but instead I hope to bring this newfound perspective to bear and try to somehow artificially narrow my options so that I can bring my focus back. If anyone has any suggestions for just how to do so I’d love to hear them.