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  1. (calnewport.com)
    Study Hacks » Blog Archive » On the Value of Hard Focus

    If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus — the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value.

     
 

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What sacrifices are required to achieve focus?

 

Focus is required for success in creative efforts, but the cost is high.

The wise keep trying to tell me that focus is the magic irreplaceable ingredient in great writing, breakthrough research, art of all types, successful entrepreneurship... basically anything really tough and really rewarding. But focus is elusive and doesn't come free, it costs more than I sometimes want to pay. I must start and return to the same task no matter how irresistible a distraction may be. And there's the question, to give in to distraction and live sensually or repress repress repress and maybe achieve that one-time vision that led me to start a project.

I can't explore the sensual distractible side-roads as an adult. Certainly, as a kid I gave in to every fluttering distraction and sometimes achieved focus only by total fascination with a subject. Being a grown-up seems to require setting my compass to point to Wisdom instead of Fascination and sticking to it. I do wonder though if I will ever know if focus is next to godliness or just a well-justified monomania.

I'd like to see successful focusers: the artist, the scientist, the entrepreneur, answer whether they would have preferred to be less successful it it would have been more fun.

| posted by seemore | to human achivement