How Do Experienced People Know What to Focus on?

Top performance experts say things like: “You have to focus your attention,” “You have to eliminate distractions,” or “You have to stick with one thing and get it right.”

Note: This article is taken from James Clear, the author and entrepreneur behind the book "Atomic Habits," which has sold over three million copies worldwide. In this article, he discusses what we should focus on.

This is actually good advice, as the deeper you study successful people in all walks of life, from artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, and scientists, you find that focus is the main factor for success. However, this advice has a problem: How will you know what to focus on among the many options? Where do you direct your energy and attention? How do you determine the one thing you should commit to doing?

I won't claim to have all the answers, but I will share with you what I've learned so far.

Until something comes easily

Like most entrepreneurs, I had a hard time in the project's first year. I launched my first product and was surprised to find out to whom I would sell it, and the biggest surprise was that no one would buy it. I reached out to important people, mismanaged my expectations, made stupid mistakes that fundamentally destroyed the opportunity to build good relationships with people I respected, tried to learn programming, and made one change to my website, deleting everything I had done during the previous three months. Simply, I didn't know what I was doing.

During the year I made many mistakes, I received some useful advice: “Try everything until you find something you like.” I took the advice to heart and tried four or five different business ideas over the next 18 months. I wanted to give every idea an opportunity for two or three months, in addition to working independently to cover my living costs, pay bills, and continue the process of experimenting with ideas.

Eventually, I saw the results of that advice and could focus on building one business rather than trying to find an idea. In other words, I handled things simply.

That was the first thing I discovered about knowing what to focus on. If you want to master and understand the basics of a task in depth, it's a good idea to start by trying a few different things.

If you try many different things, you can feel the things you can do easily and set yourself up for success. Focusing on what works is much easier than facing difficulties caused by bad thoughts.

Decide what to focus on

Assuming you're willing to try things out and test them somewhat, the next step is to ask yourself: How do I know which tasks I can do easily? The best answer I can give you is to pay attention, which means measuring something.

You should follow the efforts made in marketing and promotion if you are a businessman and follow your exercises if you want to gain muscle mass, but if you are learning on a machine, you should follow training classes. Even as you measure your business, there will come a point where you have to decide what to focus on.

Personally, I find this moment of decision to be one of the primary stressors in organising projects, where questions arise such as: Do we continue to try new things, or do we bet on a specific strategy?

Everyone wants to know the right time to deal with things and focus on one thing simply, but the reality is that this topic is vague to everyone, which makes success very difficult because entrepreneurship is not like cooking. There is no recipe for success, not even a handbook or guide.

The best choice you can make is to make a decision. It is not possible to try everything. This is because, at some point, you need a choice, not more information.

Workload

We're now at the point where knowing what to focus on is actually possible. You've tried enough ideas to discover one or two options that provide fairly good results. You've overcome the hurdle of wanting more information and the fear of committing to something, and it's time for you to make a choice, whether it's choosing a job, starting a new job, or enrolling in a new class.

It is time to work hard and appreciate the amount of work. It is not enough to do it once or twice, not when doing the work is easy. Rather, the issue is related to work of a fixed and repetitive size. Therefore, you must get used to the boredom of this work and adapt to it to stay behind.

After this repetition, you will understand the basics of your mission. You may understand the meaning of greatness before this stage, but you will not understand how to achieve it until you start working on your own. As radio host Ira Glass puts it, “You have enough sense to know if what you're doing is frustrating or not,” so you'll bridge the gap between what you think is good and what you can do for yourself through effort.

If you want to look great, you'll have to try on a lot of clothes before you get to the simple basics, and you'll probably have to buy a lot of clothes before you know what works for you. Although I'm not a fan of promoting consumerism, if that's the skill set that you want to develop, you will likely take some experimentation and effort.

If you want to become a professional chef, you may make bad meals hundreds of times before you reach a simple and delicious dinner. Personally, I have not met chefs who became skilled after only their tenth experience. Indeed, achieving a deep understanding of the basics of cooking may take time.

But if you want to write a wonderful book, you must write constantly, and you may need to write hundreds of thousands or even millions of words before you reach your goals, and then edit those papers and reduce them to the best possible version.

Only after you've iterated will you know which part of the task is essential for success.

Reach simplicity

Finally, after trying many things and then knowing what to focus on and repeating enough, the simplification process begins: sifting through what is essential and what is unnecessary.

The Frenchman Blaise Pascal wrote in his famous regional letters: “If I had more time, I would write you a shorter letter because mastering the basics is often the hardest and longest journey of all.”