Lack Of Focus Is Keeping You Unsuccessful | Ep 787
16 Dec 2024 · 33 min
In this solo podcast episode, the speaker argues that lack of focus is the primary barrier to entrepreneurial success. He defines focus as the ability to say no and eliminate distractions, rather than simply working harder. Drawing on personal anecdotes—an attorney’s blunt feedback at age 21, intensive GMAT study, building a gym, and running launch campaigns—he illustrates how "seasons of no" (periods of deliberate elimination of non‑essential activities) expand work capacity. He explains that work capacity is a trainable skill: like muscle hypertrophy, repeated overload builds the ability to handle more volume. The episode covers decision‑making fallacies (the myth of perfect information, the cost of unmade decisions), the importance of making quick, imperfect choices, and using reverse‑engineering of a "yes" or "no" to clarify criteria. He introduces a framework for business work: attract, convert, deliver, and stresses that many entrepreneurs waste time on tasks that don’t move the primary constraint. He emphasizes high‑leverage actions—identifying the single most impactful task and dedicating all effort to it—while warning against multitasking and over‑optimizing small details. The speaker also discusses pruning relationships, hobbies, and routines that don’t increase the probability of achieving larger goals, and encourages listeners to periodically reset their calendars, focus on one high‑impact task, and use timers to measure actual effort. The overarching message is that focus is an actionable habit of removal, and mastering it enables exponential growth across all stages of a business.
Chapters
I had this attorney tell me this when I was 21. I said, "Amin, I've been working so hard." And she said— she just looked at me and laughed and she said, "You don't even know how to work." And it was such a jarring moment for me because she was a partner at this firm and I was trying to impress everybody. And I thought I was like, you know, doing a gung-ho job. And she just laughed at me. She's like, "You don't even know how to work." She's like, "It takes you 10 years just to learn how to work." I feel like now, looking in retrospect, I can absolutely agree my capacity has improved. But the way to improve that capacity is to start eliminating the things that currently drain your focus right now. I've seen this consistent theme amongst people inside the community, and I want to talk about it, which is this is something that has happened at multiple stages within my business career, and it's extended seasons of saying no. If we define focus as the quality and quantity of things that you turn down or say no to, then to be the most focused person, you would literally do nothing but one thing. And so I hear many of you say that you want to focus more, but you haven't really even defined what it is. You think it's going to be about like trying harder to look at your screen when most of focus is actually the active removal of things that drain attention. And so what happens is kind of like value is created By removing all friction, focus is created by removing all distraction. The most focused people, it's not that they have willpower that you lack, they have removed the distractions that you have. And so I remember this, this, this, this talk with a friend of mine who's an Olympic coach, and he was saying the difference between people who win the gold medal and kind of the other competitors, people look at them and say, I wonder what they have that I don't. But more often it's, what do I have that they lack? In those instances, it's typically an off switch, but it's also what are the things that I'm doing with my time that they aren't? Fundamentally, it's not even that they're getting a higher return for the time they're putting in. They're just simply putting in more time. And what feels incomprehensible for you is that you could put more time into whatever you're trying to pursue right now, but you can by removing things. You know, one of my favorite quotes is that the heaviest thing in the world isn't iron or gold. It's an unmade decision. That's, that's a quote from me. So man, super deep. Uh, but, but for real though, you probably have a few decisions that you need to make. And one of the big fallacies around decision-making is that it takes time to make decisions. And it really doesn't. You make decisions in an instant based on information. And so, by the way, for those of you who sell, when someone is in this kind of like, I need to think about it, it's like, what do you need to think about it? And what information would be required in order to make a decision? Some of you need to define the variables of what would make this a yes. And alternatively, if you don't know, then what would make it a no? And then you can reverse engineer the yes. And so in either circumstance, some of you need to focus by eliminating the unmade decisions in your life by simply making them. And there's this big fallacy at all levels of business of the perfect pick, which is that you are going to be able to somehow pick perfectly. Most decisions have to be made with imperfect information. And oftentimes if you have perfect information about an opportunity, the opportunity has expired. And