Focus in Practice
Moving from theory to application.
“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”.
A powerful phrase, but a half truth in the context of our hyper-digitized world. In a world where our relationships have transcended from physical to digital, we are now connecting with much more than just people.
The truth today is that every piece of content we interact with shapes our perspectives, like a sculptor chiseling away at stone.
So let us rephrase our quote to something more appropriate. We are no longer just the average of the people around us. Instead, we are the mean of everything we spend our time with - what we read, what we hear, what we write. All of it.
Mathematics tells us that the only way to change the output is to change the inputs. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. And so, the path to finding a better average - a better us - lies through a more careful cultivation of what we allow in. The information vying to shape our minds.
In The Philosophy of Focus, I laid out the principles for how I think about finding focus in our modern world. So now, let us move from the abstract to the tangible. From theory to practice.
This is my blueprint for designing a system to find focus and take control of my attention in a world looking to strip it away.
1. Define
When it comes to my focus system, questions lie at the foundation.
In the Game of Attention, moving beyond the ‘Start’ square requires defining what these look like for you. You must find your ‘Favorite Problems’, the questions and interests that light the fire of your curiosity. And while this process is highly individual, there is a consistent roadmap to follow.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it starts with questions. Questions that in turn beget more questions.
The power of your favorite problems is that they have likely stayed consistent over time. They are the common threads that unify your life experiences, the consistent themes that show up at each turn along the way.
So the first step to finding them is to look in the rearview towards and ask yourself about the story of your life. With the right questions, you can’t help but notice the themes that have organized your experiences. Here are a couple to start:
What were you obsessed with as a child? What could you not get enough of such that every waking moment of the day you were watching, talking, reading, or exploring this subject?
What looks like work to others but feels like play to you? What are the things others might think you crazy for being obsessed with but that you cannot stop thinking about?
Are there patterns that exist in your past with subjects or questions you have consistently come back to at multiple points in time? Ones where interest ebs and flows, but where the passion inevitably returns time and time again?
A reminder as you go through this process: these questions are yours, and yours alone. As such, there is no ‘correct’ response; each of us will find different answers to the same questions. That is the point. A natural divide will form between those areas driving your interest and those that do not. Let it happen - attune to the differences so you know where investing your attention will provide the greatest returns.
This process of up-front definition is iterative; you’ll likely need to start broad and work towards narrow. Get as many ideas on paper as possible first, and then borrow some advice from the writing industry: kill your darlings. Be willing to remove the questions you like so that you can more deeply focus on the questions you love.
To contextualize what this looks like in practice, a personal experience. When I first went through the exercise, I had 20+ questions written down - each vaguely interesting in some way. But after squaring each up against the others, like a 1 v 1 battle royale, 10 ‘victors’ emerged. When each was put side-by-side, the hierarchy of interest emerged quite naturally.
You’ll notice that these questions are inherently open-ended. For each item on the list, there is no singular answer that can satisfy it. This is by design - your questions should resemble maps more so than they do blueprints. Rather than outlining the exacting detail up front, the goal is to provide a rough sketch, a general outline. In doing so, your questions will then invite you on a journey of exploration to fill in the details between the lines.
2. Distill
Definition is step one, but as we’ve discussed the true value of filters lies in their simplicity. And we aren’t quite there yet.
In current form, our questions aren’t exactly practical. We are humans, after all, and long sentences simply take up too much space. Without the next step - distillation - our questions are bound to fail when put to the test of the reality. Because in order to use them, we have to remember them.
So once your filters are clearly defined, it is time to tap into the power of reduction.
You’ll notice your questions are likely subsets of some specific themes in the world, like pieces you fit together to bring a puzzle to life. The more you connect, the clearer the picture becomes.
The inverse is true here as well - the clearer our vision of the big picture, the more likely we are to understand both where the pieces go and how they fit together. There is a reason we use the top of the box as a guide when putting a puzzle together - without it, we’d hardly know where to start.
So when it comes to your questions, try to zoom out to think about the end state. What specific theme or domain does each question map to? What bigger puzzle will they help you put together?
Whatever these answers are, use them as a razor to cut away the fluff; to move from complex to simple. Take your questions from long phrases to singular words. Reduce them to their broader themes and recognize that in studying those areas deeply, the answers you seek are likely to emerge.
A look at this process in practice, from my own experience. 219 words turned into 14:
The simplicity that emerges from distillation is freeing; the complexity disappears, and along with it so too does the strain. What we are left with is clarity - simple, memorable themes around which we can orient our focus.
Less, that we can now do better.
