Long form articles about Focus for solopreneurs
Shorter articles about Focus in a solo business
What does TL;DR mean?
TL;DR = too lazy, didn’t read.
You don’t have to engage
After getting into an argument on linkedin recently,
I immediately regretted some stuff I said online.
I said I didn’t care much about world events because I don’t watch the news, which promptly earned me the label of “privileged”.
Maybe they were right, it was a poor choice of words and there’s a lot of suffering out there.
It’s not that I don’t care.
It’s that I only have so much attention to give,
and I’m not willing to give it up to a news cycle focussed on negative hyperbole.
So I then learned about a concept I wished I’d known sooner that would have saved me some trouble…
“Hitchens razer”, named for an author, states that:
Anything asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence
This has since saved me from many pointless arguments online.
I don’t need to engage with everything I see.
How many hours have I lost crafting arguments online?
Or wasting my best energy on imagined comebacks to arguments that have already faded into the past?
Or spent all day stressing about news I can do nothing about?
The thing is I should know better!
In fact,I’ve already written about this myself
In life by design ep40 I was talking about cultivating an information diet of selective ignorance,
Which massively improved my wellbeing AND gave me improved ability to focus.
❓ how can I introduce more “flow” into my life?
What activities give me flow?
- Design
- 3d modelling
- Writing
- Gaming
- Building
- Teaching
- Gardening
What is required for flow?
- Use hard-won skills or knowledge I’m proud of
- Immediate and clear feedback loops
- Free from distraction
- Challenging enough to push my skills.
- Easy enough I can complete it.
- Have clear goals and obvious progress
- Increasing difficulty or complexity
How to reclaim your attention from Big Tech baddies
In the next 10yrs, we’re heading for another dark age…
We’ll regress from capitalism to feudalism,
Yanis Varoufakis suggests in Technofeudalism
Big tech are the new kings
Governments are liege lords
The harvest is our data
Us?
We’re the serfs,
forced to labour in exchange for rent.
Netflix CEO said in this quote I find utterly monstrous:
“Our competition is sleep”
They want your attention 24/7,
glued to their apps every second of the day
producing data for harvest,
so they can sell your own desires back to you
in advertising and products you don’t need
Here’s how to reclaim your attention
Being “triggered” is a crutch I reject
Of all the crutches people use to excuse bad behaviour, being “triggered” has to be the worst.
This new phrase has arisen during the age of attention economy.But the only thing that triggers me is the idea of being triggered.
🤬You see a social post and you are triggered.
👺 Someone says something you don’t agree with and you’re triggered.
💢 someone has an opinion on something and you’re triggered
The premise of being triggered is that you have an emotional reaction, and that whatever happens next isn’t your responsibility.
Now you can spend the next 15 mins riding a wave of righteous indignation!
Even better, now you can spread your own, far more valid, point of view to others via social media,
triggering them in turn,
igniting a shockwave chain reaction of triggers across the internet.
We call this a “viral post”.
Many social content creators actively try to artificially manufacture this trigger reaction, to get attention.
But I refuse to accept this idea that your reaction is out with your own own control;
That your own behaviour is someone else’s responsibility.
I get it, anger feels good sometimes. it’s addictive.
but are we children, to throw out toys when angry or cry the moment we feel hunger?
No we are adults, with rational brains.
it’s our job to resist our base impulses,
lest we all revert back to tribes of apes hitting each other with sticks and flinging feces at each other 💩
To pretend otherwise is devolving yourself of ownership and blame.
so don’t take the easy route.
it’s time we all grew up and nurtured a more tolerant attitude to people with different opinions.
from a selfish point of view, do you want to spend your whole life and emotional seesaw,
being controlled by the behaviours of others?
You will never be able to control what other people do,
Only your own reaction to it.
If this post triggered you,
feel free to go whinge about it on social media, I’ll be out in garden not giving a F.
When you hit the hump, seek clarity.
This week I hit a major crisis of clarity.
I’ve made some quick wins, but my momentum has halted as I hit the hump.
I was feeling like I’d lost my way.
All week I sat at my computer, distracting myself with busiwork,
but not knowing what to work on.
Listening to a chapter of Dan Koe’s Art of Focus brought me clarity.
I opened it at random and just so happened to land on a chapter specifically about hitting the hump in any endeavour.
