11 ms·

Focus is saying no to good ideas

376 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

makeitdouble 4y ago
This was an interesting read, with a more nuanced take on the issue than how the title puts it. I agree with the takeaway (last two small paragraphs), and also think it's funny how putting things in different perspectives matter a lot. We should really be skeptical of any idea that touts itself of being the most important thing to care about: if it really is, it probably was obvious already and that advice wasn't needed in the first place. If the idea appeared like a revelation, the reality is probably more nuanced and truth of that ideology strongly depends on the circumstances you're in.
belkarx 4y ago
This has nothing to do with focus - it's explaining cost-benefit analysis.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I'd argue it's the same thing. At the end of the day, keeping focus or not is a cost-benefit analysis. Put another way, focus isn't something to value in absolute, it needs to make sense in business and opportunity perspectives. You say No to good ideas only if you're confident your current plan is good enough and worth pursuing on its own.
  - glenstein 4y ago
    Right, I think that your interpretation here is basically correct. There's a lot of different words and ideas we can use to represent approaches to problem solving, and they're going to overlap a lot. And I think the exercise of treating them like they're mutually exclusive and "correcting" our choice of language by saying one term is more correct than another, more often than not, is just kind of tedious and beside the point. It's a good general rule of thumb for understanding any of these articles, and affording them what the philosopher Daniel Dennett referred to as the principle of charity. It's not to say that such corrections are never appropriate but that the principle of charity step should be completed before going into the exercise of attempting to correct language.
- sooyoo 4y ago
  Exactly. The author is arguing that certain ideas looked good but at further inspection were actually less good. Rejecting a genuinely good idea is much harder.
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    Rejecting these kinds of ideas - business adjacencies - is especially difficult. I've worked at a number of places and every single one did this exact thing - lost focus on sensible sounding adjacencies.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Even Google does this of course :-). They can afford it.
      - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        They are the worst offenders. Maybe they can afford it, but I'd argue it costs more than they'd like to admit.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  He isn't explaining cost benefit, he's using cost benefit. And basically saying people don't do a good job thinking through the cost side and/or it's harder than it seems.
- definitelyhuman 4y ago
  I agree the first two points are more about understanding trade-offs - but the result is still focus. Overall I thinks it’s a good articles about achieving goals. Focus can be an overused word, but still works well here IMO
phoe18 4y ago
This reminds me of an Apple WWDC ad from 2014: https://youtu.be/LcGPI2tV2yY https://youtu.be/LcGPI2tV2yY. The video starts with the following lines: "If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything?"
rob74 4y ago
This also applies to open source projects. As a maintainer, you're flattered that others are interested in your project and want to contribute, so you might be tempted to accept a PR for a feature you didn't initially want to have, and forget that the person who submitted it might not stick around to maintain the feature, fix bugs etc.
- yawaramin 4y ago
  Yup. Or people sending issues that then sit in the backlog for ages with no action because there's no bandwidth for them. Better to face reality and let a stalebot close them.
  - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    Why is it better to have the issues sitting closed than sitting open?
    - faeriechangling 4y ago
      One aspect is that bad ideas don’t get resubmitted and good ideas do
      - elmomle 4y ago
        If this is the desired outcome, wouldn't it make more sense to make voting on issues a core part of a bug tracking system? "Number of attempted submissions" seems far too worthwhile a datum to only obtain a noisy version of as an emergent property if (and only if) you have the right configuration.
        imgabe 4y ago
        If you're using github or gitlab, you probably don't have any control over whether or not voting is implemented in the issue tracking system.
black_13 4y ago
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
The book The One Thing by Gary Keller also dives into this idea and is one of the few popular business books which actually left a deep impact on me.
wodenokoto 4y ago
In moment to moment work, I am starting to think focus is more about _not_ keeping busy when you need to wait for something. 1 minute compile time? Not an opportunity to check your email or hacker news.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  Tis true. Eat the boredom for a minute.
- guynamedloren 4y ago
  Absolutely. Focusing on lots of different tasks is the antithesis of focus. Focus is identifying and executing against one singular goal.
- mkmk3 4y ago
  Hell yea. Biggest life improvement in the past year has been this, outside of work as well, just not trying to fill every empty moment. Thanks for the reminder to minimize passive HN use :)
- atoav 4y ago
  If tou feel absolutely bored to death a good idea is to stand up, walk around, look out of the window and sit down. Gives you even more focus than staying put. We tend to move too little anyways.
  - highwaylights 4y ago
    Pay the money to get motorised desk legs. I thought it was a really expensive gimmick relative to what it is and I was utterly, utterly wrong. It has changed my attitude to work completely and being able to spend most of my day standing has (almost paradoxically) made it easier to spend a full day at the desk because I don't get bored or anxious anywhere close to as easily. Our bodies aren't meant to be sedentary during our waking hours. I also find myself just kind of walking on the spot sometimes unintentionally when I'm trying to figure something, which I'm assuming is getting me a sliver of cardio in too.
zuhayeer 4y ago