so one of the things that makes opportunities opportunities is the risk inherent in incomplete information. And so sometimes you just have to move and learn along the way. And so one of the easiest visuals I have for this is, is, is the mist, is walking through mist, right? As you walk through mist, the next few feet are always, become clear to you. And when you walk your way up a mountain, and now imagine a mountain that you're walking through mist, right? You keep walking, you keep taking the next step. You might get to a maximum and be like, wow, this is a mountaintop. But then you see a little bit further cuz the mist and you realize you're at a subtop. And you have to take a few steps down. But the thing is, is that you'll always be further away than the people who are trying to plot the perfect path from the bottom of the mountain without being able to see the top. So you'll always be able to have better perspective after taking action, after taking motion. The reason that this has been top of mind for me is that the, the big growth periods that I've had in my life in terms of finances have typically followed, or at least happened concurrently with periods, extended periods of what I call seasons of no. What's interesting is that I'm, I'm sure this has been studied in research. We know that people are significantly less effective when they try to do multiple things. So multitasking, you are significantly less, less effective when it comes to output per unit of time. You switch back and forth and it kills your efficiency by like 75%. If we, if we consider our leverage as the difference between what we get for what we put in, then skill is a great lever on work. Meaning if work we define as output, then the more skilled person for the time they put in will have more output. So skill equals leverage, work equals output. The more skill you have, the more output you get. And so if you can get more output, then it means that choosing to do fewer things is in and of itself a skill. And I think I bring this up because some of you are like, man, I'm not that focused. But the thing is, is that The focus isn't a trait, it's an action. And you can do this on a repeated basis so that you can become more focused by simply exercising focus. That means choosing to make unmade decisions so that you can resolve them knowing that they may be imperfect, but you have the ability to course correct along the way. There are very few decisions in business that are truly irreversible, and especially when you're starting out because the stakes are so low. And so you're not making bets that are so big. The biggest periods of growth in my life have occurred when I, I committed wholeheartedly to periods where I would do nothing else. And so like currently I'm actually in one of those periods right now, which is why it's partially top of mind for me and also in reading some of the comments that you guys put out there. And I think the big thing that people miss is that it's a trade-off. One of the issues is that basically people have a preference problem. Which is that they want these results their way. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the outcome, but they want to change the variables that create the outcome. They want a six-pack, but they don't want to do the workout and the nutrition plan. But they're like, but I want the six-pack. Can I change the, can I change the nutrition plan and can I change the workouts and then I'll get the six-pack? And the answer is obviously no. And so the thing is, is that some of you have come to this world with the desire, you know, my world, whatever, with the desire to see the, to get those outcomes. And I applaud you for that. That applause is short-lived if you want to change the variables. Most of you have a huge deficit in work capacity. My point around this, and I'll give you a fitness example, 'cause a lot of people wouldn't understand it, and then I'll translate it back to work, like knowledge work. Whenever you, whenever you work out, you, you damage a muscle and then it overcompensates. And you recover and you get a little bit stronger, right? That's kind of the, the basic idea. Okay? So think about like digging a hole, you put more dirt back in a little bit, a little bit comes on top. That little bit extra is kind of the hypertrophy is the game. Okay? So work capacity itself is that people understand it that way. And so then people have this fear of overtraining, overworking, right? They're like, I don't wanna work too much, right? I don't wanna work out too much. I'll damage myself too much. But the missing variable that people have when it comes to building muscle, just as much as it comes to working, is that your work capacity itself is trainable. Meaning if you're an athlete and you train and you damage the muscle and then it grows, you actually over time, your ability to withstand the work improves, meaning you can add more volume without overtraining. Your recovery capacity to put dirt back in the hole actually speeds up. You get a bigger shovel that can move more dirt faster. I had this attorney tell me this when I was, I was about to say a child, when I was 21. I said, man, I've been working so hard. And she said, she just looked at me and laughed and she said, you don't even know how to