*The fastest way to get somewhere is to leave earlier.* The power of the head start cannot be overstated.
*The best way to save money is to not buy things.* It takes 100 10-cent savings to equal a $10 abstention.
Speeding and scrimping just aren’t effective; by the time you’re faced with that choice it’s too late. They’re also stressful far beyond their return. This is hard for me, the king of “effort”, but it’s still true.
Banana + pear + apple + [funny-looking exterior](http://flickr.com/photos/eraine/90825112/) = [my new favorite fruit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherimoya)!
In Lake Tahoe this morning, Mountain View by 1pm, on a plane in Vegas now, and in Philly by morning. My body doesn’t quite know what to do with me…
In rural China, many homes have stairways leading out of the ceiling to nowhere, built in anticipation of children living in rooms to be built upstairs.
Instead, the children have moved to the cities, the second floors were never completed, and the stairways stand alone against the sky.
(from a [PBS special on the women of rural China](http://www.pbs.org/kqed/chinainside/women/index.html))
I was on a plane cross-country recently when the time for the food service came. The flight attendants moved down the aisle, handing out little bags of pretzels to each passenger and pouring half-cups of soda and water. I wasn’t really hungry, but when the pretzels arrived I dutifully tore open the package by one end, dumped the contents into my hand and ate them.
I didn’t want pretzels. I don’t particularly like pretzels. I don’t think I’ve ever thought to myself, “Man, I could really go for some pretzels right now.” But I ate them just the same, and they are now part of my body. That little bag of pretzels, baked in a food mill somewhere I’ve never been and chock full of chemicals, fats, sugars and salts, has now become a living part of my body, the temple.
I realized this fact immediately after swallowing, and it felt strange. Why did I do that, I wondered? If I wasn’t hungry, why didn’t I just leave them there? And if I was, why didn’t I wait for or plan ahead and pack something that I would enjoy or need?
There are two ways to get things:
1. Take what is provided for you
2. Seek what you really need or want
These ways apply to almost any situation and need, from food to work to information to entertainment.
The pretzels were in the first category.
A new sport for me…but the only one yet where I compete with seals!
From his article in Fast Company, What Should I Do With My Life?.
###MONEY Doesn’t Fund Dreams
> It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world — and psychologically adapted to it — that you don’t really want to ditch it.
###SMARTS Can’t Answer The Question
> What am I good at? is the wrong starting point. People who attempt to deduce an answer usually end up mistaking intensity for passion. To the heart, they are vastly different. Intensity comes across as a pale busyness , while passion is meaningful and fulfilling. A simple test: Is your choice something that will stimulate you for a year or something that you can be passionate about for 10 years?
###PLACE Defines You
> One of the most common mistakes is not recognizing how these value systems will shape you. People think that they can insulate themselves, that they’re different. They’re not. The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life?
###ATTITUDE Is the Biggest Obstacle
> Probably the most debilitating obstacle to taking on The Question is the fear that making a choice is a one-way ride, that starting down a path means closing a door forever. “Keeping your doors open” is a trap. It’s an excuse to stay uninvolved.
Focus, and by extension one’s _involvement_ in something, is the key to quality work in a world that is awash in opportunities. Time ran a recent article on “twixters”, college graduates in their mid-20s who live at home, hop from job to job, and feel lost in the world:
Parents were baffled when their expensively educated, otherwise well-adjusted 23-year-old children wound up sobbing in their old bedrooms, paralyzed by indecision…
To them, the period from 18 to 25 is a kind of sandbox, a chance to build castles and knock them down, experiment with different careers, knowing that none of it really counts. After all, this is a world of overwhelming choice: there are 40 kinds of coffee beans at Whole Foods Market, 205 channels on DirecTV, 15 million personal ads on Match.com and 800,000 jobs on Monster.com.
Can you blame Galantha for wanting to try them all? She doesn’t want to play just the hand she has been dealt. She wants to look through the whole deck. “My problem is I’m really overstimulated by everything,” Galantha says. “I feel there’s too much information out there at all times. There are too many doors, too many people, too much competition.”
Fortunately for my generation, the article is generous and understanding; explaining reasons for such seemingly-irresponsible behavior and exploring possible solutions. Barry Schwartz explores this tendency in his book The Paradox of Choice, and in an interview with Mark Hurst, explains how he has observed it in action:
I teach very talented students at Swarthmore. As they near graduation, when they have to decide what to be when they “grow up”, I observe this complete panic and paralysis overtake many of them, because they realize any choice they make will be closing other doors that they’d like to keep open. There is an opportunity cost associated with every decision. It’s so hard for some of them to decide that they spend years working at Starbucks, waiting for the answer to emerge…
Some social science research says that one consequence of leaving your options open is that people are less satisfied with their decisions; if a decision is non-reversible, you’ll make yourself feel better about the choice you made. If it’s a reversible choice, you don’t do that. You don’t bring your romantic partner “back to the store,” but because you might, you don’t convince yourself that she’s the love of your life. If people know they can undo their choices, they get less satisfaction out of them. People want to keep their options open. And that’s not the road to happiness.
It’s obvious that for my generation going forward, limitless opportunity and limited time and focus are setting up to be the greatest battle we will fight (a pretty good battle, if you ask me–choosing from limitless opportunity–but that doesn’t make it any easier). We want to do it all, but instead we’re doing nothing well.
Focus has always been a double-edged sword to me. The benefit to extreme focus is that I can accomplish lots of work in a short time. Yet as a designer, my creativity depends on inspiration from a huge variety of sources. Focusing too closely on one can limit the influence of innovations in others.
Simply focusing more widely on the area of interest doesn’t really work–it adds few new ideas and hurts productivity on the now-less-focused area. David Allen, the productivity guru, argues that focus is the key to quality work:
Allen argues that the real challenge is not managing your time but maintaining your focus: “If you get too wrapped up in all of the stuff coming at you, you lose your ability to respond appropriately and effectively. Remember, you’re the one who creates speed, because you’re the one who allows stuff to enter your life.”
What I’m working on is absolute focus on one area, followed by a crazy, wild shift of focus to other areas periodically.
That sounds terribly unproductive, as most lifestyles like that are associated with schizophrenia or other mental disorders. Yet I believe that an intelligently-architected system, computer-based or manual, can create a “focus schedule” that helps people work more productively _and_ creatively.
In my application essay to Stanford, I noted that when I was racing bicycles at a professional level, the focus it developed in me helped me succeed in school, work, and the rest of my life as well. Yet while I succeeded at the things I was currently doing, rarely did I experience new and unexpected things. I was productive, but not creative.
Later at Stanford, I fell sick and had to take a couple quarters easy to recover. The time off opened my eyes to opportunities I’d never noticed before, and broadened my experiences for the rest of my time there. But it hurt my performance in classes and certainly cycling. I was creative, but not productive.
The world will continue to get more complicated, not less, and if we all expect to both explore the whole range of possibilities _and_ succeed in the one or two we deem most important, focus will be our most valuable asset, and things that help us schedule our focus will be our most important tools.