Reminds me of Jony Ive's reflections on how focused Steve Jobs used to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSo_2tDETt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSo_2tDETt4
- sixstringtheory 4y ago
  Funny enough the next suggested play after that video is this one where the article got its headline from, which it credited to Steve jobs in the first paragraph, from WWDC ‘97: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs
ultrasounder 4y ago
This was addressed at length by Cal”deepwork”Newport in one of his recent podcast.his thesis being in order for our brain to focus it needs to deal with boredom A lot! For instance whenever I come to a traffic signal my immediate Pavlovian response is to pull my phone and check HN. Now that won’t get me to focus for a long period of time in the long run. Instead he suggests involving in activities where failure to focus results in not attaining a desired outcome. Playing 1:1 basketball, racquetball, tennis, poker, chess and list goes on.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Surfing is a good one for focus. The conditions constantly changing and you can get knocked out if you don’t pay attention. Incidentally: my government has cameras now to check phone usage while driving. Demerit points and possible loss of license.
  - ultrasounder 4y ago
    Surfing is a Good one :-) lose focus and you fall off the board.
wbharding 4y ago
Interesting article, but could have used a definition of “F&B”. I presume it’s probably “food and beverage,” but it drives me crazy when an article uses an acronym (in this case, about 50x) without ever defining it.
- Aicy 4y ago
  Yeah, not helpful. In my industry it means "face and body", referring to beauty products.
jongjong 4y ago
If most people followed that advice, they would stay home in their parent's basement and rot away there until they died. Most people aren't even exposed to a single good idea/opportunity in their lives. I'm 33, I've been coding since I was 14. It only happened once in my life that someone offered me to co-found a company but they had no funding, no connections and the idea sucked. I didn't join and the project failed. If I get any semi-decent opportunity at all, I take it because otherwise I will have to wait 10 years for the next mediocre opportunity to come up. Trying to find opportunities is also not viable. At one point, I reached out to some VCs and attended some events which I knew they would also attend; it almost got to the point of stalking them... Still couldn't even raise $20K from them... All I got was a free cappuccino with one of them. Waste of time. The only opportunities I ever got and which worked out with moderate success were the ones where everyone was telling me that it was a waste of time... They would have been a waste of time if I was a lucky spoiled brat maybe; but in my world, if the opportunity is even moderately good, someone else with a few million $ in funding is already doing it and Google will send every single user to their platform and won't send a single user to my platform.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Why don't you take the initiative and ask others to be co-founders?
  - jongjong 4y ago
    I did but as a tech guy, non-technical CEOs with connections don't like a tech guy who takes the innitiative. They like to be the one with the vision/idea. Maybe I should just offer myself up as raw talent though and ignore my own ideas. I haven't tried that yet.
    - csujoy 4y ago
      No need to depend on non-tech CEOs in early days if you can speak with (prospective) customers yourself. Just reach out to a few in your network and show them an initial prototype
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
petesergeant 4y ago
I forget where I got the idea, but when I write goals, I write out a list of everything I might want to make a goal, and then having ordered and selected the ones I want to achieve, I mark the remainder as "anti-goals" -- eg, my goal is to _not_ do them. My anti-goals this year include improving my Thai, improving my squat weight, and taking on a position of responsibility in any organization...
nonrandomstring 4y ago
In reality, good ideas are the next lifeline to survival. It's an interesting read, but seemingly written from a privileged perspective. My experience in business was that every good idea counts, since one is constantly forced to adapt. You must make the bandwidth to listen to them all, prioritise, select and filter - to understand what informed people are trying to tell you about the situation. Basic leadership "openness/receptive" stuff really. That includes warnings that you think you know better about. Lot's of good ideas are negative and one should still heed them. In the story there's one great idea: "Never get into catering POS with table management". That would have been a good idea to listen to early (smugly proclaimed with hindsight - but no less true).
hamasho 4y ago
I googled the original quotes because I didn't know what it means. Here are the full quotes: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629613-people-think-focus-means-saying-yes-to-the-thing-you-ve https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629613-people-think-focus-m...
maverickJ 4y ago
Interesting article. I had the same realisation which I coined the phrase ”everything is not for you”. It’s the idea that even things termed as good might not be good for you; especially in the long term. Our time on earth is finite. It involves choosing a focus and cultivating the attention to stay on track. It also involves being comfortable looking wrong in the short term. The article below can be read adjacent to the one in this post https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/everything-is-not-for-you https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/everything-is-not-fo...
darkerside 4y ago
I'm glad for the epilogue at the end. I was thinking the whole time that those hard and complex ideas weren't distractions. They were the proven business models that the startup should have been pivoting to focus on. How else do you think you build a competitive moat? By solving easy problems?
thenerdhead 4y ago
The Steve Jobs quote likely originated here: > People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. It feels like the author extended this specifically to “the other good ideas” which is always true because it includes both good and bad ideas. Yes fills time. No makes time. https://jondouglas.dev/saying-no-will-make-time/ https://jondouglas.dev/saying-no-will-make-time/
