“Divided attention destroys best intentions. Singular focus is the friend to success.”
Benjamin Lotter
I am trying to build a diversified, multi-million-dollar farming business over the next 10 years. This is a huge vision, and it can be intimidating. To execute it, I need to be patient. When I get impatient, I put my energy into several different things at once. I will look up how to make little wooden items for a gift shop which will work as an add-on to a tour business that hasn’t started yet. At the same time, I will educate myself on cryptocurrency and NFTs so that I can take advantage when they start to go mainstream. These things take time, and there is a point in time where they are necessary. But it is not the immediate term.
I was watching a YouTube video that described it well. Let’s say every day you have 100 energy points. You get assign them however you would like, but you only have 100 of them. If you assign 100 points to a single project, day after day, you will suddenly be 500, 1000, a million points into a project. If, however, you split those 100 points into 10 different projects, you will move slowly in many directions rather than fast in a singular direction. I believe there are situations for both these strategies. In building a business, you seem to get pulled in many different directions. In this case, Trying to maintain a singular focus is a worthwhile effort.
Narrowing your focus gives your life great clarity. You don’t have to make so many decisions when you are planning your days, weeks and years. If your vision is clear, and the path towards that vision is clear, there is no apprehension. You just need to execute. You need to do the work. This clarity gives you a centredness, a non-anxious presence of mind. It’s a compounding effect, a positive feedback loop. You get more clarity, making it easier to execute, which gives you even more clarity, which makes the next thing easier to execute. There doesn’t seem to be limits to this.
Having a singular focus doesn’t mean staying in a bubble. You still need to think outside the box. You need to take on many different paradigms and mental models of the world if you are going to be effective. But even this learning of different mental models ought to be clear in its focus. Do it intentionally rather than simply finding yourself in the annals of a new perspective. Find the connections between new models and existing models. Build your own models based on those consistent principles. But make it clear and intentional. You can have a singular focus on building mental models. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
My advice is this: don’t spread your focus too thin. Don’t be afraid to let things go. Let the noise disperse and focus on your project. To build something spectacular, you will need to cut the fat. Have a singular focus and build something special.