Focus.

Focus is absolutely essential, and lack of focus is one of the largest things that holds people back. Sometimes it makes sense to go through unfocused periods and experiment a lot, but once you can get laser-focused on a single area, you can get immense amounts done on that.

So okay, let's say you get the focus epiphany and want to get there, but you've got 10 things going on.

Now what?

Well, you might want to let 7 or 8 of those 10 areas burn while you get only the most important handled and closed out.

Whenever you try to understand how a situation unfolded, it gets filtered through your own beliefs and biases.

This is equally true when you're trying to figure out what happened during the Roman Republic, if you're trying to make sense of what's happening with a particular part of the economy, or if you're analyzing a conflict you got into with another individual last week.

Even if you've got the exact same facts, you'll focus on them to different extents and assign them different weights. It's an easy way to score a laugh when you point out a fundamentalist who is so committed to a position that they ignore entire sets of facts inconvenient to them, but we all do a lesser version of that all the time.

It's hard -- really, really, really hard -- to even get somewhat outside of your narrative and to understand something from another person's point of view. Even fully bearing this in mind, and trying to do it, it's still near impossible.

But it's worth trying to do, anyways. It's worth constantly remembering. Your story about what happened is heavily filtered. Maybe it's more right than the other person's -- you obviously think it is, which is why it's your story -- but their story would make a lot of sense if you were them.

It's nice to buy things that are durable, even if they're more expensive.

I bought a couple pairs of jeans about six months ago in China. They were cheap and looked perfectly fine, and were just as comfortable as any other jeans, but they just don't have underlying quality of materials, construction, and workmanship to last a long time. They're already both starting to fall apart.

Meanwhile, you might pick up designer jeans that cost 5x as much as inexpensive clothing, but they'll potentially last you 3-5 years. 

While a lot of branding doesn't add value, the nice thing about brands is that they have a reputation to live up to that they've invested quite heavily in. When you buy no-name products from people you're unlikely to do a further transaction with who also don't have an underlying pride in their workmanship -- you're going to get stuff that falls apart fast.

When you look at the cost pro-rated over an item's lifetime, often the more expensive goods offer better value. It's useful to look for things that aren't too subject to fashion cycles and get a solid version that'll last you a half decade or more.

It's absolutely astounding what you can accomplish when you work on an important project at least a little bit every day. Just putting a short session every day, and occasionally letting inspiration take you further, means you can accomplish damn near anything.

Working regardless of the inspiration means that things take shape and start growing. Rarely do projects that aren't abandoned fail. They might not reach the magnitude or scale you'd hoped for, but any project that's consistently nurtured and acted on usually produces something of value.

Daily action. It's incredibly what it does. If you've got a big project or dream that's stalled out, the answer is really simple.

Stop and ask yourself: Am I working on this every day?

Then, fix that.

I'm thrilled that Tynan is coming to you with two things -- first, he's offering a breakthrough session through GiveGetWin. It's geared around doing more of the kind of excellent work you want to do, becoming more internally focused with your emotions, having a more enjoyable life, building great habits, and producing a lot of value in the process. There's five spots, so check it out now.

Second, we have this wonderful tour-de-force interview: it starts by covering how Tynan made the shift from unfocused to focused, how to derive internal enjoyment from things, useful actionable exercises you can do right now, Tynan's method and mindset for producing creative work consistently, how to set up great habits and an excellent mental and physical work environment, and how to make blogging work and similar endeavors work for you. 

Total Focus; Total Enjoyment by Tynan, as told to Sebastian Marshall

When I turned 30 and I had a minor freak out… I thought, "I'll be 40 in not long, and then 50… there's things I want to do in my life, and they're not happening at this pace."

Before that, I had a general idea of things I wanted to do and have in my life, but I went about in an unstructured way. It was good in a lot of ways. It made be a broad process, but not much depth.

I think the world is changing, and it's often cheaper to buy the component pieces of things these days, than to buy a complete package.

If you're dealing with a product or service that takes a few radically different types of skills or inputs to build, it's unlikely that a given company is equally good, equally skilled, or equally cost effective at delivering each of those components.

And most importantly, it's unlikely that the person or company equally likes doing each part of the process.

In olden days, coordination and communication were unreliable and expensive to the point that it didn't make sense to bring multiple people in. But these days, you can often get things much more effectively by getting the relevant expert or skilled craftsman that is both great at what they do, and passionately enjoys that aspect of the process.

This is probably especially true with services. While it's nice to be able to hand over something to just one person and forget it, that usually either requires higher expense or lower quality than if you were able to assemble the component parts yourself. If it's a one-off and not-so-important transaction, that's fine and take the convenience. If it's a repeatable part of your life or business, think of going piecemail and assembling (or even getting a great assembler to make sure it works well together).

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Okay, I've almost got all my email inboxes almost empty now.

I get a ton of mail. I hired an assistant and automated some of it, and I still get a ton of mail. More than I can answer normally.

I'm gradually building more systems, both technology, decisionmaking, and people to process all of this, because I have opportunities worth a lot of cash, a lot of cool stuff, and a lot of ability to connect with interesting people sitting in my inbox. At any given time, there's probably 3-4 very interesting things buried in the dozens of mails I get.

And I also get a kick out of helping people. I like getting and answering questions when I can.

But then I realized, one particular type of questioning makes me cringe, and I dont want to write back to people that write like that.

Amazing comment by Chad on Invisible Gains and Invisible Losses --

Re-read that a couple times. Read it slowly, think about it, then read it again. It's brilliant. Very important, and really brilliant.

Really, spend the time to read it super slowly and think about it. You might get some big gains for a few minutes of work. Thanks Chad. Great stuff.

Sleep deprivation is bad.

Indeed.

Terrible.

Don't try it, don't do it, it's bad for you.

However.