- kiwicopple 4y ago
  it could also be from this video, one of my favourites (1:35): https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs?t=90 https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs?t=90
koliber 4y ago
Focus is something a lot of people talk about, but few do well. The article illustrates this nicely at the end, via the two sets of statements. Often, people makes statements that sounds a bit like this: "Oh yeah. We do need to focus on XYZ. Mary will add this to her responsibilities." This is the kind of "fooling yourself" that the article talks about. That is not focus. It's the opposite of focus. It's spreading yourself thinner than you were before. True focus requires you to say what you will NOT be doing. It requires a bold statement on what you will deliberately neglect. That takes courage. In the article, the second set of statement has that ingredient. It's not easy.
Ensorceled 4y ago
Years ago we had a strategy meeting hosted by our VP Product and in his presentation he outlined the 5 "Priority 1" projects for my team for the next quarter (the slide was literally titled "Q3 Priority 1 - <my team>"). As the VP talked, the CEO kept looking from the screen to me and back again. Finally the CEO couldn't take it anymore ... "Ensorceled, I was expecting your head to explode by now." and I replied "What? This is great, if you give me 5 priority 1 tasks it means I get to choose and my favourite is on the list!" In the ensuing "discussion", I brought up the Jobs quote about 5 times.
- cainxinth 4y ago
  VP: “I want you to prioritize everything!” OP: “That’s not how the word prioritize works.”
- KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
  Sounds just like a slide mislabel, he really just means tier 1 priority.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    Sure, I mean I was there, the CEO, CFO, CTO, other directors all interpreted it the same way I did and the Product guy defended it as if he meant they were are #1 priorities we need to be "focused" on, but I'm sure you're right. I'll have to revisit my memories of the incident.
    - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
      I didn't say you misinterpreted, he's just bad at communicating what he actually means. There can't be multiple #1s so he must mean they're tier 1s. There is no other option since having 5 #1s is literally impossible.
      - shuntress 4y ago
        That's the point. This misunderstanding was made by the presenter. And the "joke" is that once this misunderstanding has been made, the follow-on misunderstanding is that all "tier 1" priority tasks will be completed in the time it takes to complete one "tier 1" priority task. Regardless of what you call it, only one thing can truly be top priority at any given time. Without effective planning, it will morph into a priority singularity titled "Finish the Project".
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
In this vein, classical ethicists talk about the vice of curiosity as opposed to the virtue of studiousness. Studiousness is the virtue of attention, of self-mastery in relation to intellectual pursuits, of prudent allocation of attention to what you should; curiosity is the vice of inattention, of spreading yourself too thin, to pursue things other than what one should or what is not worth pursuing, pursuing that which is beyond your reach, of flitting about between things, of inordinate desire in the domain of intellectual pursuits. The studious man attains wisdom, the curious man remains, at best, a coasting, superficial dilettante. The difference between the studious man and the curious man is something like the difference between the committed and faithful husband and the waffling philanderer. The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity. In all these cases, desirable things may present themselves that would derail you from your aim and sabotage your achievement and your own good. In all these cases, commitment involves refusing to indulge those desires because doing so is counterproductive and harmful in relation to the good pursued. In life, we must make decisions. The word "decision" comes from the Latin "to cut off", as in to cut off options or paths. The grapevine must be pruned to strengthen it and produce more fruit. Of course, we must decide wisely, there is no question about that, but FOMO is the opposite of that. It is an intemperate and immoderate desire for everything, never committing to anything and therefore never attaining anything and never becoming anything.
- echelon 4y ago
  Make the wrong decision and you'll wish your curiosity had won the battle. It's all a fitness landscape. Once you have a good signal of a steep, yet tractable curve, it's time to hone in and focus. Otherwise you need to keep exploring. Within your exploration you need to know when to search and when to labor. You also need to know when you've sunk too much into a fruitless endeavor.
  - taneq 4y ago
    Also, as always when reading advice, think about who's giving it. If you're writing for the masses, decrying fanciful curiosity and promoting narrow studious focus alters that fitness landscape significantly in favour of those who want to control those same masses. You don't want your workers running off to start their own enterprises, after all.
sebastianconcpt 4y ago
There is something compulsory in the culture about this. Most probably the psychological impression and glamour mining. Am I the only one that doesn't like when very specific advice that would work well in a narrow set of specific circumstances because it optimizes what is kind of already tested is presented as a revelatory insight of universal truth?
BOOSTERHIDROGEN 4y ago
Any recommendations about marketing books ?
z9znz 4y ago
This is true in life as well. There are many ideas, things which we could probably do. But just because something (interesting or profitable) is possible, that doesn't mean we should do it or even spend much time pondering it. For those of us who see problems and solutions _everywhere_, this is a surpreme challenge. Or for those who "ramp up" quickly to new things, everything seems possible. Consequently, any good idea not pursued seems like a lost opportunity. It may be! But it may also be a distraction from doing something which is also important and already in motion.
zomglings 4y ago
I couldn't find a definition of this anywhere on that page and it was really frustrating: F&B stands for "Food and Beverage".

