Focus is saying no to good ideas
commoncog.com
commoncog.com
In life, we must make decisions. The word "decision" comes from the Latin "to cut off", as in to cut off options or paths. The grapevine must be pruned to strengthen it and produce more fruit. Of course, we must decide wisely, there is no question about that, but FOMO is the opposite of that. It is an intemperate and immoderate desire for everything, never committing to anything and therefore never attaining anything and never becoming anything.
It's all a fitness landscape. Once you have a good signal of a steep, yet tractable curve, it's time to hone in and focus. Otherwise you need to keep exploring.
Within your exploration you need to know when to search and when to labor.
You also need to know when you've sunk too much into a fruitless endeavor.
I definitely perceive partial truth to what you're saying but I wouldn't want people to confuse 'being disciplined' with what you're talking about. 'Being disciplined' just leads to burnout eventually, it's a way of the cortical (planning, future goals, losing weight) lying (foregoing good tasting food) to the thalamus ("give me good tasting food, feeling full, with the least amount of energy expenditure, NOW!") which will not succeed in the long run.
The trick is to research how to make healthy food taste better than junk food, and take less energy to make. Since you will always go for the best ratio of cost-benefit, you will lose weight without struggle.
I would rewrite the article as "If it's not a hard yes (in terms of BOTH immediate and long-term pleasure), it's a hard no"
This was actually accounted for by the system of thought the parent comment is discussing.
Since virtue is the median between two vices, there is a middle ground between focusing on nothing and focusing on something to the point of exhaustion. The virtue of eutrapelia. Thomas Aquinas argues that just as the body needs rest when it is weary, so too does the soul when it becomes overburdened. And, like the body, the soul takes rest in a kind of pleasure we call 'play'.
What I'm talking about is a synthesis of play and work, where work becomes play, as opposed to playing, resting, or relaxing, after or as a 'reward for' work (which would not qualify as immediate reward. Immediate reward = in a fraction of a second.)
The 'work itself is the reward' if one carefully chooses what the work entails.
The virtue ethicist would say that one should inculcate the virtue of caritas (love) which will enable them to approach any task with a positive attitude, such that something that would otherwise be annoying to do becomes meaningful or at least tolerable with a long-term goal of increasing the love of the other for whom you do the task for.
Catholic virtue ethicists (I can't speak for the others) do see one aspect of life as a combination of work and play: religious service. For example, the Sunday mass is both a liturgy (lit: "a work of the people") but also play: it is something to be done precisely because it need not be done. An omnipotent God doesn't need anything, including worship. It has no other outside purpose in theory than to be a celebration and is thus something meant to refresh in the way other forms of play refresh. In the Catholic tradition at least, this highest work is itself the highest form of play.
Can you name some examples of who you're talking about?
[0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q166
[1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q167
[2] https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/McInerny/McInerny11.pdf
[3] https://www.primematters.com/foundations/search-truth/studio...
If you want to get into classical philosophy you're going to run into that left, right, front, and center. Many words and concepts they take for granted either correspond to old English words (and I mean old as in time, not as in formaly Old English, though they may be that too), or simply no longer exist in English. Thus, reading translations of them may be quite challenging.
Personally I don't think it's because those concepts are necessarily inapplicable or that we're so much better, nor do I necessarily think we're so much worse either. If anything I see it as a very valuable way to get a very different perspective on philosophical issues. However, it will take substantial effort put in to understand what they're really saying; to use very modern terminology, the representational bias of modern English is almost incapable of expressing what they are actually saying. While I won't blindly endorse everything they say, I will say it is also not as stupid as it may sound at first when read in modern English, nor vacuous, nor any other quick dismissal than may come to mind.
It is possible to find well-done introductions that attempt to bring a philosopher 'forward' but even those often find it easier to define what the philosopher means by 'caritas' and then use the Latin instead of translating it as "love" or "charitable love" each time.
> St. Thomas defines wonder (admiratio) as “a kind of desire (desiderium) for knowledge; a desire which comes to man when he sees an effect of which the cause either is unknown to him, or surpasses his knowledge or faculty of understanding.” Wonder leads people to inquire and seek answers in a deliberate and purposeful manner in order to gain knowledge. St. Thomas identifies that we associate the desired person, event or object with what is “pleasing” and “scarce.” Simply, the wonderer glimpses an elusive knowledge to pursue.
https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I-II.Q32.A8 from https://www.nashvilledominican.org/desire-wonder-essential-e...
