Focus

The trick is to collide your mental model with the outside world as often as possible. This is what exploring does.

Maintaining focus becomes easier because ideas become less interesting. “Experts literally experience a different world within their specialism,” Tom Morgan pointed out . Experts perceive more layers and details, they see patterns and nuances invisible to others. Their experience of the same domain is richer, more interesting, and filled with an... See more

One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.

To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the... See more

“My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.” — Edwin Land

Why do some people achieve so many of the things they want, and others not? Do people have a fixed budget of things they can achieve in a lifetime? It doesn’t seem so. Rather, it seems like our achievement budget is a function of the number of priorities we have. Interestingly, it seems to be a nonlinear function. Meaning that if you go from 4... See more

At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.