376 points by nsoonhui 4y ago

This was an interesting read, with a more nuanced take on the issue than how the title puts it. I agree with the takeaway (last two small paragraphs), and also think it's funny how putting things in different perspectives matter a lot. We should really be skeptical of any idea that touts itself of being the most important thing to care about: if it really is, it probably was obvious already and that advice wasn't needed in the first place. If the idea appeared like a revelation, the reality is probably more nuanced and truth of that ideology strongly depends on the circumstances you're in.

belkarx 4y ago

This has nothing to do with focus - it's explaining cost-benefit analysis.

makeitdouble 4y ago
I'd argue it's the same thing. At the end of the day, keeping focus or not is a cost-benefit analysis. Put another way, focus isn't something to value in absolute, it needs to make sense in business and opportunity perspectives. You say No to good ideas only if you're confident your current plan is good enough and worth pursuing on its own.
- glenstein 4y ago
  Right, I think that your interpretation here is basically correct. There's a lot of different words and ideas we can use to represent approaches to problem solving, and they're going to overlap a lot. And I think the exercise of treating them like they're mutually exclusive and "correcting" our choice of language by saying one term is more correct than another, more often than not, is just kind of tedious and beside the point. It's a good general rule of thumb for understanding any of these articles, and affording them what the philosopher Daniel Dennett referred to as the principle of charity. It's not to say that such corrections are never appropriate but that the principle of charity step should be completed before going into the exercise of attempting to correct language.
sooyoo 4y ago
Exactly. The author is arguing that certain ideas looked good but at further inspection were actually less good. Rejecting a genuinely good idea is much harder.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  Rejecting these kinds of ideas - business adjacencies - is especially difficult. I've worked at a number of places and every single one did this exact thing - lost focus on sensible sounding adjacencies.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Even Google does this of course :-). They can afford it.
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      They are the worst offenders. Maybe they can afford it, but I'd argue it costs more than they'd like to admit.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
He isn't explaining cost benefit, he's using cost benefit. And basically saying people don't do a good job thinking through the cost side and/or it's harder than it seems.
definitelyhuman 4y ago
I agree the first two points are more about understanding trade-offs - but the result is still focus. Overall I thinks it’s a good articles about achieving goals. Focus can be an overused word, but still works well here IMO

phoe18 4y ago

This reminds me of an Apple WWDC ad from 2014: https://youtu.be/LcGPI2tV2yY https://youtu.be/LcGPI2tV2yY. The video starts with the following lines: "If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything?"

