Focus
Gotchas and Reframes around Sacrifices
Focus is the behavior of concentrating resources (time, money, attention, etc) towards a narrow set of pursuits.
Naturally, focus involves giving up many things as tradeoffs.
The downside of tradeoff itself is pretty well known. You get worse at hobbies. You don’t catch up with your friends as much. You don’t explore the city anymore. Etc.
What’s overlooked are the hidden gotchas: the emotions that come with actually experiencing giving up certain things.
You can’t really forecast these emotions. They don’t appear in decision matrices nor in rational planning. They only appear once you actually experience them.
You can’t really tease them out from asking others. Everyone is different. The way people reframe, prioritize, and react to emotions cannot be totally replicated.
You need to experience them yourself. And you need to do so many times.
After a couple times, you see the recurring emotions you experience, the depth at which you experience them in, and your tendencies when confronted with said emotions.
I’m fairly familiar with the emotions experienced in the dedication to focus.
There’s sadness in deliberately letting things get worse. It goes against the grain of my natural optimizing tendencies and feels uncomfortable when I’m confronted with the fact that I regressed in certain parts of my life.
There’s hollowness in identities being no longer relevant, especially when I was proud of myself in those certain qualities.
There’s doubt in my decisions when I experience the mismatched pain-reward. Things given up are felt quickly (which is immediately painful) and things achieved by focus accrue slowly (which is not immediately rewarding).
There’s even more doubt when I see the tangible manifestation—money, status, trajectory of career—of opportunity cost with paths untaken.
I’m also fairly familiar with how I deal with the reoccurring emotions.
I know I’m bad at ignoring them. Being rather introspective, I find trying to ignore their existence results in unnecessary prolonged psychological torture that hampers focus.
Thought loops of “what if’s” and “I should not give up those things” constantly bubble in my thoughts without any productive resolution.
It’s better for me to regularly acknowledge the emotions and the tradeoffs made and act in spite of any pain and discomfort felt.
I’ve reframed it in which the emotions felt and sacrifices made are not bugs but features of focus.
It’s the suffering in lettings things go that makes focus valuable. The current price of focus is readily available for me to see.
And by committing to it, I bet in seeing growth in the psychological capacity, emotional intensity, and knowledge of self required to support the compounding opportunities that come years in the future.
I believe that it’s necessary that you become closely familiar with the emotions you experience and the compatible reframes that systematically dig you out of the dumps.
It’s an unlock that just keeps you optimistic as you march towards whatever you truly want.
Psst… here what I’m consuming this week:
P.S New life hack: buying physical books and writing in them. Books can be bought for a price of a latte now so there isn’t a reason not to do this.