It kinda made me wonder why I felt so uncomfortable reading it, and I think it's the very deep religious philosophy that shines from it.
Curiosity is fundamentally a desire to discover things by one-self and uncover hidden things. It goes against authoritative advice ("kills the cat") and is self motivated. It is basically the opposite of blind trust, faith. A vice.
Studiousness was the core virtue of monks, and they were the spearhead of shuting down distractions to focus on a single goal.
This is basically the advice we'd give to people to stop looking at the birds, to focus on plowing the field in front of them.
For instance during the “dark ages” we saw construction technique leap forward (think cathedrals like Paris’ one), accounting techniques saw the shift to double entry book-keeping, and so many deeply impacting innovations that didn’t cone from monks while they were supposed to have such knowledge and education.
You mention classical books reproduction which was a important occupation for monks, yet the printing revolution came from a completely different direction. Not rocking the boat was a principle they adhered to that basically tied their hand.
We also use the word curiosity slightly differently - the older form is found in "curiosity killed the cat". The ancient philosophy term that would be closer to what we may mean by curiosity now is wonder.
I think you leaped to a conclusion here. Parent post is about immoderate distraction, not having horse blinders on 24/7. There is plenty of room to “look at the birds” while also knowing how to say “no” to distraction.
> prudent allocation of attention to what you should
How do we even define "what" outside of a basic moral context? "What" is a constant moving target throughout life, something extremely personal that's based on our experiences and knowledge.
I say stay curious.
Consider Bob, the virtuous, studious person, who is opposed to that vicious "curiosity" that would distract him from his goal, spends all his time studying and practicing and focusing on his very narrow subject. Think about building a building as tall as you possibly can -- that's their knowledge tower. Taller! Taller! More focused, more specialized! But once he's read all the books and journal articles on the subject, how can he keep getting better? Where do new ideas come from? Just more practice, the same thing over and over? That works well for running a marathon, but not for creative work.
Now consider Alice, the vicious, curious person, also wanting to get as good as possible in a focused field, but often distracted by her general intellectual curiosity. She doesn't read every book and journal article in the field, but she's read a lot of them (most of the way through) and is aware of the general ideas presented in most of the others. Think of the 80/20 power-law rules; this person, devoting half her time to the focused subject, is probably about 80% to 90% as knowledgeable about the deep, focused field as the person who devoted all his time to it. Meanwhile, she has a wellspring of fresh ideas from a wide range of related disciplines (and everything is all related, one way or another).
The thing about world-leading experts in creative fields is that they're constantly facing problems that nobody has ever solved before. When Bob The Studious faces such a problem, he needs to invent the solution wholesale by a mutation on his existing body of knowledge. He has no raw memetic material to cross-breed with to explore the solution space. But Alice does! She doesn't need to rely on the slow and random process of mutation; she has a wealth of other memetic material to cross-breed with her (somewhat more limited) specialist knowledge. Nobody in RAID Firmware design has solved that particular problem before, but it looks a little bit like a hobby project she read about a few months ago involving a Raspberry PI, and didn't they have to deal with something like this on the space shuttle? Hold on, I think I bookmarked that ...
Virtuoso musicians know that practicing 4 to 6 hours per day is better than practicing 10 hours per day. Instead, go listen genre of music you don't like, read about the between Baroque and Classical music, play around with an instrument you've never touched before, or even just space out and go on a walk.
I would also add that it can depend what your goals are.
In the parent's other metaphor (the grape vine) useless grapes are a vicious curiosity that must be stamped out. Propagation of species has no purpose in the fastidious pursuit of the longest strongest grape vine and so surely must be pruned.
The studious man marries the first person they date and commits to life-long faithfulness regardless of any potential misalignment.
The curious man dates lots of people trying to learn both if they want to get married and what they want out of such a life-long faithful commitment.
All people are a combination of both curious and studious. It reminds me of a question I've had quite often and had lots of good conversation about: Does learning make you less able to learn?
