A short motivational talk by John Assaraf about the importance of focus as a learnable skill. He argues many people try to do too many things at once and gives a concrete weekly exercise: write your top five tasks, prioritize them (1–5), calendar-block time to complete each in order, and eliminate distractions to train discipline and increase productivity.
Chapters
Hey friends, it's John Asrath and I want to talk to you today about the power of focus. One of the things that I see all the time is people trying to do too many things at once. Whether it's family things, things for yourself, following your hobbies, following your favorite TV shows, you know, building your company, doing three, four, five, six, seven, eight things at once. Most people haven't ever really learned the skill. And yes, I say focus is a skill skill of tackling or doing one task to completion and then doing another task. They're busy doing a lot of work and getting totally unorganized in their mind and unorganized in their behaviors and then wondering why they're not getting that much done in a day or a week or a month. What I want to challenge you to do is write out the top five things that you have to get done this week. Then I want you to prioritize them in this fashion. If you could only do one, which one would you absolutely get done? No matter what, choose that one, Put it into your calendar right now and block out enough time to get it done to completion. Then what's number two? Put that in your calendar, get that to completion, and 3 and 4 and 5 and make a decision right now that you'll turn off your cell phone, you'll turn off your other distractions and not allow anybody to get in your way to interrupt you or to take you off focus. Do that for the first thing. What you'll see and what you'll find is that it's really hard to focus if you don't train your brain and you don't train your self disciplinary intuition within you to get things done versus focusing on 10 different things at once. The person who wins the game before becomes the most successful is the person who focuses and gets things done.
