On this particular day in the gym, there was a coach visiting who had worked with thousands of athletes over his long career, including some nationally-ranked athletes and Olympians.
I introduced myself and we began talking about the process of improvement.
“What’s the difference between the best athletes and everyone else?” I asked. “What do the... See more
I have a suspicion that most adults (75%+) could pick any skill—excluding sports—and work their way into the top 10% in the world simply by working exclusively on it every day for two years.
But almost nobody displays that degree of focus, so we will never know.
Anyone can say no to crappy opportunities. Only a master will say no to good opportunities. If you don’t say no to good opportunities, you’ll never have the time to pursue great opportunities.
Saying no is hard. Nobody knew that better than Steve Jobs, who said:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not
That, as a startup, you should only do half of what you want to do (only half the options, half the tabs, half the offerings, and half the target audience) to compound your chances of true PMF.
Ben Franklin's daily schedule is proof that most people attribute to genius what is just long periods of focused time
“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
A lot of companies don’t make it because in the process of trying to get many things right, they don’t get anything right.
Why are they in such a hurry?
A great company is a privilege, and it’s a privilege best earned through a singular product, not a collection of products. Entrepreneurs and creatives think about batches of products —creating an... See more
What is impossible, however, is concentrating on two tasks at once. Multitasking forces your brain to switch back and forth very quickly from one task to another.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if the human brain could transition seamlessly from one job to the next, but it can’t. Multitasking forces you to pay a mental price each time you interrupt one... See more
In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford called attention “the thing that is most one’s own” because what we pay attention to determines what is real to us, what is “actually present to our consciousness.” Just as we become what we eat, our reality becomes what we pay attention to. And just like our appetite has been hijacked by food... See more