work. And it was such a jarring moment for me because she was a partner at this firm and I was trying to impress everybody and I thought I was like, you know, doing a gung-ho job. And she just laughed at me. She's like, you don't even know how to work. She's like, it takes you 10 years just to learn how to work. And I remember thinking, you know, being a little bit disheartened by that at the beginning, but I feel like now looking in retrospect, I can absolutely agree. That, that my ability to work itself has improved. My capacity has improved. But the way to improve that capacity is to start eliminating the things that currently drain your focus right now. And so then all of a sudden you realize once you kind of like have the bare naked truth of your calendar in front of her, you have nothing else left, and then you still are struggling to stay focused. Then you can begin the work on your work capacity. The big piece, number one, is the unmade decisions. You wanna eliminate those by making them. The second big piece is that you wanna eliminate the things that are not the work, right? And so a lot of people obsess about, you know, morning routines, things like that. You wanna eliminate all that stuff. The next category is gonna be relationships and hobbies. All right? And so some of you guys may have hobbies, and I wanna be clear, there are hobbies that are basically function as rest. So if your work output per unit of time over a long period of time, and I wanna be clear about this, you can always work more in 24 hours. If you only had 24 hours to work, you just shouldn't sleep. You shouldn't do anything, take a ton of, ton of stimulants and you'd work more. But over a week you lose productivity. And so my point here is that you not rest, You should work as much as you possibly can and then rest as, as efficiently as you can so that you can resume work at max output. And so for you, if gardening is a thing or playing video games is a thing or whatever, I see that as separate from playing video games as getting in the way of work. If you work first and then you allow yourself to reward yourself with video games at the end of your workday, that actually does two things. It actually gives you a reward for work and it gives you rest, which is nice. And so I would encourage some of you guys to put off extended periods of time before the thing that you might want to do more. And I want to kind of disclaim or, or decry actively the idea that everything that you're about to embark on, whatever season you're in, is going to be fun. The vast majority of the things that I do every day aren't that fun. I do enjoy what we build. And so if you want to build this big chateau, this big castle, laying bricks, not that fun. Digging moats, not digging trenches, not that fun. Like cutting wood, nailing it in, not necessarily that fun. But when you have a castle and you get to live inside of it, you're like, this is pretty dope. But the thing is just like, so people have this big conflation area, right? Between the thing that they want to get and the process of getting there. It's just, it's a very pithy soundbite to say like you should just, you know, never, never, never work a day in your life again if you do what you love. But no one does what they love all the time to do the things, to get the things they want. And I just like, I am, I'm actively about this. Zooming back out with regards to business owners in different, in different seasons, right? Is that when I, when I was a consultant, so this is all the way back to when I had my job. And so for some of you, this will be relevant. I didn't, I didn't really go out at all. I would spend 4 hours a day after my workday, uh, doing practice problems for the GMAT, which was what I thought I was gonna do as my next step was take the GMAT and go to Harvard and then kind of like go the MBA route. And then that's all I did. I took 100% of my discretionary time and put it into acing the GMAT. And then once I realized that the GMAT wasn't going to be the next path, I then drove across the country. That eliminated friends, that eliminated family, that eliminated anyone who knew me. And then I started a gym and I pretty much lived at the gym. I, I by default created an environment of focus because there was nothing else for me to do. For that next chunk of time, I was just dedicated to making this gym work. And that also meant that during that period of time, I didn't read, I didn't read like general business books. I didn't read, I wasn't watching like motivational videos. All I did was just look at how do I get more members? How do I sell better? How do I price? All of my focuses are on the one problem that I had. And so many of you have a specific problem that you know you need to solve, and yet you're not allocating all the resources in your discretionary time and effort towards solving it. What's interesting about this is we've seen on the, on the 100, which is the, the little group that Kirby and I are running as a side project to see if we can do anything different on onboarding. And inside of that group, I think we've had 86% of people make a dollar. Is that correct? Yeah. And so 86% of people have made a dollar, and then I think something like 60% of people who had never, had never made a dollar. So we had 3 cohorts inside of there. We had people who had made money on school but wanted to compete. We had people who had made money outside of school. So business owners in general who've made a dollar and then they'd never made a dollar on school. And then we had people who'd never made a dollar anywhere. And so those are the 3 cohorts. Now, cohort number 1, people who'd already made money in school, all of them have made money. So that's 100% of the people who made money elsewhere and then came onto school. Do you know what the percentage is there? 