When you "learn" something and accept it as a de-facto truth, you can be very studious from that base. However, doing so limits your ability to be curious and explore contractions to that baseline. Most modern discoveries are built on curious, by questioning the status quo. THEN, committing to that curiosity in a studious fashion.
> For all of Michael’s amazing moves and unforgettable moments, he knew none of that could happen without the fundamentals. Those basic moves he had practiced over and over and over since he was a kid made everything else possible. He didn’t work on being flashy, he worked on being consistent, and he worked on it relentlessly. Cleaners don’t care about instant gratification; they invest in the long-term payoff.
I also recognize something Bruce Lee said about martial arts techniques, that the techniques that are pleasing to the eye are not very good, that the best stuff that works is boring and simple, and one has to develop that taste, not unlike developing a taste for wines.
I found the quote:
> “Some martial arts are very popular, real crowd pleasers, because they look good, have smooth techniques. but beware.They are like a wine that has been watered. A diluted wine is not a real wine, nto a good wine, hardly the genuine article. Some martial arts don’t look so good, but you know that they have a kick, a tang, a genuine taste. They are like olives. The taste may be strong and bittersweet. The flavour lasts. You cultivate a taste for them. NO one ever developed a taste for diluted wine”
In response to;
> The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity
I don't agree with your example by the way. There are many variables. For example, the former may be lazy and undisciplined with his life in general, but is faithful regardless for whatever reason (it's also easy to imagine that monk-like discipline is not necessarily always the only factor that keeps men in committed relationships from cheating). The latter may just consider polygamy as a lifestyle choice for a certain period of time but be very disciplined with his life nevertheless. It's not correct to derive assumptions about one's discipline purely based on the type of relationships one engages.
I'm 33, I've been coding since I was 14. It only happened once in my life that someone offered me to co-found a company but they had no funding, no connections and the idea sucked. I didn't join and the project failed. If I get any semi-decent opportunity at all, I take it because otherwise I will have to wait 10 years for the next mediocre opportunity to come up.
Trying to find opportunities is also not viable. At one point, I reached out to some VCs and attended some events which I knew they would also attend; it almost got to the point of stalking them... Still couldn't even raise $20K from them... All I got was a free cappuccino with one of them. Waste of time.
The only opportunities I ever got and which worked out with moderate success were the ones where everyone was telling me that it was a waste of time... They would have been a waste of time if I was a lucky spoiled brat maybe; but in my world, if the opportunity is even moderately good, someone else with a few million $ in funding is already doing it and Google will send every single user to their platform and won't send a single user to my platform.
Edit for spelling.
Even without the inevitable new ideas, I probably have a year or two's unrealized ideas littered around on post-it notes. Dunno if that is a measure of success as it is a measure of actually doing something interesting.
I agree... one of my relatives hates programming and used to tell me learning to code was a waste of time. Now I get a bigger check at the end of the month despite the fact he's an overworked doctor, and I'm sitting on my arse at home building some CRUD. Pick carefully who you listen to.
Sure mom, but I make more than you and dad ever did doing less, and it's feeding your grandchildren. What do you want from me?
Stopped paying real attention years ago, but it's usually a story where she knows a person who makes however many dollars a year and I could have too. I don't think this discussion would have been any different if I was in one of those jobs.
That person usually works 60-80 hours a week. She leaves out the times when it isn't a great year in that area and they were laid off for 8 months. She misses the toll on your body working like that takes. She doesn't realize the cost of the trucks and the tools, if you need them.
I guess it is easier when you simplify down to $X a year for your best year.
If you were a plumber, she'd have an easy answer when talking to her friends about what doubled112 does. Plumber is a job everyone understands at a basic level; most of the trades are because you can point to a finished product. "He builds things like that."
Sometimes an analogy can help; I've definitely told people I'm an internet plumber and that seems to satisfy their curiosity.
I'm not sure you come out as the winner here...
In all seriousness I know what you mean.
A lot of entrepreneurs come from well off families because they can afford to say no, or spend time on a bunch of middling ideas until they strike it rich on a single one.
I'm finally getting to the point where I might feel comfortable going off on my own venture (I have a bit of a safety net built up, but no family to count on still if things go awry). It's nice, but at the back of my head I'm still struggling to let go of what's providing me stability. That and being American I'm about one health problem away from losing it all so...
