Focus: The Modern Super Power
Focus is one of the hardest things to come by in the modern world. Now, more than ever before, everything is competing for your attention — breaking news, people liking your posts, text messages, weather updates, sports scores, and the other seemingly endless stream of notifications on your devices — the attention economy is in full swing. Having the ability to maintain focus in this noisy world is the closest thing you can have to a super power.
This isn’t the usual preachy Medium post where I pontificate on my superior ability to focus — in fact, I’m still trying to figure out what works best for me. I’ve talked about some of the books I read after college to reboot. They made me realize the value of habits , but a long list of habits only helps so much. We’re all given the same number of hours in a day, but some people just seem to get more done. That’s because rather than waking up and figuring out what they’re going to do that day, they’ve made a mental model of how their time will be spent. This has become my latest goal. By going through how I might respond to a certain scenario in my mind, I won’t simply react to stimuli as they come along. Time is an incredibly valuable resource, and it is important to spend it wisely.
“To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.”
— Charles Duhigg
It’s not that I have a short attention span or that I look at my phone too often. I believe I beat the average on both counts (although my girlfriend may beg to differ). I also believe that I’ve managed to stay pretty active, productive, and meaningfully connected during quarantine, but that’s not to say that I’ve been perfect. I have spent more time going down Twitter and Instagram rabbit holes in the last three months than I did all of last year. They have proven to be major distractions and I quickly fell back into the old habit of jumping straight into those infinity pools the moment boredom strikes. They have been my biggest barrier in my daily focus, but I believe that there is a greater focus in life as well.
I believe that focus is the bigger goals or purpose you hope to accomplish in life. Again, we’re all only given 24 hours in a day — but we don’t all choose to use our time the same way. Elon Musk manages to act as the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, the founder of The Boring Company, and the co-founder of Neuralink and Open AI; Stephen King has published over 60 novels, Karlie Kloss is a super model and founder of Kode with Klossy, her STEAM focused non-profit. How the heck do they manage to do it? Simple. They have chosen a focused life. By choosing focus you choose to make the most of your time. I’ve talked about John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp’s killer book, Make Time, before; but I often think back to their thoughts on calendars. Yes, the endless possibilities of an empty calendar feel freeing, but a structured calendar forces you to think proactively about what you want to accomplish in a day. Basically, by planning out your day on a calendar you’re creating a mental model for how you want that day to go. I know that this works. I used to hate planning and would rely upon spontaneously finding something to do everyday, but boy was I wrong.
This has been one of the busiest years of my life. I’m pursuing a number of career opportunities and pushing my passion projects further than I ever have before, and it’s all because I’m choosing to focus. Pursuing so many projects would be impossible if I just hoped life would work out. Instead, I have made a habit of asking myself if the thing I want to do is moving me towards my greater goals. It may sound antithetical to the idea of focus to pursue so many projects, but I believe that by choosing focus you open yourself up to so many more possibilities.