100%. The reason that that second category is so important is that it demonstrates that there are skills that when applied to school, like basically school is a great platform to immediately be able to build a business on. And so then it's like, okay, what other skills must a beginner learn? And this is what we're trying to figure out is like, how many of these extra skills does someone have to come in with that we can eliminate so that someone can be successful? And so right now I think it's, do you know what the actual percentage is on the, on the bot third box? People who had never made a dollar? 62%. So 62%. Okay. Some of you who are new here would hear that and be like, man, I want to get into that. The thing is, is that most of the times the stuff that we've actually covered in there, we've actually, it's already, it's already, we've already covered it. And so you think that there's a secret and there really isn't. And so I think the thing that really separates the people who have made money or more money is the expectation of the effort required. And I think this is where a lot of people struggle because it's really that your expectation can be 100x off. Like I've seen expectations truly off by 100 times. This should happen in 1/100th of the time. This, I should be able to get a customer. If I should reach out to 5 people, I figure I'll get 1 customer when you really need to reach out to like 200 people to get a customer. And then you're like, oh wow, that's a lot more people than I expected. And it's like, yeah, it is. And that first customer might pay you 1/10th what you thought, right? And so all of these things are expectation problems more than they are problems of they are, they're, they're declarative knowledge deficiencies people don't know about, rather than procedural knowledge, know-how-to. I, I'm, I'm making this mostly because a lot, I just see this as this really monstrous recurring theme. It doesn't end like that season of cutting things off. I cut things off when I started, you know, when I, when I did the GMAT to study for, to, to go to business school. Then I cut everybody off when I went to start my gym. And then when I started flying out and doing launches, I literally was flying around the country and saw no one. Like, it's all I did. And I really stayed in touch with no one besides Layla, who was basically my partner in the business when we started it. There's a period where I'm in right now where I more or less have said, I'm not traveling, I'm not speaking, I'm only taking podcasts if they fly to me, et cetera, et cetera. There are these things. And the easiest way to determine this is look at the time that you spend on a weekly basis and see everything that is not work. Like, look at the whole calendar, look at every single box of yours that does not drive. And here, and I wanna be clear here, if work is the output, right? And money made is the, is the output we're measuring for entrepreneurship, right? How does money get made? So money gets made by, at the, at the most basic levels, converting attention into goods and services that are exchanged for money. That's it. That's the, that's the fundamental exchange that occurs. There's some, some person you have to get their attention and then you have to be able to transact with them to make an exchange. That's it. When I say look at your calendar and then determine how much work you're doing, if it's not something that's getting you more leads, getting you more traffic, getting, getting more people to come to your site, opt in, get contact, you know, give you contact info, whatever, and/or increasing the likelihood that they convert and/or transact with you, a.k.a. you sell them something, or increasing the likelihood that they retain, they resell, they refer, or they leave you a review, the 4 Rs on the back end. If, if the thing that you're working on when you look at your calendar does not relate to any of those big 3 buckets, which is basically attract, convert, deliver— if, if you don't have anything that's occurring within those 3 buckets, then this is not work. And so it is actually unfocused of you to have those things. And I would say it's most common at the beginner level to have these things. At the advanced level, It's that you fill your time with work tasks that are not the constraint of the business. And so it's the idea that you are doing things because you like doing them rather than because it's what's required. And so I'll give you an example. If I, for example, love— I love marketing. Fine. Right? Let's just— that's what it is. So if I spend more time generating leads for my business, but my constraint of my business is my sales guys, I don't have enough sales guys to take the calls. Then me generating