I would love for the stability that allows others to "self actualize", so to speak.
and THEN they will start a nice side business where they brag about their success and what they did to ensure it - re-emphasising the survivorship bias.
Or the "self made" success story who got just a "minor" cash injection of $500k from their parents' slush fund and then could afford to not generate any income for 5 years.
Unfortunately the stats on all these (and on this site in particular) are going to be extremely skewed. I'd hazard a guess that just the viewership of HN already heavily skews the sample towards a very privileged %ile of the total population.
Jesus, almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor on that one...
But yea, I know the feel. I worked in tech for a long time and didn't have any connections. Its frustrating hearing stories of people getting funding jsut by knowing teh right people and being able to secure hundreds of thousands for a seed round. While I'm strong in tech, I am complete trash when it comes to design or sales.
Luckily I met my cofounders through a mutual friend. they get me funding and I can focus on building our startup. Since I worked in a few other startups previously, I was able to benefit from watching and avoiding the mistakes they made that caused them, to fail. Now get to call the shots when it comes to engineering and we've been growing steadily and getting traction despite the bad economy.
Before you bother building the product, call up your VC friends and see if you get any nibbles.
Most of Europe.
This sounds like part of the problem. Lucky people tend to think they are lucky. Because when an opportunity arrives, they assume it's lucky and look for the reason why.
If you assume you have bad luck, you could, for example, get invited to an exclusive 1:1 meeting with a high powered VC investor, who has a ton of wisdom, many connections, and access to resources, and somehow think it was a waste of time.
For 30 days in a row, come up with and write down a million dollar idea per day. It's hard at first, but gets much easier, and after awhile you'll see that there is so much real opportunity around you that the challenge is deciding what to go after. But as long as you are convinced that good ideas and opportunities are few and far between, then you are probably going to be stuck.
Get into the habit of looking for weaknesses and inefficiencies in everything around you, for example. Or look in niche industries that are too small for the Googles of the world to care about. An idea can be worth more money than you'll ever use and still be way too small to be interesting for Google. When you find something that can work, don't wait for somebody to hand you money or invite you to join them, but go bootstrap it yourself. Maybe just do it as a side gig, but choose something with the potential to be far bigger.
For example: I noticed that the nearest dry cleaning company appears to be using a DOS-based system, they seem to be somewhat disorganized, and they have to manually notify me (phone call) when my clothes are ready. Odd are, there are lots of other dry cleaning companies like them. It probably wouldn't take much time talking to them to figure out a number of ways to dramatically improve things with some better software and maybe some RFID tags or something. Their customers will love that, on your system, they automatically get notified when their clothes are ready. The companies will love that, on your system, they can handle more orders per day, they never lose track of stuff, and the software is much easier to use. Plus, your system lets them send out coupon codes and reminders ("It's been 6 months since you got your suit cleaned - bring it in this week and we'll give you a 25% discount!") and so they see people taking stuff to them more often. Google is never going to compete with you there, but you could probably demonstrate that a company could save $10k/yr and/or increase revenue by $10k/yr using your system, and you'd "only" charge them $3k/yr (or whatever). There are about 14k dry cleaning companies in the U.S., so converting a small segment of the market would be enough to be self-sustaining, with a much higher upside if you got to, say, 10% of the market.
The above is just a random example off the top of my head, but I guarantee you are swimming in opportunities like this, so if that one isn't appealing or the numbers don't hold up under scrutiny, then look around and find something else.
> People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
It feels like the author extended this specifically to “the other good ideas” which is always true because it includes both good and bad ideas.
Yes fills time. No makes time.
Finally the CEO couldn't take it anymore ... "Ensorceled, I was expecting your head to explode by now." and I replied "What? This is great, if you give me 5 priority 1 tasks it means I get to choose and my favourite is on the list!"
In the ensuing "discussion", I brought up the Jobs quote about 5 times.
OP: “That’s not how the word prioritize works.”
I'll have to revisit my memories of the incident.
Regardless of what you call it, only one thing can truly be top priority at any given time. Without effective planning, it will morph into a priority singularity titled "Finish the Project".
I'm finding it hilarious that you are defending this guy.
