Focus: The Last Superpower?

Your mission is to find your life's work and to not get distracted once you do.

When Warren Buffett and Bill Gates first met over dinner, they were asked what factor had been most important in their success.

“And I said, ‘Focus,’” Buffett recounted. “And Bill said the same thing.”

Focus.

I don’t like calling things a ‘superpower’, but the ability to focus in a world conspiring to distract you might come close.

Focus has an inner and an outer dimension: focusing on what is important is macro focus. Staying focused on the task is micro focus.

Or as James Clear put it: “know what you want and go after it relentlessly.” Paradoxically, the latter — relentless work — may be an escape from the terror of truly exploring the former. We will get to that in a minute.

Mastering this dual focus may be one of the most important skills you can develop. Your greatest success lies right at the intersection.

Buffett, Gates, Jobs, and many others understood this. Michael Moritz wrote that Gates obsessively removed distractions from his environment: he stripped the receiver off his TV to avoid watching anything but educational videotapes and took the radio out of his car, ‘lest news bulletins or music prevented him from thinking about Microsoft.’ In Moritz’ opinion, Jobs’ “ability to shut off the outside world paid enormous dividends.”

Alice Schroeder explained how Buffett structured his day for maximum focus with the window shutters closed, stacks of reading materials on the desk, and the occasional phone call. “You get no sense that a world exists outside,” she noted, “which is what he wants, no distractions.”

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, called Jobs “the most remarkably focused person” he’d ever met. Jobs would regularly ask him:

“How many things have you said no to today?”

Ive believes that focus “means saying no to something you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea.”

If it’s not a little painful, it’s not focus.

All three had macro focus — the Buffett Partnership followed by Berkshire, Microsoft followed by the Gates Foundation, Apple, NeXT, Pixar, and Apple again — and they protected their micro focus as best as they could. That kind of focus, maintained over long periods of time, becomes an unstoppable force.

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