more leads adds potential to the system, but not throughput because I'm limited by the number of sales guys. And the same would be true if I then increase the number of sales guys, but then I didn't increase my number of customer success or my delivery team or, or inventory if I had product. The issue is that in the beginning you just work on a lot of stuff that's not work and you call it work. Later on, you work on a lot of things that are work, but are not the work that needs doing. And so it's a minor difference that happens. And I'm telling you, this happens at all stages. This, this happens at, uh, a million a year, a million a month, a million a week, all the way through. I've seen this across the board. So you're not too advanced to hear this. And I say this because this is something that I struggle with every day is like, is this the most important or highest leverage thing that I could be using with my time? And I think many of you, are simply spending the vast majority of your time not working. You think you're working, but you're actually not. And I had a guy email the other day, uh, because I, I spent a day with, uh, a higher, a higher level group of business owners. So it was like $5 to $35 million was the room. It was 10 guys. And so like decent sized businesses. And he wrote this very nice email back and he said, the biggest lesson that I learned was like, I had heard of this amount of work ethic. He was like, but Alex didn't leave the room for 11 hours straight. And he didn't stop the whole time. And he said, I'd never actually seen it. I'd never seen it. Right. I, I bring this up just because you have so much more in you that you can only tap into by removing everything else. And I think that when I've had these big breakthroughs in my life, it's because I was willing to say no. And the thing is, is that the more things you say no to, the more painful it is. Like, man, I really love— I love fantasy football with the boys. I, I love going out on Friday nights. I'm not saying that you have to do it forever. I'm just saying you do it for now. You just do it for a season. Because the thing is, is that these dedicated seasons is where sometimes you can fore— you can, you can pull 4 years of the future into your life in a matter of months. But you actually have to stick with it and you have to do it for that period of time because you have to confront the discomfort of not knowing. It's the unknown of figuring it out. And so a lot of you continue to think that basically because you want to avoid the pain of not knowing what to do, you think you will solve that pain by doing more research. But again, you are trying to solve something with declarative knowledge, learning about something rather than procedural knowledge, which is learning how to do something. And the only way you learn how to sell is by getting on the phone. The only way you learn how to run ads is by running ads. Fine. You can read an article or two. But I promise you, you'll learn significantly more the day you actually start and you'll look back. And for anybody who's a parent, I can imagine that you read a couple parenting books and then you're like, it is not even close to what running, you know, to actually having a child is like. And to the same degree, those of you who are starting a business now, if you read some business stuff, it wasn't anything close to what actually running a business is like. The goal of this, if I have one call to action for you guys who, who are listening right now, is to remove everything that is not the work that moves the business forward. And at the advanced level, it's making sure that the work that moves the business forward is the work that moves the business the most forward per unit of time. I could have an improvement in CRO. That would be like if I split test my landing page and I get a 5% lift, that's an improvement. I could try and work with the sales team to get them to close a little bit higher. That would be an improvement. But the biggest gains in my life came from asking the question or solving impossible questions, meaning, okay, what would need to occur in order for me to 10x this thing in a year? And then saying, what would have to be true? And then oftentimes there's only like one thing that has to be true for that to happen. And if I know what that one thing is, then the next question is, given the resource, time, and money that I have available to me right now, Is it reasonable that I could accomplish that one thing in the next 12 months? If the answer is yes, then the highest and best use of your time might not be the optimization, but might be the maximization or order of magnitude change that you do to get the outcome. So what I mean is you can opt— you can only optimize something to 100%. You're never gonna get 100% conversion on your opt-in page. You're never gonna get 100% close rate. But you can 100x your lead flow. And so I, again, I see this oftentimes and I see this at different levels to be clear, but I'll see a business owner, you guys, you'll get stuck on like this obsession around tiny optimizations. And at some point you just gotta do an order of magnitude more. You just gotta blow more through the top so that you can get a huge increase. And the only way that you'll be able to recognize