Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about focus.
Thanks to modern technology and the way we live, focus has become a scarce commodity. Our attention spans are shot, our focus is fragmented, and we are all the poorer for it.
You see the signs of this everywhere – for one thing, everywhere we look (for example, news reports, books, videos, articles), we are met with poor quality and rushed, superficial content. With divided attention spans, people often no longer have the wherewithal to stay focused on tough and complex issues. (As soon as something feels difficult, we pivot away and reach for the comfort of our smartphones.) And, of course, with AI providing handy shortcuts, we are all living in an era of bite-sized, content-light, knowledge acquisition.
But there are certain rewards for those who choose not to walk this path. For the few who make the intentional choice to safeguard their attention spans, and to harness their focus in productive ways, the rewards are massive.
Thanks to advances in modern technology, there is no shortage of opportunity for those who want to create beautiful things, build successful businesses, and make wonderful art. Take, for example, the opportunities presented by no-code software, or the amazing things that Claude Code enables us to do these days. (Yesterday, I watched a video on how to create a website using natural language prompts in Claude Code; and then how to upload the HTML and CSS files via GitHub into the backend of the hosting provider. Such a thing would have taken hours (if not days!) a mere 15 years ago. I speak from hard experience.)
Thanks to the wonders of AI and other digital marvels, we can do so much these days to add beauty to the world, and even more meaning to our lives. And we can do all these through little more than the smartphone we have in our hands right now.
And yet, these same smartphones can also distract us from these wonderful promises. Through countless social media apps, they can take us down unending and unrewarding paths of banal entertainment. They can sap our inspiration, cut off our drive at its source, and substitute it with an unslakable thirst for even more banality. In this way, we lose our focus, our motivation, and our creative energy.
And so we lose the opportunity to be creative, and the deep satisfaction that comes from contemplating the works of our hands.
I have therefore decided to be intentional about where I put my focus. I am also being intentional about keeping my focus undivided. Given the intense bombardment we face from the online world, it is a Herculean task.
But it is worth it, and I recommend it to everyone.
There are beautiful things yet unmade – poems to be written, music to be made. The world is worth all this, for sure. Who else, but we, can get it done?