Focus

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

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... 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

Focus forces brutal prioritization

Making few bets forces you to make hard decisions. It’s extremely hard to measure the value of something against some abstract and absolute notion of value.

Proponents of diversification argue that it takes the edge off of making a mistake. That would be a good argument if people acted the same way independent of... See more