that and dedicate the resources to it is to eliminate the, the, the hobbies, the people, the unmade decisions, that are, that are limiting you and decreasing the time between once you know what you should do or need to do and actually beginning to do it. And I think that a lot of people spend too much time doing everything else because I think that the people who are the most focused, when you actually watch them, you would be astounded by basically how, how simple, how simple it is. It's just that it's very difficult. It's simple in that it's easy to understand, difficult in that it's hard to execute. If you watch someone write a book for 16 hours straight, you're like, okay, that's what writing a book for 16 hours straight is. But what you don't see is all of the, the prepping the table for the work that happened, happened prior to and in the years leading up. So almost every billionaire that I know in my life maintains such a clean space physically, and then more importantly, emotionally clean space, as in the people that they allow in their circles, they have one razor that they use to judge them, which is, does this person increase or decrease the likelihood that I achieve my goals? So does having this person in my life, does having this habit in my life, does having this phone call, does having this brunch, Does having this, this weekend trip, does it increase or decrease the likelihood I achieve my goals? And I think that a lot of you in the beginning are so afraid, and to be fair, even as you progress, because it happens in levels, are so afraid of cutting things out because you have a fear that you'll never get it back. You have a fear that that cut is permanent. You have a fear that if you miss out on this fantasy football season, that you'll never get invited back. But there's two things that you'll have to remember, which is that one, a more capable version of you will have more doors that open than you do today. And so you'll never lack for opportunity, lack for opportunity in business or lack for opportunity in friends if you get better. The reverse is not true. If you get lamer and you stay in fantasy football, they still may not invite you back, but then you've lost both. I have yet to have more doors closed for me in the future than I have had in the past because the trade that you make is becoming better and there will always be more doors for better people. And the only way that you get there sometimes is by closing the doors in front of you today. There's just this fallacy that it's an irreversible decision, but it's not even that it's irreversible. Let's say, let's say there is a door that's irreversibly closed. The fallacy is that a better door does not exist in the world and that a better version of you wouldn't have access to it. And that's the real fallacy. That's my encouragement. That means that there is a better friend of yours than your current best friend that exists for a better version of you. There's a better hobby for you than the one that you currently have when you are better and you are more able and you have more resources. I know how scary it is at any level to cut people out. I cut people out today, like all the time. Like in this year, I've cut multiple people out of my life. So it doesn't end. What happens is your standard raises your standard, your bar of who's allowed in your space, because as your goals get bigger, new people, or rather old people, fail the new standard. So does this person increase or decrease the likelihood that I achieve million-dollar status in my life? Well, I mean, I'm already there, so they don't need to hit that bar. They've already kind of crossed it. They're still in my life, already hit it. But does this person increase the decrease that I hit the likelihood that I get $10 billion in my life? No, I don't think this person's gonna be somebody who's gonna increase that likelihood. If not, then why keep them? A lot of you guys are doing this for different reasons, and I can appreciate and respect that. I would, I would posit that the reason that matters most is who you become along the way. I have yet to see a person who accomplishes more by taking on more. The big— a lot of, a lot of big truths are inverted. Like you, you get the most by giving the most. You get the most done by taking the least on. It's these ideas that, see, like the thing is, is what feels intuitive, if the intuitive answer were the correct answer, then everyone would already be achieving it. And so it's the counterintuitive solutions that we have to be mindful of because those are the ones that don't seem right at first glance. But only people who have the procedural knowledge of having gone through it, who can kind of lead the breadcrumbs and say, no, like you really do have to focus. It makes sense that if you did 5 businesses, all 5 should grow, but it's not reality. So it's counterintuitive that one business will outgrow 5 if you actually focus on it. All of the effort you have also at a micro level, you have 5 tasks within that one business. If you focus on the one task that matters most and you put all your research towards it, it will grow the whole business more than trying to do 5. And so it happens all the way down. And the only way you can do that is by clearing the way. And I would