Focus is the ability to put effective action towards one thing in concentrations sufficient to accomplish a goal that can’t be accomplished with the same overall level of action all spread out.

If you dump a bucket of water onto a sheet of metal, it won’t do a thing. But waterjets can cut through sheets of metal like butter – the difference is focus.

Everyone’s ability to focus is different, and I think a lot of problems are caused by misaligning your level of focus capability. We take on too much (or even too little) and don’t align focus correctly. How do we do that?

I’m going to continue to use the analogy of the waterjet. Using that analogy, we can understand focus to have three components: Intensity, Spread (or “Horizontal Focus“) and Depth (or “Vertical Focus“).

Intensity is the jet itself. How narrow of an area can you concentrate that water down to? This is different for everyone, but the ability to block out the external and really get the water down to a tight point is what allows it to cut metal. You don’t get anywhere by splashing around. This is the easiest concept to understand, so I won’t dwell on it – but focusing more is obviously more effective.

Spread is like thinking about how many waterjets are fed from the same line. Two won’t be as intense as one – but you might not lose much. If you have plenty of water pressure, two jets might each cut through the same metal as one, and now you’re twice as effective. Likewise, if you have plenty of energy to give and a tight focus, you might be able to focus on two different areas of your life with efficiency. Maybe even three, four, five. But probably never ten, certainly never twenty. The exact number differs by person, but this is essentially how many plates you can keep spinning in your life. If you find that you can’t maintain a successful career, a successful marriage, a healthy body and an active social life – then guess what, four jets is too many for you. You’ve got to cut it down.

Depth is, quite simply, how much water is in the tank. Regardless of how intensely you can cut, or how many sheets you can cut at once – how long can you do it? Some people are incredibly intense, able to go “all in” on an area of improvement – or maybe more than one – but always burn out after six months. They never stick to it. Maybe they have high Intensity and even high Spread/Horizontal Focus, but they lack Depth/Vertical Focus.

So, it’s a simple set of statistics: everyone has a level of How Intensely They Can Focus, plus a Maximum Number of Things They Can Effectively Focus On, plus a Maximum Duration of Effective Focus.

I have high Intensity, high Depth, low Spread. I can focus very intently, and I can do so for long periods of my life to build habits and routines. But I can’t pick more than one or two focus areas in my life before the machine starts to stall. I’ve met people with different stats – people with medium Intensity, low Depth, and high Spread, for instance, are excellent short-term multitaskers but tend to revert to their baseline life after a while. Or people with low Intensity, high Depth, low Spread – these are the people that are excellent at one particular thing, master it, but don’t tend to want to do much else or move out of their comfort zones.

If you want to be successful – however you define it – you need to operate within the realistic framework of your own waterjet. You need to know how far is “spreading yourself too thin,” how much intensity will burn you out before it accomplishes anything, and when you might be “biting off more than you can chew” by taking on projects whose timeframes exceed your depth.

If you stay where you have full power, you can accomplish incredible things. But one of the first stages to successful planning is to know your equipment.

There is something people do that I don’t much care for. It happens in some workplaces, in some relationships, in some statehouses. In any given corner of life or society, you can find someone who is employing the “99% Bad” strategy.

What is that? It’s when you find the worst example you can find of someone else’s behavior for which said person was not appropriately punished, and then you do something that’s just a tiny bit not-as-bad as that and use the original behavior to justify yours. As if whatever you do is totally beyond reproach just because someone else did something 1% worse and didn’t suffer karmic realignment for it.

Oh, the person you’re dating refuses to wash any dishes? So you do something slightly less bad, like wash socks but nothing else in the laundry hamper. Or a co-worker shows up an hour late and gets away with it, so you show up 59 minutes late and if anyone says anything you whine “but Bob was an hour late yesterday and no one said anything to him!” Or, probably like a bajillion political examples that I don’t need to specifiy.

But the point is – your goal in life shouldn’t be to emulate 99% of the most toxic elements in your life. It should be to remove them entirely while maintaining your own honor and dignity. If you have a partner that refuses to contribute to the household, have a discussion with them and if you must, find a new partner. If a coworker is late and you don’t like how it’s handled, voice that concern – but do so while you’re early, not while you’re almost as late. If you have to find a new job, do it.

Don’t engage in this race to see how bad you can be without being the literal worst, as if the existence of even one person worse than you is justification for anything you want to do. Don’t seek out one worse person. Live your life so that you can’t find one better.