3. Apply
With our filters both defined as questions and reduced to their underlying themes, we are now set up to leverage them in the domain of application.
As you start to put your filters to the test, you will observe a natural attunement process taking shape. Like a metal detector revealing hidden treasures underground, your questions will start to steer you towards the information likely to hold the answers you seek.
Over time with practice, your filters will become internalized. The more you use them, the more natural the process will be. Your focus will innately gravitate towards what is you want to be pursuing, and away from that which you wish to avoid. It will take time - and repetition - but that day will come.
But until it does, there are strategies we can use in the short term to speed up this process and better extract value from our filters.
The Content Audit
Let’s talk about one of my favorites, what I call ‘The Content Audit’.
The Content Audit is something I’ve started doing on a yearly basis and found immense value in. It involves taking a look at the various platforms on which I consume information and assessing what I am reading against my pre-defined filters. For me, this mostly involves two locations: my Twitter account and my Readwise Reader app (where most of my newsletter/email subscriptions feed into).
Using Twitter as an example, I start the audit by adding every account I follow into a Notion document and assign them tags based off of my filters. I then group them by specific categories, which allows me to quickly identify both magnitude (ie the total number of accounts I’m following for knowledge acquisition) and distribution (ie how many are in each theme).
Laying your content streams out like this can provide some staggering insights. For example, my 2023 Content Audit revealed that I was following 63 crypto focused accounts - thought leaders, builders, founders, and the like. While this is a subject matter I’m intensely interested in, seeing that number was surprising - especially when squared up against the frequencies of other categories. My content environment have become heavily skewed in a way that was out of alignment with where I wanted to be. More noise, less signal.
But where did this skewness come from? There is a simple explanation for me: content follows the laws of entropy. Without guardrails in place to curtail it, the disorder of the content landscape always trends towards more chaos. I had left my content diet unchecked for a while, and it had taken on a mind of its own. The Content Audit helped me reign it back in.
For this reason, I’ve found the Content Audit to be best utilized on a yearly cadence, such that you are constantly stepping in to constrain the entropy of your information environment. It is not a set it and forget it type strategy. Like a garden, your content environment requires constant upkeep. The more time you spend in it trimming and cutting, the more beautiful it well become.
Scientists, Not Chauffeurs
Once you identify your content distribution - the areas in which you are either over or under indexed - the final step is create balance. A helpful thought experiment can help here, one I call ‘Scientists, Not Chauffeurs’.
The model is borrowed from the story of Max Planck - the Nobel Prize winning physicist - and his chauffeur, who after hearing Planck’s talk on quantum mechanics so many times once thought he could give it himself. After testing the idea out one evening in Germany, the chauffeur found himself in over his skis. He waltzed through the talk with no issues, but the Q&A session was another beast. He knew the talking points, but not the technical details underpinning them. In the end, he had to request insight from his ‘chauffeur in the audience’ - Max Planck himself.
The lesson here is this: when choosing where your content will come from, find the scientists - not the chauffeurs. Look for the the practitioners, the one that are in the arena accruing the scars of knowledge behind the scenes, and let their hard earned perspectives shape yours.
The reality is that there are many more chauffeurs - people that purport to know - than scientists - those that do. And while history has shown this to be true, it also tells us that but a few scientists can have outsized impact on the world. And the same can be true when it comes to our content.
Here we can borrow a principle from 80/20 thinking - the majority of the value can be derived from a minority of the inputs. There is no need to find 100 scientists for any given domain of interest - a small handful will suffice.
So when defining your input streams, ask yourself a simple question: what small subset of experts can I derive 80-90% of the value from?
A smaller list means less competing voices for your attention. Less but better, yet again.
Final Insights
In a world where every piece of information impacts our thoughts, filters are the path towards freeing our minds from the algorithm’s control. The process for finding them is simple: define your questions; distill them to their essence; apply them to the content you consume.
Once you do so, each filter will serve as a guardrail to constrain the entropy of your content diet, allowing you to create order from a system that bends towards chaos. What they look like are up to you.
But a parting word of advice - strive to find the midpoint between the many and few. It is amidst balance where filters thrive - enough constraint to bolster yourself against the firehose of information, but enough freedom to let your curiosity wander.
Lastly - remember that filters exist to make our lives easier, not harder. The goal is to play a game of minimal effort on the intake, so you can spend more energy thinking, experimenting, and combining the information that makes it through. If you find your new focus system requiring more energy than necessary, it is likely you have taken your filters too far.
Keep it simple. Define your questions. Reduce them to their underlying themes. Apply them to where you source your information.
And you’ll start to see the world in an entirely new light.