Focus Is Everything One of the things I have thought the most about and ran the most experiments with, especially over the last two years or so, when it comes to pursuing change and pursuing Christ, is focus. And the more I study and experiment, the more I realize that focus is everything. You become what you focus on. It’s just everything. The phrase “you are what you eat” is very true. What you put into yourself will be what you give out — whether that’s food, water, media, the people you surround yourself with, the activities that you find yourself doing on a day-to-day basis. You become what you focus on. And by extension, your actions express your priorities. A lot of people may think, or maybe even feel, like they’re focusing on the areas that they want to be. But when they take an honest look at their calendar on a day-to-day basis, they might find that they’re spending a lot less time doing the things they say are their number one, two, three priorities — and a lot more time doing things that they probably don’t even think should be priorities. Because that’s part of human nature, and part of the world we live in, especially now. It’s been re-engineered to distract us from what matters most and keep us focused on things that make other people money, rather than things that might truly matter to us. Focus is so important. There are a couple quotes I think about when it comes to focus. One is Steve Jobs — “focus is just saying no.” I think it’s a little more complex than that, but I think Steve was on the right track. I think focus has a lot more to do with overall simplicity. And I think focus is just doing something with the maximum level of intentionality that you can, for an usually extended period of time. The intentionality is the real key, in my opinion. Because it’s easy — well, maybe not easy — but there are a lot of people who can do something good for a long time. But to relentlessly pursue anything requires a lot more intention in your thoughts and your focus. You have to be mentally engaged if you are going to relentlessly pursue something. Almost the entire time. You can’t have passive action. It has to be intentional action. There’s a podcast called the Founders Podcast — phenomenal podcast on entrepreneurship by David Senra. He did an interview with Chris Williamson a while back where he said if he could sum everything up — everything he’s read, over 400 biographies, over 100,000 pages of words and ideas and life experiences of ultra-successful entrepreneurs — into one word, it would be focus. And to couple that with a quote from Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid: “My entire life has been spent trying to teach people that uninterrupted, intense concentration for hour after hour will bring out results in people they didn’t know they had.” There’s also one from Charlie Munger — Warren Buffett’s right hand man — “Find a simple idea and take it seriously.” And one from Dan Martell: “Simple scales, complex fails.” A lot of those phrases originated from a business or entrepreneurial context, but I know they apply to life as a whole. For me, what focus has looked like recently is being able to narrow my scope of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it into one sentence apiece. One simple sentence. So I can sit here and honestly say, when people ask me what I want from an overall life standpoint — I want to change to become more like Jesus Christ. I am obsessed with changing to become more like Jesus Christ. And when people ask the career question — I get paid to serve people and help bring them closer to Jesus Christ. Those are simple sentences that encapsulate what I’m doing and who I am. Those took me about two years of constant introspection, experimentation, and retooling of how I defined what I wanted in life. To give you an example, an experiment you can run — of how you could potentially go about finding that focus for yourself. Because you can’t reach a destination you don’t know the location of. If you don’t know what you want, how are you supposed to know where you need to go to get it? When I realized I had no clue what I wanted, I was working at a roofing company in Arizona. I took myself off my salary position and went back to being all commissioned so I had more control over my time. I would do all my roofing work in the morning, and then I would go back to my house, change back into my pajamas, lay down in my bed, and think. What do I want? What does God want me to do? Who does Jesus want me to be? How does God want me to change? What improvements can I make? I had a notebook on my bedside table with a pen, and every time I felt like I had an answer worth writing down, I’d write it down. Then go back to thinking. Write more stuff down. Go back to thinking. Repeat that for hours a day sometimes. At the time, I thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur — more in the sense of how Steve Jobs or Alex Hormozi is an entrepreneur. So I was trying a lot of different business ideas, finding the most fiscally efficient way to test each one. But in hindsight, through the introspective analysis that those experiments yielded, I realized that everything I was trying to do was just to give myself a way to get paid to serve people and help them become more like Jesus. That was the crux of all of it. And I noticed that pattern over time. I would encourage each of you to do something like that. To find out what you want, what God wants for you, and what you feel like you should focus on. I promise you, it is worth the time. It is worth the effort to remove the distractions from your life. Delete your social media — you don’t have to delete the accounts, just delete it off your phones. Spend the time with yourself. Honest introspection is one of the most powerful tools to learn your identity as a son or daughter of God, to feel that identity. A lot of people are either scared to spend time with themselves — in their own head, their own thoughts — or they just let themselves get distracted by the things of the world, because it really is so easy. There’s an infinite number of distractions for anyone at this point in society. I’ve really enjoyed the movie F1, the new one with Brad Pitt. His character has a line — he’s talking about the media and the press coverage and everything, and he tells the other racer: “It’s all just noise. It’s all just noise.” And that’s what the vast majority of the things around us in life are. It’s just noise. All the news is just noise. Most of your friends’ Instagram story updates. It’s just noise. Your favorite YouTube creator dropping a new video. It’s just noise. The list goes on and on. Remove the noise. Remove the distractions. Simplify — as my good old buddy Henry David Thoreau said — simplify, simplify, simplify. And that will bring the focus that your life deserves. You should be far more aggressive in simplification and seeking focus than you currently are. Everyone should be. It is such a powerful tool. And I just want to remind everyone of the Edwin Land quote, because I think it’s so powerful. We don’t understand our own capacity. We don’t know ourselves well enough to know what we are actually capable of. Edwin Land is the founder of Polaroid. He was Steve Jobs’ idol. He has the third most patents of anyone in U.S. history. This guy could literally invent things on demand. The military called him up and said, hey, we need a fix for this problem. And he said, okay, I’ll be by tomorrow. The military leader asked, so you’ve already got a solution in mind? And he said, no, but I’ll have one by the time I get there. And he did. This guy knew what focus was and knew how to utilize it. The kind of person who is dropping this truth bomb — it’s not just something he said, it’s something he practiced and lived. He gleaned this truth from a life of focus. “My entire life has been spent trying to teach people that uninterrupted, intense concentration for hour after hour will bring out results in people they didn’t know they had.” That is the relentless pursuit of Christ. Uninterrupted, intense concentration — hour after hour — figuring out what you can do to be more like him. Trying to be more like him. Thinking about changes that need to be made to be more like him. Making the changes. Over and over and over again. Focus is utter simplicity. Get full access to relentlesspursuitofChrist at relentlesspursuitofchrist.substack.com/subscribe
