What We Miss About Focus

When smaller becomes more.

It’s when you set aside your distractions that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from. — Johann Hari

I’ve never been what society at large would call athletic. But not for lack of enthusiasm.

In middle school, I joined our (objectively) terrible basketball team. To give you an idea of just how bad we were, one time, we faced a Jewish rival. The kids on the other team were kind and hilarious, but they had one major flaw. For some reason, their yarmulkes kept falling off during the game. So, at any given point, 2 or 3 of their 5 players would stop mid-play to reach down and resecure it.

They beat us by 21 points.

In high school, I upgraded to softball with a ragtag group of guys who could recite significantly more Star Wars facts than they could baseball stats. None of us really knew what we were doing other than (A) we had to hit the ball when it was our turn and (B) we had to catch the ball when it wasn't our turn (I feel like most sports actually boil down to this).

Ricky (we’ll call him Ricky for this story) was in the outfield with me. Now, what you have to know about Ricky is that paying attention wasn’t exactly his strong suit. He was a daydreamer. He liked to let his mind wander. More than once (an inning) we’d have to yell at him to turn around and face the plate, instead of staring at whatever had caught his attention at that moment.

Ricky was about to learn why the hard way.

In our last practice of the preseason, we met up on a beautiful June day to play through a full scrimmage match. We all donned our light blue team shirts for the first time and ran over to assemble our lineup.

It’s so cliché to say that the excitement was palpable, but it was. We felt cool. Maybe even a little athletic, for a moment at least. The other team started at bat, so Ricky and I took our spots in the outfield.

Batter 1 came and got a base hit with a ground ball. Batter 2 lobbed it to the other side of the outfield and nabbed their first point on the board. Batter 3 is when it all went to shit. He stepped up to the plate and hit that ball high and right into the sun’s line of sight. We all watched for what felt like 5 minutes trying to figure out where it was going to land, then we saw it. It was making a B line for Ricky.

Ricky!, we shouted. Ball!

Ricky, I kid you not, was facing the other direction. But he spun around, got his hands up, and popped a mid-squat to brace for impact. The ball came down fast and for a split second, looked like it was headed straight for Ricky’s glove. But it was high. Just an inch or two.

Just enough to come down squarely on Ricky’s face.

One broken nose, a fractured cheekbone, a couple of black eyes, and one ruined light blue shirt later, we all learned an important lesson about focus. Or, more clearly, what happens when you don’t.

But Why Focus?

Now, the heart of this f-word series has always been about reclaiming "bad words." Like seeing fear as a gift, or failure as a map, or fake as a permission slip. I wanted to give myself the language I felt like I didn't have access to as man.

Most of these words have a tendency to make us feel less than. Like we’re not ambitious enough or masculine enough. Like we’re breaking some set of unwritten rules if we go after an easy life or a fun existence or play the game opposite of everyone else.

But focus is none of these things.

It’s already in the mainstream consciousness of what it means to be a good, successful person. We inherently understand the merit of it. Focus is a verified virtue.

If Ricky focused, he would have spent much more of his summer on the field and much less in the hospital.

Still, I think we get something fundamentally wrong about focus.

A Small

I read a lot for this piece to try and wrap my head around why focus felt like an f-word we needed to address.

Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, writes about the thinning of the modern mind because we’re spread across too much technology, in a perpetual race to absorb too much information.¹ Cal Newport, in Slow Productivity, goes even further, arguing that we lose something even deeper than our minds when our focus dries up.²

Across all of it (books, notecards, podcasts, etc.), there was one idea I kept bumping into.

Focus is a small, in service of a big.

It’s this exception to the rule of daily life; like an exit ramp for a highway we use to pop off, fill up our car, and quickly get back on again. Focus is intermittent because small is a place we visit, never a place we live.

But what if that’s where we’re making the mistake.

A Big

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live a big life.

Everyone has their definition of what that means to them. For me, it means that people know my name. That my work gets recognized and rewarded. That I get some sort of external validation that I matter in this world.

I know, shocker. Who would have thought a guy writing a Substack would have an ego and want to be famous (or at least internet famous)!

It’s true. And if you’re one of the few dozen people reading this, you probably also know that I’m not there yet.

I live in Ohio, not a big place like New York or Los Angeles, in a quaint, old house in the suburbs. My writing makes less money than I’d like, but it’s on the way up. I have a few close friends and frequent the same few restaurants. I’m not in the midst of any grand scandals or the keeper of any particularly juicy secrets. I have a beautiful wife who’s more patient than I deserve. A body that’s healthy. And a mind I’m learning to be friends with.

In my 20s, this would have been an existence I scoffed at. How can you just settle for normal? How can you be so okay with small?

Now, in my 30s, this “small life” feels less like something I settled for and more like something I arrived at.

A Present

It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99% of it. — Derek Sivers

Small is powerful in a big world. It allows you to be a whole person in a society stretched thin.

I don’t think I would have said it this way before writing this article, but focus is presence. Ricky was mentally everywhere except the one place he needed to be. And we do the same thing. We pawn off our attention, our presence, ourselves to social media or to external validators and then wonder why we’re so unhappy.

Success isn’t happiness. Neither is fame. Only happiness is happiness. But these are the sorts of things that are hard to see in the big. They can only be seen in the small.

Most of my 20s were about squeezing as much into my existence as possible. My 30s have been the opposite. It's been a lot of pushing, shedding, and scraping away.

What ends up happening when you live this way, when you start focusing in on who you are and what you want, is that it leaves you exposed.

Big goals are easy to hide behind, a small life is not. And that is why focus feels difficult when you start doing it right: it becomes as much about what you see as it is what you let be seen.

A Life

You deserve a small life.

By that, I mean an uncomplicated existence where you get to have what you want by being who you are. And the only way to get there is through focus, which is the unthinning of your mind.

It’s more of you in fewer places.

Sometimes we have to shrink our world to find ourselves again, and that’s okay if you do because there are so few things worth giving a fuck about in this life, and it’s far too easy to ignore all of them right up until the moment they crash into our cheekbones.³

Your entire life will always be directly in front of you. Don’t let the world convince you otherwise.

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Challenge #7: Focus at the Center

1. Ironically, the “accelerating trend” began long before social media appeared. Pages 31-32 of Stolen Focus. But that’s a rabbit hole for another time.

2. That thing could be our humanity (page 188). To go slow, small, and focused leads to health and creativity and novelty. Maybe those aren’t coincidences.

3. I borrowed this phrasing from Guy Claxson, a brain professor interviewed in Stolen Focus (page 36): “We have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth.”