On Focus

2024.11.24

LXXV

Why only talk about B2B SaaS when I could also talk about poetry books?

Focus & Its Consequences

I’ve been reflecting on focus lately, and found some evidence for its power in my own life in a place I was not expecting–some poetry books I wrote years ago now.

There is definitely a difference between minutes spent “going through the motions” of some task and minutes spent intensely focused on that same task. The minutes add up regardless, but they add up quicker when you’re truly present. Sometimes I find myself consumed by on one thing, even when I’m not directly working on that thing. You might call it a one-track mind.

This is important, because we live in a world where the outcome of things are not linear–some things are better than others by multiples on many measurements. Generally, you want to be on the part of the graph that goes up really fast, and It seems that focus may be one of the most powerful weapons we have to get to that part of the graph.

A Tale of Two Poetry Books

Recently, I reread parts of two poetry books I wrote. We’ll call one of them Book Last, as it was the last one I published. The other we’ll call Book First, as it was the first one I published.

In all honesty, I thought Book Last wasn’t very good when I reread it. I had been trying to do what I thought would be the modern equivalent of something like Bob Dylan’s song Desolation Row. I was using abstract folk characters in a disjoint narrative to criticize our societal dependence on social media and the mighty “algorithm.” I also wrapped it in this “ai” gimmick of each book being different and customized to the “user” based on a survey they filled out when they ordered it. Cool idea, but it was a bit too thinly veiled to be very good. 

Book One, on the other hand, I actually thought was pretty damn good. I could feel the raw, sometimes disturbing emotions coming through. A lot of the poems are very dark and jaded, but there’s also quite a high contrast between them and some more light and optimistic poems. It's biggest shortcoming is that I batched the cynical ones near the start and all of the less cynical ones at the end so it can maybe feel a bit repetitive and “the point” I was trying to get across might be too obfuscated underneath the vulgarity.

Either way, I wrote Book One two years before Book Last, yet Book One was much better. While I’m fairly confident that I didn’t become a worse writer, we can take a look at the context I wrote each in to see what happened. 

A Chaotic Life

The context in which I wrote each of these books was sharply different. 

Book Last I wrote when I was 20, firing up a hedge fund, studying for a finance exam I never took (FRM), coming off a summer of doing workaway and vagabounding into my junior year in college, was head over heels for a girl who was running me in circles, and still had a fair bit of the party animal in me. So, the setting was nothing short of chaotic.

And, on top of it all, I made some poor but time intensive attempts at marketing the book… more time, of course, that didn’t go into the book itself. Really, I spent maybe a month actually focused on the writing itself, and that was a very disjointed focus. In a way, I had written Book Last just to publish it with that aforementioned ai gimmick. 

Book One, on the other hand, was written during my senior year in high school and that following summer–a rare time in life when my obligations were few and freedom was high. It was written and edited intensely over nearly a year. I beat it into perhaps the highest quality thing it was possible for me to produce at that time. 

I still partied and dated that summer and had an hourly job with lots of downtime, but by that point, my obsession with this one thing, this poetry book, outweighed nearly everything else. If an idea came to me for a poem when I was driving, I would pull over and write it down. Frequently, when I was trying to sleep, I’d snap awake to jot down a poem or some pithy remark in the notebook by my desk. And, of course, that hourly job was yet another great place to write whenever I had a thought.

I spent no time on marketing. I erroneously thought Book One would sell itself. Then, when it didn’t, I carried copies around in my backpack freshman year, dropped them in random places on campus*, sold them in conversation with people, attended a book fair, etc, etc. In a few months I had sold 80 copies–not a lot, but more than I ever did with the overly complex marketing of Book Last.  

*I can’t remember if I actually put a copy in a university library, but I certainly remember discussing the possibility. 

Winner Takes All

I was going to post about Jensen’s Inequality today and wrote paragraphs explaining the math behind it. Instead, I’ll run the risk of translating one of it’s implications with little context in one sentence: In a winner takes all environment, providing the “average” amount or intensity of work will leave you behind the winner by multiples. 

So, you likely want to get into the upper percentile by whatever way you can.

It’s hard to compare the “quality” of two books, but we’ll go with likely read time. If I found a copy of Book One and had not written it, I likely would have read it more than once. Under the same conditions, I probably wouldn’t finish Book Last. While this is a biased measure, I also sold maybe 5 times as many copies of Book One as Book Last and received much more positive feedback on Book One.* If we conflate sales and quality, Book One wins; if we try to separate them, Book One still wins.

So, all of this is to say that I don’t know how to make sure I’m in the winning part of the curved graph. But, based on past experience, it seems like I’ve done much better when I’ve been able to lean into focus and pursue something with almost irrational intensity.

Focus surely isn’t all there is to it, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it can hurt.

*This positive feedback includes girls posting pictures of my poems on their instagram stories, perhaps the only real metric of a poet’s success.

I am very focused on one thing right now and have been intensely for months. Before that, I had been focused on it on and off in different forms for years. 

I don’t know how long the natural intensity will “last” for, nor do I know how long it needs to last for me to get the outcome that I want.

Regardless, I will ride it.

Live Deeply,