A hidden superpower
A quality which is getting more and more scarce.
Hi.
Reading time: About 12 minutes
The more I look at myself and everyone I see I notice one thing. We all lack one major ability. Something which is the essence of life. Something that can help us achieve unimaginable results.
The ability to ‘focus’.
We are in the age of scrolling. When we want any sort of dopamine that we can get, we are all hooked. In this time I believe the hardest yet biggest differentiator will be the ability to focus. All of us consume a lot of information but the problem lies in the fact that most of what we consume is trash.
This is a very interesting image. Machines learning and humans scrolling. The reality of the world right now.
Both Buffett and Bill Gates were asked what is the one thing that they would attribute their success to.
“And I said, ‘Focus,’” Buffett recounted. “And Bill said the same thing.”
Focus has an outer layer and an inner layer.
Frederik Gieschen calls it Macro focus and Micro focus.
Macro Focus
Macro focus is the outer dimension of focus. It is finding your calling. This is what you want to focus on. This is what most of us spend our early life figuring out. We want to know what we want to do in our limited time in this world and we many times take this decision lightly.
This is the most important decision of your life. If you choose wrong it could lead to you leading a miserable life. What I notice most people doing is they have this wild dream that they choose a life where they have a chance of earning the most money. Once they earn the money required they will retire and do what they like.
In this article of the top 5 regrets of my life the first regret was : “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
I also thought life was like that. You do something which makes you money you retire and then you enjoy your life. Then I saw Warren Buffett. A 90-year-old businessman who has been doing what he loves since the age of 12 and has not stopped working. Makes you think how much better your life would be doing what you love and at the same time not having to worry about money.
If we miss out on macro focus then we get drained. We become significantly less happy and at the same time, we end up in a dangerous cycle. I think people can make a lot of money and still not be happy doing what they are doing.
Per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it. The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on?
When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older. - Paul Graham.
So how do we find what our ‘calling’ is?
Frederik Gieschen wrote in his essay ‘Focus: The Last Superpower?’
“Jeremy Giffon made this point on a recent episode of Invest Like The Best. “Most people,” he said, “wish that they like things that they don't actually like.”
“People with tons of options, will spend their whole life working jobs they hate. It's really strange and tragic.”
Giffon relayed a conversation with a coach who told people about their true calling. This, it turned out, “was the most devastating thing” for many.
It’s not hard to figure out why: ‘If I tell someone who is a very successful investor that they need to be a third-grade teacher. You know that becoming a third-grade teacher now means you no longer live in Tribeca, you don't have the same friends, you don't have the same apartment and all that is terrifying to you, so the fear of loss.’
(I wonder if he ever ran into the opposite: a teacher who should really be an investor. Unlikely, I think, since the teacher would not have been able to afford the coach.)
I’ve written about this idea before (real growth is scary): the more success you’ve already had (and the higher your financial obligations), the more difficult it is to explore any other paths (see also Tom Morgan’s work on fitness landscapes). But what if you can’t shake the feeling that your macro focus is off?
What if you would like to have that intense focus but can’t figure out what would be important enough?
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer. Finding your macro focus might turn into a multi-year journey and involve a whole lot of failed experiments.
But you can start looking for trailheads. These could be negative or positive emotions or states, like fear and resistance, being in flow state, or feeling deeply curious, centered or ‘alive.’ Tom Morgan offered some great questions in his most recent piece.
And Patrick O’Shaughnessy collected some classic ones:
“1) Where do you feel great resistance or fear?
2) What that you do looks hard to others but feels easy to you?
3) What would you keep doing no matter how much money you had? Or even better, what couldn’t you get paid $1B to stop doing?
4) What’s the weirdest thing you spend a lot of time on? Or, what’s a passion you’d be embarrassed to admit publicly?”
Why look for fear? If it doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not that important. If it’s important, failure matters. It’s scary to truly commit to something whose failure would matter. It’s much easier to keep yourself busy with activities whose outcomes disappear into the background. List all the things that a part of you wants to do but which another part of you is scared of. Explore your resistance.
On the flipside, in which moments or activities do you feel fully alive, fully you? What prevents you from exploring these further? In what ways are you tapping into your natural talents? What truly excites you? What would get you out of bed earlier?
The truth is scary and to go for it is not easy at all.
If someone were to ask me though how do you know whether you have found what it is that you want to focus on for your limited time in this world my answer would be:
What is it that sparks genuine curiosity in you. What makes you want to know more and you don’t mind spending time in figuring it out.