Sometimes, you need help. And sometimes, because humans are imperfect, you get help in a way that doesn’t really help you.

This has probably happened to you more than once, and if you really think back you may even realize that you’ve been the source of that unwanted help once or twice in your life. I know I have – despite my best intentions, sometimes the thing I offer isn’t what the person needs.

But here’s the thing – take the help. Be gracious at the offer. Because often one of the conditions for getting the help you do need is to show gratitude for all the help that’s offered.

Think back to an opinion you once held that you now strongly disagree with.

Can you? I suspect that a non-zero number of people might have trouble with this. Some people go their entire lives without a substantial change of mind. Others do experience such a change, but later convince themselves that they have not; they fool themselves into thinking they’ve always been as wise as they now imagine themselves to be. If this is your first hurdle, you won’t reach another. If you can’t think of an opinion you no longer hold, you should find some of your current ones to shed – I guarantee you that some have gone sour while you weren’t paying attention.

If you can recall such an opinion, don’t worry about why you once held it – consider instead why you no longer do. Was it gradual? Did it simply come of aging and experiencing? Or was there a short sharp shock that knocked it loose and made you realize you needed to change? Or perhaps – even more rare – did someone convince you that your opinion was worth adjusting?

Let that particular experience wash over you in your memory. How it felt to change. We don’t like it, generally. The reason people erase the memory of the change of opinion is that changing means admitting a past error, and some people don’t even like to do that. But that’s exactly why we should get used to the idea. So that we’re more comfortable with it, and able to drive that experience around with proficiency when it’s needed. If there are indeed winds of change, don’t run indoors to avoid them. Get a kite. Heck, get a hang glider! Steering to a better place is better than being blown down.

Happy Birthday!

Hey, maybe it’s not your birthday. But if you read this blog every day, you can always bookmark this one and come back to it when it is your birthday and read it then. Or you could send this to someone whose birthday is today!

But since I don’t know if it’s any particular person’s birthday today, why mention it? Because personal holidays are awesome, and your birthday is usually the first one you get. A personal holiday is any meaningful anniversary that matters to you, but not to the larger society in which you live. The more personal and the more deliberate, the more meaningful.

Your birthday is mostly random and you certainly didn’t choose it, but I still think it’s more meaningful than, say, New Year’s Day. Because it’s yours, and you get to define more of what it means. You pick the rituals and ceremonies used to celebrate it. You can choose to ignore it without societal repercussions. How much it bends someone else’s life will be correlated with how much they know and care about you, specifically. These are all good things.

You can go even further – and you should! Mark days that are important to you, and celebrate them. Put big milestones and accomplishments on your calendar, and turn them into holidays that you celebrate every year. Wish yourself a happy birthday, a happy first-time-living-on-your-own day, a Doctorate-Day, the Annual Feast of the Longest Hike I Ever Took. Whatever they are, your life is a celebration, and you deserve to celebrate it however you wish.

We never truly have a clean slate. I think that the assumption that we do affects our ability to plan and set goals negatively.

While every day is a new day and every year is a new year, the starting conditions for each are set by the days and years before. There’s no “base level” that gets returned to.

So use that to your advantage! Don’t try to build an empire on an empty plain, because you don’t have an empty plain. You have the lasting monuments and crumbling ruins of the empires of yesterday and yesteryear.

Knowing that, pick an area and improve it. Each day, week, month, year. Take one aspect and say “this thing will be better.” Keep going. Sisyphus without the boulder. There’s no top of the mountain, but there is always up.

Happy New Month! (And I guess also happy new year, but the new month is more important.)

I’m very excited about this month. My role at my job is evolving, and this month is the official kickoff of the next stage. I’m really amped for it, and so that’s the focus of my New Month’s Resolution – kicking off this new focus with 100% of my attention and effort.

I spent a lot of last month (successfully!) creating good paradigms for my “parawork.” The work that needs to be done in order to do the meaningful work you want to do. The reports, the organization, the scheduling, the emails. Even the “off-hours” parawork like making sure I have an environment in which I can do the best work, my kids are attended to during the hours in which I’m focusing, etc. I’ve created a good little sphere of my life in which to do good work, and I’m excited to get it rolling.