rob74 4y ago

This also applies to open source projects. As a maintainer, you're flattered that others are interested in your project and want to contribute, so you might be tempted to accept a PR for a feature you didn't initially want to have, and forget that the person who submitted it might not stick around to maintain the feature, fix bugs etc.

yawaramin 4y ago
Yup. Or people sending issues that then sit in the backlog for ages with no action because there's no bandwidth for them. Better to face reality and let a stalebot close them.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  Why is it better to have the issues sitting closed than sitting open?
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    One aspect is that bad ideas don’t get resubmitted and good ideas do
    - elmomle 4y ago
      If this is the desired outcome, wouldn't it make more sense to make voting on issues a core part of a bug tracking system? "Number of attempted submissions" seems far too worthwhile a datum to only obtain a noisy version of as an emergent property if (and only if) you have the right configuration.
      - imgabe 4y ago
        If you're using github or gitlab, you probably don't have any control over whether or not voting is implemented in the issue tracking system.

black_13 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

The book The One Thing by Gary Keller also dives into this idea and is one of the few popular business books which actually left a deep impact on me.

wodenokoto 4y ago

In moment to moment work, I am starting to think focus is more about _not_ keeping busy when you need to wait for something. 1 minute compile time? Not an opportunity to check your email or hacker news.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago
Tis true. Eat the boredom for a minute.
guynamedloren 4y ago
Absolutely. Focusing on lots of different tasks is the antithesis of focus. Focus is identifying and executing against one singular goal.
mkmk3 4y ago
Hell yea. Biggest life improvement in the past year has been this, outside of work as well, just not trying to fill every empty moment. Thanks for the reminder to minimize passive HN use :)
atoav 4y ago
If tou feel absolutely bored to death a good idea is to stand up, walk around, look out of the window and sit down. Gives you even more focus than staying put. We tend to move too little anyways.
- highwaylights 4y ago
  Pay the money to get motorised desk legs. I thought it was a really expensive gimmick relative to what it is and I was utterly, utterly wrong. It has changed my attitude to work completely and being able to spend most of my day standing has (almost paradoxically) made it easier to spend a full day at the desk because I don't get bored or anxious anywhere close to as easily. Our bodies aren't meant to be sedentary during our waking hours. I also find myself just kind of walking on the spot sometimes unintentionally when I'm trying to figure something, which I'm assuming is getting me a sliver of cardio in too.

zuhayeer 4y ago

Reminds me of Jony Ive's reflections on how focused Steve Jobs used to be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSo_2tDETt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSo_2tDETt4

sixstringtheory 4y ago
Funny enough the next suggested play after that video is this one where the article got its headline from, which it credited to Steve jobs in the first paragraph, from WWDC ‘97: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs

ultrasounder 4y ago

This was addressed at length by Cal”deepwork”Newport in one of his recent podcast.his thesis being in order for our brain to focus it needs to deal with boredom A lot! For instance whenever I come to a traffic signal my immediate Pavlovian response is to pull my phone and check HN. Now that won’t get me to focus for a long period of time in the long run. Instead he suggests involving in activities where failure to focus results in not attaining a desired outcome. Playing 1:1 basketball, racquetball, tennis, poker, chess and list goes on.

quickthrower2 4y ago
Surfing is a good one for focus. The conditions constantly changing and you can get knocked out if you don’t pay attention. Incidentally: my government has cameras now to check phone usage while driving. Demerit points and possible loss of license.
- ultrasounder 4y ago
  Surfing is a Good one :-) lose focus and you fall off the board.

wbharding 4y ago

Interesting article, but could have used a definition of “F&B”. I presume it’s probably “food and beverage,” but it drives me crazy when an article uses an acronym (in this case, about 50x) without ever defining it.