But at the end of the day this is very subjective. It’s not like you are going to be hit with some sort of enlightenment that this is what you have to do for your life. It’s just one of those things which make life interesting (as Munger would say)
Micro Focus
Once you have your micro focus in line and you know what it is that you have to work on and become better at throughout your life micro focus is the next step. Micro Focus is like knowing what your target is and trying to hit bullseye. Look at all the successful people in the world. They have relentless focus on what it is that they want to achieve and they shut out everything for it.
A Forbes article wrote the following about Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett;
Bill Gates:
In the words of Bill Gates Jr.’s college roommate, Andy Braiterman, “Bill had a monomaniacal quality [...] He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing.” One of his ex-girlfriends described him as being extremely focused and intolerant of distractions. He didn’t own a television and had even dismantled his car radio. She elaborates: “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour’ turnaround—meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours.”
He shut off almost everything other than the things that brought him value. And that is the beauty of focus. You have to realise that distractions take up a lot of energy that your brain does not have unlimited supply of. In this day and age if you want to be mega successful the sacrifice you have to make is simple. Get rid of all distractions. Not some but all.
It has become increasingly hard to do so.
Steve Jobs:
“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,”
In this world there are a lot of things that you can get good at. It is up to you to choose what it is that you want to be good at. But even then in the particular field the options you have is crazy. And for someone to actually be great you have to be very particular with your time.
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” - Warren Buffett
Sherlock Holmes is big on the idea of not knowing a lot of things which are of no use. He thinks of the brain as an attic. It can take in limited information and if you have excess it removes a lot of it. Better to choose what goes in your head than forgetting all the important stuff in the process.
“I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
Flow
There is this video by Swami Sarvapriyanand on Flow.
In this video he explores the idea of how our mind has limited capacity. It can only focus on so much. We have a capacity of 126 bits a second. Out of which we use around 60 bits a second to listen to someone. It is that taxing on our brain. We use half of our power to listen to someone speak. If we are lucky enough though we can focus around 80-90 bits a second into something. When you put that much focus into something it is known as flow.
When you are in Flow state:
You don’t have a sense of your surroundings it does not matter whether there are insects biting you or any other thing is going on. When you are in flow you lose a sense of what is going on outside as all your energy goes towards one thing. You feel like you are in your own world
You don’t have a sense of time. When you are in flow you don’t know when the time passes by. You realise that time has gone but for you it felt like minutes.
You retain a lot of information.
You get a sense of ecstasy
A sense of serenity
Now if I ask you have you ever experienced Flow? Have you ever sat down and read a book not knowing what is happening around you not having track of the time?
You can think of any lecture, a sport or any activity where you don’t realise where the time went and at the same time the only thing you focused on was the matter at hand.
You could go for a run and not realise how much time or distance you have covered. You could be in a lecture and not realise 2 hours have gone by.
I have experienced ‘Flow state’ very rarely. I think in a month I experience it once or twice. It just goes to show how little we use our brain to full capacity.
“The difference between an ordinary person and a great person lies in the degree of concentration.”- Swami Vivekananda
So the idea is simple we have to focus on what is important and ignore what is irrelevant.
How to improve focus?
There are a lot of tools that I can think of:
To invert I would like to try and get rid of the distractions to increase focus. In my opinion the best way to get rid of all the dopamine on social media is to not remove the habit but to replace the habit. We will have better odds of success if we replace bad habits with good ones. (link)
These are the habits which increase our capability to connect with nature and have better periods of focus:
Meditation: I don’t practice meditation but it is said to require a lot of concentration and this way you do increase your levels of concentration.
Music: I find some music to invoke a lot of thoughts in my head. I find it to be an amazing way to focus my attention and send me into a different world. I sometimes go into flow listening to great music from movies.
Walks: Taking a stroll in nature without your device helps you a lot. It is a great tool for you to think.
Exercise: Exercise can be done in any form. You can run do yoga play a sport anything at the end of the day this helps in keeping your body fit.
Environmental priming: I mostly work from home or local cafes and there is a distinct downside to that. Stepping into the office is a signal to your body that ‘we’re here to get that thing done.’ I wish I had a dedicated home office room. Maybe I will give Wework another shot. My point is: I’m not doing this well, and I’m probably paying a significant price for it.
Conclusion
A combination of macro focus and micro focus is what can make you great. Many times people lack the former. They forget the bigger picture. Remember the mental model of velocity. On the other hand if you know what you want and you still don’t make efforts to achieve it you will be left thinking you could have done so much more and be left with regrets. You need both types of focus, not only one.
That’s it.
Thank you for reading,
Samvit.