Focus, will you?

Now pack even more dangerous advice to students in one short article without too much back up and background, will you? OP jumped from description of his personal blazingly fast and 'energetic' thought process to generalizations too quickly, I think.

I actually strongly disagree with both points raised by the author and will state something quite opposite:

1) Focus is most probably not a direct function of one's mood. Do not mistake momentary excitement for ability to focus or being in a flow. Bright emotions come in bursts, quite often they skew and blur the vision and undermine your ability to think clearly. Basically, untrained person constantly falls prey to her emotions and impulses. The flow is a state of peace of mind, not of over-stimulation and constant agitation. Keep emotions for creative sessions (I don't believe too much in such thing, to be frank), but when you need to focus - try to get calm and then shift into flow-state.

2) One can - and I think one should - train to concentrate on most kinds of mental tasks (providing that nothing gets in the way, of course). Focusing only on what's interesting is very rarely an option. It is much more vital to be able to focus on what's important rather than on what seems to be really cool right now - for students and for entrepreneurs especially! And anyway, almost any big task, however cool, consists of some important not so cool small steps that can't be ignored. So: do try to focus on one thing at a time, be ready for your wandering mind to try to take you somewhere else, be ready to notice patterns of loosing focus (come on, you are loosing focus, not just changing it), don't over-rationalize or get aggravated at this and just make conscious effort to stay on topic. Being calm and prepared helps a lot.

Couple of final thoughts about article. Focus is trainable, and in the long run persistence is what's important, not following your constantly changing emotions or chasing your thoughts. Multitasking is not suitable for everyone, not suitable for all types of activities and is almost as dangerous to young person as promotion of cool-looking do-what-you-want lifestyle to school students.

I believe that a lack of focus - for example being unable to focus on a discreet task for any length of time, is a bad thing. I've often drafted 10 responses to 10 different e-mails and given myself a mental slap on the wrist for realising that I've not finished a single one of them. Then the phone rings...then an employee interrupts me with a question on Skype and before I know it, it's lunchtime and I've got nothing done.

Focus is something you can learn, and I'm proactively re-wiring my brain through exercise and meditation to achieve longer levels of focus.

In the meantime - at the start of the day I set up my personal Trello board with the smallest number of tasks that I must do that day, and so long as those get done - I'm free to dip in and out of a range of other tasks that my job as CEO requires of me. This also helps to stop the self-hatred vibe, which is easy to jump on when I don't feel I've made enough progress in a particular area of the business.

TL;DR: Being a CEO is tough.