Aicy 4y ago
Yeah, not helpful. In my industry it means "face and body", referring to beauty products.

jongjong 4y ago

If most people followed that advice, they would stay home in their parent's basement and rot away there until they died. Most people aren't even exposed to a single good idea/opportunity in their lives. I'm 33, I've been coding since I was 14. It only happened once in my life that someone offered me to co-found a company but they had no funding, no connections and the idea sucked. I didn't join and the project failed. If I get any semi-decent opportunity at all, I take it because otherwise I will have to wait 10 years for the next mediocre opportunity to come up. Trying to find opportunities is also not viable. At one point, I reached out to some VCs and attended some events which I knew they would also attend; it almost got to the point of stalking them... Still couldn't even raise $20K from them... All I got was a free cappuccino with one of them. Waste of time. The only opportunities I ever got and which worked out with moderate success were the ones where everyone was telling me that it was a waste of time... They would have been a waste of time if I was a lucky spoiled brat maybe; but in my world, if the opportunity is even moderately good, someone else with a few million $ in funding is already doing it and Google will send every single user to their platform and won't send a single user to my platform.

Tepix 4y ago
Why don't you take the initiative and ask others to be co-founders?
- jongjong 4y ago
  I did but as a tech guy, non-technical CEOs with connections don't like a tech guy who takes the innitiative. They like to be the one with the vision/idea. Maybe I should just offer myself up as raw talent though and ignore my own ideas. I haven't tried that yet.
  - csujoy 4y ago
    No need to depend on non-tech CEOs in early days if you can speak with (prospective) customers yourself. Just reach out to a few in your network and show them an initial prototype
4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

petesergeant 4y ago

I forget where I got the idea, but when I write goals, I write out a list of everything I might want to make a goal, and then having ordered and selected the ones I want to achieve, I mark the remainder as "anti-goals" -- eg, my goal is to _not_ do them. My anti-goals this year include improving my Thai, improving my squat weight, and taking on a position of responsibility in any organization...

nonrandomstring 4y ago

In reality, good ideas are the next lifeline to survival. It's an interesting read, but seemingly written from a privileged perspective. My experience in business was that every good idea counts, since one is constantly forced to adapt. You must make the bandwidth to listen to them all, prioritise, select and filter - to understand what informed people are trying to tell you about the situation. Basic leadership "openness/receptive" stuff really. That includes warnings that you think you know better about. Lot's of good ideas are negative and one should still heed them. In the story there's one great idea: "Never get into catering POS with table management". That would have been a good idea to listen to early (smugly proclaimed with hindsight - but no less true).

hamasho 4y ago

I googled the original quotes because I didn't know what it means. Here are the full quotes: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629613-people-think-focus-means-saying-yes-to-the-thing-you-ve https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629613-people-think-focus-m...

maverickJ 4y ago

Interesting article. I had the same realisation which I coined the phrase ”everything is not for you”. It’s the idea that even things termed as good might not be good for you; especially in the long term. Our time on earth is finite. It involves choosing a focus and cultivating the attention to stay on track. It also involves being comfortable looking wrong in the short term. The article below can be read adjacent to the one in this post https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/everything-is-not-for-you https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/everything-is-not-fo...

darkerside 4y ago

I'm glad for the epilogue at the end. I was thinking the whole time that those hard and complex ideas weren't distractions. They were the proven business models that the startup should have been pivoting to focus on. How else do you think you build a competitive moat? By solving easy problems?

thenerdhead 4y ago

The Steve Jobs quote likely originated here: > People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. It feels like the author extended this specifically to “the other good ideas” which is always true because it includes both good and bad ideas. Yes fills time. No makes time. https://jondouglas.dev/saying-no-will-make-time/ https://jondouglas.dev/saying-no-will-make-time/

kiwicopple 4y ago
it could also be from this video, one of my favourites (1:35): https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs?t=90 https://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs?t=90

koliber 4y ago

Focus is something a lot of people talk about, but few do well. The article illustrates this nicely at the end, via the two sets of statements. Often, people makes statements that sounds a bit like this: "Oh yeah. We do need to focus on XYZ. Mary will add this to her responsibilities." This is the kind of "fooling yourself" that the article talks about. That is not focus. It's the opposite of focus. It's spreading yourself thinner than you were before. True focus requires you to say what you will NOT be doing. It requires a bold statement on what you will deliberately neglect. That takes courage. In the article, the second set of statement has that ingredient. It's not easy.

