Focus

A common theme of the ideas and thoughts I have had this week were around Focus and why it's key to channel ambition and energy.

Dec 02, 2023

One of the key things that hit me hard this week is both by realization and by studying Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and such people at least at a preliminary level. The core idea is that at any point, you’d have so many things you’re curious and interested about. It’s not saying NO to things you’re not interested about or passionate about that matters. Focus means saying NO to things you are genuinely interested in, passionate about, and keep thinking about each day, to prioritize only one thing - which is the most important thing.

For this week, I’m just pondering and thinking deeply on this idea and how it reflects what I have been doing with my life so far.

Even within trading, there are a lot of things I want to do. Studying each play within the playbook, coding and creating tools and functionalities for myself, to improve and automate my research process. I also want to read books, study the best in each field, read blogs of people who have the skills/qualities I am seeking to build in myself. There’s also a genuine interest and curiosity in studying history - not just of the products I trade, but almost everything to do with financial markets. This sudden burst of curiosity, interest, passion, and enthusiasm is great. But if I pursue all of these, I’d end up not even good at anything. So, the ideal thing for me to do is to say no to all of these except that one thing which would contribute the most to my growth at this point.

I guess we all have things like that. My strong opinion is that if we can remove the clutter of things that form a cloud over the one or two things that we should focus on, and do only those 1-2 things relentlessly, we’d progress way faster at whatever it is we are doing.

I read a Sam Altman blog post on this. That hit a home run for what I meant to express in words. Here are the highlights from that post.