I hope you never have to work for, or with, one of these people because it will probably drive you bonkers.
1 minute compile time? Not an opportunity to check your email or hacker news.
We tend to move too little anyways.
I also find myself just kind of walking on the spot sometimes unintentionally when I'm trying to figure something, which I'm assuming is getting me a sliver of cardio in too.
googled it with DDG®, darn, i guess it just means a sitting/standing desk that can raise and lower the top easily
Software or sites that don't take that into account have decreased usability
The worse offenders are those who make you wait a lot then prompt you to click a non optional "Ok" before another waiting period. Thanks I hate it (I think there was a Windows install like that)
Sounds like a minute to explore optimizing your compiler settings though...
The article illustrates this nicely at the end, via the two sets of statements.
Often, people makes statements that sounds a bit like this: "Oh yeah. We do need to focus on XYZ. Mary will add this to her responsibilities." This is the kind of "fooling yourself" that the article talks about. That is not focus. It's the opposite of focus. It's spreading yourself thinner than you were before.
True focus requires you to say what you will NOT be doing. It requires a bold statement on what you will deliberately neglect. That takes courage.
In the article, the second set of statement has that ingredient. It's not easy.
Effort is just a strong signal and redoing something you already did that didn’t go anywhere signals a willingness to expend energy on a request that historically went nowhere which is a pretty good signal that it’s important to somebody.
A related truism is people who care about something will email you more than once about it.
May be a good idea if you want people to go away or treat all issues as garbage, nonetheless it is infuriating and nowadays I check for it before making any bug report.
You have Stalebot? I am not going to bother with spending time on bug report.
To be clear, I support aggressive issue triage and closing them.
Yet if it's a decent/good idea, my go to answer is "not yet" and not "no". If it's really a great idea, eventually I'll get to it. By keeping the issue around open, it's still peripherally in my vision and I may have a plan to take care of it that depends on something else. Extra information is never wasted and may inform your decisions on what you are working on now. Plus you know, it's kind of the polite thing to do.
I feel it's the same for the original Steve quote, Apple was/is pretty famous for saying "no" to a good idea and revisiting them later. I think "not yet" is closer to the originally meant intent.
I agree with the takeaway (last two small paragraphs), and also think it's funny how putting things in different perspectives matter a lot.
We should really be skeptical of any idea that touts itself of being the most important thing to care about: if it really is, it probably was obvious already and that advice wasn't needed in the first place. If the idea appeared like a revelation, the reality is probably more nuanced and truth of that ideology strongly depends on the circumstances you're in.
It’s the idea that even things termed as good might not be good for you; especially in the long term. Our time on earth is finite.
It involves choosing a focus and cultivating the attention to stay on track. It also involves being comfortable looking wrong in the short term.
The article below can be read adjacent to the one in this post
https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/everything-is-not-fo...
Incidentally: my government has cameras now to check phone usage while driving. Demerit points and possible loss of license.
Here are the full quotes:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
It's an interesting read, but seemingly written from a privileged perspective. My experience in business was that every good idea counts, since one is constantly forced to adapt. You must make the bandwidth to listen to them all, prioritise, select and filter - to understand what informed people are trying to tell you about the situation. Basic leadership "openness/receptive" stuff really. That includes warnings that you think you know better about. Lot's of good ideas are negative and one should still heed them. In the story there's one great idea: "Never get into catering POS with table management". That would have been a good idea to listen to early (smugly proclaimed with hindsight - but no less true).
How else do you think you build a competitive moat? By solving easy problems?
There are many ideas, things which we could probably do. But just because something (interesting or profitable) is possible, that doesn't mean we should do it or even spend much time pondering it.
For those of us who see problems and solutions _everywhere_, this is a surpreme challenge. Or for those who "ramp up" quickly to new things, everything seems possible. Consequently, any good idea not pursued seems like a lost opportunity. It may be! But it may also be a distraction from doing something which is also important and already in motion.
Put another way, focus isn't something to value in absolute, it needs to make sense in business and opportunity perspectives. You say No to good ideas only if you're confident your current plan is good enough and worth pursuing on its own.
It's not to say that such corrections are never appropriate but that the principle of charity step should be completed before going into the exercise of attempting to correct language.
Rejecting a genuinely good idea is much harder.