say that most of the times when I talk to the portfolio founders that we have, most of what I talk about is what they're not going to do, not what they are. Just being very real. A lot of the strategy is what are you not going to do? And what one thing, if we accomplished it, would be so big or so important that it would make these other things irrelevant. And so I try and take our priorities list of 5 things and say, what one thing matters? And let's erase the other 4. And if we just did this one, we will succeed. And so right now, I'm gonna bring this home for you. Many of you have this big list. Who here in the— who here has a big list of things that they know they should do right now? Just, just gimme, just gimme a little, a little shout out in the chat. Who here has quest that massive list, right? Huge list of things that you know you should do. So lean into this. All right, so pay attention. This is for you. I need you to take that whole list and pick one thing and then erase the rest. And then once you complete that one thing, you do no other task besides that one thing. That means the next time you sit down, you eat, you come back, you get back on the task, right? And if you need to buy a little timer or you do it on your phone, get a little timer and actually see what your time on task is. Say how long you think this should take. Take an estimate. And what, what you will find oftentimes is that something you think will take 2 hours sometimes takes 20 minutes, but the pain of trying to figure it out. So it might take you, might take you 10 actual minutes to figure it out and then 2 minutes to do it. And so the thing is, is that a lot of the work that you have right now, especially when it's the most important work in the business, is work you don't know how to do. Because if you knew how to do it, you'd already have started. And so it's the unknown that creates the delay. It's the fear of being inadequate, the fear of failure, because we have it all the time. We all have it. If you can define part of the problem solving as wrapping your arms around the problem, understanding the problem is part of the problem solution, then you won't feel like you're being unproductive as you, as you take 45 minutes to understand the problem, then 5 minutes to solve it. You'd also be amazed at how much easier it is to solve problems when you're only trying to solve one. And so when you try to solve 5 at the same time, you're so spread thin and you're bouncing between different things that, that are contingencies of one another. If you just, just solve one, the amount of mental bandwidth, like basically said differently, you can be a lot dumber and win if you only try to solve one thing at a time. And so there's a reason that I have this, this tweet that went really viral, but a focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius. And so I've met a lot of you and you're very smart, but you're distracted. You're easy to beat. I'd be grateful to compete against you because I know I wouldn't even be competing against you. I'd be competing against all the other things that are competing against you. 'Cause all I gotta do is beat 1/20th of you. Not that hard, no matter how smart you are. A good, a good visual for this is if you think about yourself as the sun, right? Like you're the energy source, right? In your world. And you need to burn through a hole through a piece of paper, like that's what you have to get through. A sun has more than enough power to burn through it, but if the sun is evenly spread, it just warms up the paper, but it doesn't, it doesn't even break through. But if you take the magnifying glass, even a small, a small amount of magnifying glass, you'll be able to burn the hole through. But you have to focus all of that, of that energy on one point. And so many of you have suns and suns worth of energy, but you're so spread thin that all you do is warm your stuff up. You never cook it, you never break through, and you would be amazed at how much more you can accomplish when you only have one thing to do. And here's the second one. This one's that you want another counterintuitive one. You don't expect is that the speed of doing 5 things in a row is faster than doing 5 at the same time. So if you do number 1, and then because you know these other 4 things are still important, so that these other 4 drive you to do number 1 faster. Because you're like, shit, I still have to do these other 4. So then you get number 1 done and then you're like, all right, now I'm gonna start on number 2. So you start on number 2 and you're like, I still have to do 2, 3, and 4. But the problem is because you haven't been able to prioritize, you haven't been able to focus on what one thing is the most important. You are afraid of having it take too long. So you start on all 5 and in so doing make it take way longer than it would've taken to begin with. And so I would say if I had to TL;DR this, This is about how to work, and it works at all seasons, whether you're advanced or you're starting out. It's just that the nature of the distractions change, but the, the highest output work process remains the same. It's just that the quality and quantity of your distractions improve the better you get. And so it's a lesson you have to relearn at every level.