Focus isn’t what you think it is.
Most people treat it like a skill to master—using timers and productivity hacks to fend off distractions, forcing focus through willpower. But that misses the fundamental truth: focus isn’t about disciplining your mind—it’s about being so interested in one thing that everything else feels unimportant.
The best work comes from people who are obsessed. When someone builds a great company or makes a scientific discovery, it’s not because of good habits or time management skills. It’s because they lived the problem they were trying to solve. It consumed them. Like Einstein visualizing himself riding alongside a beam of light, or Marie Curie spending years processing tons of pitchblende to isolate radium—their focus wasn’t forced, it was inevitable.
This kind of obsessive focus continues to drive breakthroughs today. Take Sam Altman‘s pursuit of artificial general intelligence. While others debated whether AI was overhyped, he spent over a decade following his conviction. That singular focus—sustained through years of skepticism—transformed OpenAI from an ambitious experiment into a force reshaping the fundamentals of technology.
Focus compounds—when you align time, energy, and skill on one goal, progress accelerates. What starts as curiosity becomes understanding, then expertise, then breakthrough—yet most people confuse activity with progress. They push in ten directions at once, getting nowhere.
Being busy feels productive, but scattered effort does not compound. It dissipates like heat, while focused effort builds like potential energy.
The physics of focus is unforgiving but simple: If you want to do something exceptional, be ruthless about what you focus on. Everything else is noise.