Ensorceled 4y ago

Years ago we had a strategy meeting hosted by our VP Product and in his presentation he outlined the 5 "Priority 1" projects for my team for the next quarter (the slide was literally titled "Q3 Priority 1 - <my team>"). As the VP talked, the CEO kept looking from the screen to me and back again. Finally the CEO couldn't take it anymore ... "Ensorceled, I was expecting your head to explode by now." and I replied "What? This is great, if you give me 5 priority 1 tasks it means I get to choose and my favourite is on the list!" In the ensuing "discussion", I brought up the Jobs quote about 5 times.

cainxinth 4y ago
VP: “I want you to prioritize everything!” OP: “That’s not how the word prioritize works.”
KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
Sounds just like a slide mislabel, he really just means tier 1 priority.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  Sure, I mean I was there, the CEO, CFO, CTO, other directors all interpreted it the same way I did and the Product guy defended it as if he meant they were are #1 priorities we need to be "focused" on, but I'm sure you're right. I'll have to revisit my memories of the incident.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 4y ago
    I didn't say you misinterpreted, he's just bad at communicating what he actually means. There can't be multiple #1s so he must mean they're tier 1s. There is no other option since having 5 #1s is literally impossible.
    - shuntress 4y ago
      That's the point. This misunderstanding was made by the presenter. And the "joke" is that once this misunderstanding has been made, the follow-on misunderstanding is that all "tier 1" priority tasks will be completed in the time it takes to complete one "tier 1" priority task. Regardless of what you call it, only one thing can truly be top priority at any given time. Without effective planning, it will morph into a priority singularity titled "Finish the Project".

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

In this vein, classical ethicists talk about the vice of curiosity as opposed to the virtue of studiousness. Studiousness is the virtue of attention, of self-mastery in relation to intellectual pursuits, of prudent allocation of attention to what you should; curiosity is the vice of inattention, of spreading yourself too thin, to pursue things other than what one should or what is not worth pursuing, pursuing that which is beyond your reach, of flitting about between things, of inordinate desire in the domain of intellectual pursuits. The studious man attains wisdom, the curious man remains, at best, a coasting, superficial dilettante. The difference between the studious man and the curious man is something like the difference between the committed and faithful husband and the waffling philanderer. The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity. In all these cases, desirable things may present themselves that would derail you from your aim and sabotage your achievement and your own good. In all these cases, commitment involves refusing to indulge those desires because doing so is counterproductive and harmful in relation to the good pursued. In life, we must make decisions. The word "decision" comes from the Latin "to cut off", as in to cut off options or paths. The grapevine must be pruned to strengthen it and produce more fruit. Of course, we must decide wisely, there is no question about that, but FOMO is the opposite of that. It is an intemperate and immoderate desire for everything, never committing to anything and therefore never attaining anything and never becoming anything.

echelon 4y ago
Make the wrong decision and you'll wish your curiosity had won the battle. It's all a fitness landscape. Once you have a good signal of a steep, yet tractable curve, it's time to hone in and focus. Otherwise you need to keep exploring. Within your exploration you need to know when to search and when to labor. You also need to know when you've sunk too much into a fruitless endeavor.
- taneq 4y ago
  Also, as always when reading advice, think about who's giving it. If you're writing for the masses, decrying fanciful curiosity and promoting narrow studious focus alters that fitness landscape significantly in favour of those who want to control those same masses. You don't want your workers running off to start their own enterprises, after all.

sebastianconcpt 4y ago

There is something compulsory in the culture about this. Most probably the psychological impression and glamour mining. Am I the only one that doesn't like when very specific advice that would work well in a narrow set of specific circumstances because it optimizes what is kind of already tested is presented as a revelatory insight of universal truth?

BOOSTERHIDROGEN 4y ago

Any recommendations about marketing books ?

z9znz 4y ago

This is true in life as well. There are many ideas, things which we could probably do. But just because something (interesting or profitable) is possible, that doesn't mean we should do it or even spend much time pondering it. For those of us who see problems and solutions _everywhere_, this is a surpreme challenge. Or for those who "ramp up" quickly to new things, everything seems possible. Consequently, any good idea not pursued seems like a lost opportunity. It may be! But it may also be a distraction from doing something which is also important and already in motion.

zomglings 4y ago

I couldn't find a definition of this anywhere on that page and it was really frustrating: F&B stands for "Food and Beverage".