We’re Living Through a Silent Focus Epidemic

Cheap dopamine is the real ponzi scheme.

The good life is not built on cold showers.

The reason why we fail to achieve our goals is often blamed on a lack of money, time, or connections.

I disagree.

In the future, focus will be the most sought-after skill. First we have to make it through the focus epidemic that technology helped spread.

The epic question that reveals the truth

A friend of mine is an aspiring writer. They have great skills.

She could outwrite me any day of the week. The metaphors she uses leave my cheap one-liners in the dust. She is naturally witty. She’s cool, calm, funny — and her writing shows it.

But she’s a giant failure.

She’s published a handful of things in the last year. Her drive and motivation are solid. Writing is her one true love. Yet it doesn’t happen. I asked her one question to see if I could help:

“How long do you sit down to write at a time?”

“30-60 minutes if I’m lucky,” she said.

Next, I asked her something creepy.

“Can you share your screen so I can watch you write?”

She accepted my bizarre request. “Pretend I’m not here,” I said. I sat and watched her write on a Google Doc. The process revealed the problem.

Every few minutes she was clicking away from her article. The toolbar at the bottom of her Mac screen was full of red notifications. Popups in the top right corner of the screen would flash at regular intervals. She had no notes or dot points prior to sitting down.

The article she wrote in front of me didn’t get finished.

“I’ll try to finish it tomorrow.”

The skill she’s missing has nothing to do with writing. She hasn’t mastered the art of disciplined focus for an hour or more, without distractions.

The work she does happens in bite-sized chunks, so the muse never finds her.

The unearned dopamine era

The chemical dopamine gets produced in the brain. It helps determine your feelings of reward and motivation, and can meaningfully impact your mood.

In the cheap dopamine era, we’re programmed to get access to the reward of dopamine before we’ve put in the effort to earn it.

Checking social media stats gives us a hit. Looking at how much money we made or how high our investments have gone gives us a hit. X-rated content gives us a hit. Even checking emails can become a dopamine addiction.

It’s the reason we tell people about what we’re working on. We want the feedback to get access to unearned dopamine we haven’t worked for yet because we haven’t done the task.

The problem is, cheap dopamine has made it hard to focus. It’s easier to get cheap dopamine for free or without effort than it is to achieve our goals that give us natural dopamine.

“Most people lack focus, not motivation”

Productivity expert Shane Parrish said this.

If you can’t focus it’s going to be hard to progress in any area of your life.

“Where focus goes energy flows,” says Tony Robbins. If you constantly divide where you place your energy, then what you get back in rewards will be disappointing, so you’ll chase cheap dopamine to compensate.

You’re not lacking skill. You’re lacking focus.

Skills are great to learn but they’re useless if you can’t focus. If you learn to focus and do it consistently, you can go much further in whatever it is you want to do in life.

The big winners in the new economy

As the global economy evolves and the work we do changes, as software continues to eat the world, focus will become a superpower.

Job interviews will place a lot more emphasis on whether you can focus, or whether you’re a cheap dopamine monkey. I’m *not* a focus god. The focus epidemic has infected me plenty of times.

Here’s what helped me:

Turn off all the distractions

Your phone isn’t going to build your dream life.

I said to a friend the other day, “if we’re catching up for coffee then you can’t bring your phone.”

That’s what it has come to.

The temptation to reach for the phone to google something while in conversation is too great.

The moment you open your phone the notifications get shown. Sudden rushes of dopamine and panic (depending on the alert) flash through your brain. My coffee buddy is the worst so we have had to make this a rule.

Very sad.

As I said, we’re in a focus epidemic that’s infecting brains daily. I hate distractions from my devices, so much, that I’ve removed all the background images and turned the colors to black and white.

A police officer made fun of me last night when I had to show him my vaccine certificate. He asked why there were no colors on it.

“Black and white removes temptations. If it looks boring I won’t look at it.”

The officer laughed and let me through.

Make your devices boring. Learn to leave them in other rooms or in the car.

Once you get in flow, stay in flow

Most of you are aware of flow states, where hours feel like minutes and you do some of the best work of your life.

To get into a flow state requires you to overcome the resistance. Your body doesn’t naturally want to start a hard task. I’ve found I have to trick my mind. I start with a tiny task like writing a tweet. Then once I’ve written a few, I switch to writing longer blog posts.

The challenge I’ve found is, once I’m in flow it’s easy to come out of flow.

The worst problem for me is lunchtime. I stop work to have lunch and find myself doing dishes or cleaning. Then when I go back to write I have to get into flow all over again. Now, I eat my lunch in my home office and try to stay connected to the writing I’m doing by thinking about it.

By staying in the same room and being loosely attached the work while I take a break, I don’t break my flow state, so my ability to do deep work and focus is significantly better than normal.

Stay in flow, once in flow.

When you do, you can get more done and spend less time working overall.

Do this the next time you complain about a lack of results

A lack of results in one area of life can be frustrating as hell. The next time it happens, consider whether you’ve accidentally got infected with the focus epidemic. Is it a lack of skill, or a lack of focus?

An hour or more of regular focus can change your life.

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