Why you should [not] focus

Successful people will tell you that focus is the secret weapon achieved your goals. Tales from amazing people and how they achieved their level of success rarely begin with “ then I decided to try 10 things at once and see what worked out”. They mostly started out with a dream and pursuit it until it succeeded with all their hearts. But, when you think about investment and risk, the idea of putting all your eggs in the same basket is very counter-intuitive. Which makes the argument in favor of a single focus very very hard to stand.

On the other hand, psychology makes a good argument in favor of single focus correlating it directly to greatness. Concentrate on a single task, removing all distractions and mostly helps you get in “the flow”. Such a state allows things to progress much more rapidly. Why? Because when you are playing on a risky scenario¹ it’s a numbers game. It’s not about trying out as many paths you can at once. It’s about learning from those that fail and leveraging those that succeed. Not trying big leaps upfront, but consistently achieving small wins increments adding to an exponential result. Focus is what makes your mind diverge on the possibilities but converge on the results.

Focus also comes with a big downside. It means you have all your bets on the same horse. When you think about successful people you almost never think about someone who has a single endeavor². Think Elon Musk, Paul Graham or even DHH — who beside Basecamp and it’s many side products have even his own car racing team. If they have so many things, does it means that focus is not important then? I believe that this is not the right question. When you think about these examples, you are thinking about people that are diversifying their investments. They’ve managed to get one endeavor to achieve “cruise velocity” and then jumped in the next one.

¹ My assumption is that achieving greatness is directly related to risk scenarios. It is very hard to do something awesome following a well-known path. The known world will most probably lead you to where others already went, which is hard to find new things. But jumping into the unknown is much more prone to failure. But also much more likely to lead you to something new.

² I’m not saying it is not possible to succeed without focus. Just that it is uncommon.