I realised the problem I was struggling with was not having too many tasks, the problem was I had no clarity.
I didn’t have anything to guide my focus and so my efforts all felt random.
Without clarity, I was trying to work on everything that came my way.
I was struggling mentally because my skills hadn’t yet developed to the point where I’m ready.
Which means I’m not getting the results I want.
Which is normal.
My anxiety was coming from the fact I was resorting to seeking new activities,
cramming my day with admin and busiwork,
Instead of just recommitting to the things that work.
I just need to stay the course and keep doing the right things every day.
As soon as I realised this I felt a wave of relief and joy washing over me.
I was already in the right place doing the right things.
I just need to keep doing it for a few more years haha.
Most stress is not caused by a lack of time or lack of skills, stress is caused by lack of clarity.
Now the path was clear.
I had moved away from my schedule so I was opening myself to choices.
Which was allowing lots of random non-needle moving tasks into my day.
So I set aside an hour,
I sat down and redesigned my schedule a bit as I have to get back to doing the same things every day.
My schedule gives me clarity on what I *should* be doing instead of what I *could* be doing. Follow the process.
Stop wasting your attention
In the course of an average day, your brain processes 11 million bits per second.
That’s 14 billion bits of information over your life.
Your brain is always active. Always processing.
Whether you are solving problems in your business, brushing your teeth, watching TV, having sex or spending time with children.
Your brain is always processing information.
Right up until the moment it’s not and then everything stops for you.
Every time you take any action, you’re spending your bits of information.
The quality of your life is determined by the information your process over the duration of your life.
Learning to walk takes 5 years.
But then you spend the rest of your life doing it with almost zero effort.
We call this “muscle memory” but the label is false.
Rather, we reinforce pathways in our brain to make it more efficient to process information.
We carve grooves in our mind that allow information to flow like water in a channel.
This makes it easy to perform complex tasks on autopilot conserving our energy for other more important tasks
( Link to power of routines and habits article)
Stack your information into skills that help you flow or grow.
The unintended side effect is that we also reinforce biases that we hold.
This is the origin of the phrase
“you can’t reach an old dog new tricks”
We become more fixed into our habits and behaviours
Forging new habits, experiencing new things, keeping an open minds, learning new skills…
This is how you stay young forever.
I think of these X2 reinforcements every time I spend my attention watching a subpar Netflix show that doesn’t relax me,
Or waste my energy worrying about problems I can’t solve.
Or allow information that doesn’t help me and I can’t control into my life.
Or worry about things that have yet to pass.
Only spend energy doing things in front of you, or on planning so the right things come to be in front of you.
Effort vs expertise
I’m just back from the trip of a lifetime, skiing in France.
3 years ago this type of holiday would not have been possible for us.
I count my blessings every day.
It was truly a fairy-tale place.
Cosy cabins, epic mountain scapes, misty godrays split through hazy treelines stretched across jagged whitecapped peaks stretching off impossibly tall into soft pink skies at sunset.
Everywhere Skiers slalomed their way gracefully down the slopes…
I was not one of these elegant figures.
It turns out “easy” routes in the Alps are equivalent of “difficult” in the UK and I haven’t skied in 15 years. 😅
Nevertheless, after about a day of faceplants and cartwheels, and impressive pirouettes, I found my ski legs and mustered what might even be called grace.
After the first day my legs were jelly!
I was expending all my effort trying to stop. to slow down my mass,
and I bludgeoned my way down the slope, mostly on my ass, sometimes on my face.
Whereas the experts spent a fraction of the effort, they simply leaned in, turned their ankles just a few degrees to redirect their angle down the slope….
flawless elegance and speed!
Not only did they spend a fraction of the energy but they got to the destination more quickly.
Plus they didn’t look like a fool.
They had a serene look of intense focus and joy.
Its the classic scalpel vs the sledgehammer. The sniper instead of the shotgun
Just another example of how a tiny bit of effort applied the right way,
has a much bigger impact than brute force and effort.
Where else can we apply this principle in your life and business?
Where can we apply expertise instead of brute force to build leverage?
FAQs from solopreneurs about Focus
More topics for solopreneurs
Ask me about Focus in a solo business...
Your contact details will be private. The answer to your Question will be public so other solopreneurs learn from it.