A recurring theme of the “new month’s resolution” bears special repeating here, in this month – don’t set goals with a timeframe of a year. That’s ludicrous. The level of direct ambition has to match the time-frame. Build habits by the day, build milestones and course corrections by the week, build goals by the month, and make planning frameworks by the year.

Happy new month to you – and may all of those things be successful!

This year I blogged every single day. I put points on the board every time. They weren’t always great. I didn’t “win” each day’s battle. That’s not just about my writing here – it’s about life.

But, I think, I won more than I lost. I came out ahead.

In certain very real ways, this place was a lifeline. A way for me to focus, to anchor, to force myself to be better. To have something to show for each day I survived. Maybe just proof that I was here.

It was a good habit to build, and I’m more glad than I can tell you for that buzzing sound I hear now in my mind if it approaches ten o’clock and I haven’t written yet. That reminder to collect my thoughts, to refine them, and to find the most positive and/or helpful among them.

I hope that, as a positive externality, you benefitted.

I hope that sometimes this was funny, or insightful, or thought-provoking, or interesting, or enlightening. I hope perhaps it spurred on conversations or daydreams or strange mental tangents. I hope that it was, in other words, an opportunity for you – to think differently, maybe even better. I hope it continues to be that, because I have no intention of ceasing.

I made it through the whole year. If you’re reading this, so did you. For all the harrowing experiences this year brought, I had many, many joys. I will allow the things that hurt to fall away with the last page of the calendar, and I will carry the joys with me forever.

See you next year, my friend.

Left to her own devices, my eldest daughter constructs elaborate, fantastical scenarios of all kinds. She builds permanent fortifications out of any raw materials she can lay hands on. She invents devices to move objects around in arcane ways whose purpose I cannot fathom. She paints, programs, draws, cuts, and shapes. In between these things, she runs, jumps, climbs and reads.

In short, I have very little worry that my daughter isn’t finding sufficient stimulation for her agile mind, even now.

Tonight, she solemnly handed this to me. I feel like the beginning of a great adventure is afoot.

“I will sail across the ocean, if nothing prevents me.” – Seneca the Younger

As an early Stoic philosopher, Seneca shared this insight. Seneca wanted to illustrate that hard work and virtue were important while still accepting that at least some part of your success is in the hands of fate. Certainly the best archer in the world has a greater chance of hitting a target than a novice, demonstrating that your effort does matter. At the same time, even a master archer doesn’t hit the target every time – a deer may suddenly dart in an unexpected direction, a bird may fly in your path, the bowstring may break. How to maintain your drive in the face of fate’s ultimate influence?

Seneca’s phrase: “I will sail across the ocean, if nothing prevents me.” It’s a way of being comfortable putting in all your effort (note the “I will,” and not, for example, “I’ll try to”) and not blaming yourself for any ultimate results, only holding yourself accountable for putting in the best effort possible.

I love this lesson, but I think it may be incomplete. Far be it from me to presume to add to the great philosophers of Rome, but I think the modern era features a kind of mistake that I see people make, even when following Seneca’s lessons.

I would adjust the phrase thusly: “I will sail across the ocean, if nothing prevents me and if I don’t decide to do something better.”

Many people anchor themselves to grit and determination – admirable traits, I say! And they create solid action plans to accomplish their goals – equally praiseworthy! But they leave no room for new information, new choices, even new evolutions of your own desires.

Virtues, commitments, and paths of honor are worth committing to. Values and beliefs should not change with the wind. But there should be room for them to change, if change they must. And “plans of action” are an order of magnitude lower than values and virtues when it comes to things you should remain loyal to.

If, halfway across the ocean, you discover a previously-unknown island paradise, don’t be afraid to stay there just because you said you’d sail across the ocean. That was a noble plan, with all the information you had at the time. But each new piece of knowledge resets your universe to starting right now, this second. There are new choices to be made. Not all of them will be different choices, and your virtues and values and beliefs will help you sort through which is which. But only a fool would put on blinders and say “yes, that island is probably exactly where I’d like to be if I’d known about it when I set out; but I didn’t, so on I shall sail.”

The bright white light of the past splits into an infinity of possible colors in the future only through the prism of your present choices. Only you, in this moment, are capable of choice. You are not beholden to choices made even five minutes ago if you learn something new in between. Hold great ambition in your heart – yes. Make good plans in your mind – yes again. And if nothing prevents you, follow through – unless you think of a choice that’s even better.