Focus 🎯
Three Things #140: October 13, 2024
I’ve written a bit about focus before in the context of my personal life. Recently, however, I’ve been reflecting on focus not at the individual level but at the level of a team, company, or organization.
Focus at this higher level is at least as important and at least as difficult as it is at the individual level. I’ve been part of a number of teams and projects over the years that have really struggled to focus and have paid the price. I’ve also been a part of teams and projects that did achieve singular focus, although in my experience this is rare. As a result, I’ve been able to apply some pattern matching to the people, projects, and opportunities that I come across, and one of the main things I look for before investing time or money is focus.
Here are some of the things I’m looking for when I look for focus, and some of the ways in which it’s important, and difficult, and how to achieve it.
Thing #1: Important 🚨
Building anything is hard. Competing in any industry is hard. The only way a startup, or any new project or team, stands a chance of competing with the established incumbents, regardless of industry, is by competing asymmetrically.
There are lots of ways to do that, some easier than others. You could build a product that’s 10x easier to use or creates 10x more value (very hard, and rare). You could hire people who are 10x smarter or who work 10x harder (hard, expensive, and rare). You could sell the same product as your competitors but with a 10x better brand, and/or 10x better marketing (hard, but less rare). You could sell the same product at a 10x lower price point (hard, not fun). You could take risks that your incumbent competitors aren’t willing to take, e.g., with respect to regulation (easy and common, but obviously risky).
Focus is another possible asymmetry, for the simple reason that it’s easier for a small, new team to focus than it is for a big, established one. This disproportionate ability to focus is one of my favorite startup asymmetries. If a team has nothing else over their competitors, but they have 10x the determination and work 10x as hard, then other things equal they’re more likely to win.
10x the determination might sound impossible, but actually it isn’t as hard as it sounds. Have you ever paid attention to how most companies spend their time, their resources, and most importantly, their employees’ time and effort? The average corporate worker spends a ridiculous amount of time every day on pointless busy work, on meetings, writing reports, etc. In our industry, people tend to spend a stupid amount of time traveling, attending conferences, and throwing parties. Each of those—every meeting or conference your competitor is attending, every moment they spend traveling or writing pointless reports, every dollar they spend on a party—is an opportunity for you to get ahead.
The way to do this is focus. Relentless, ruthless, hardcore, gritty focus. It’s rare but you know it when you see it: the one guy at the party, in the back of the room, banging on his laptop, continuing to work while everyone else drinks beer and chats around him. The girl who isn’t there in the first place because she’s working by herself somewhere, trying to ship before a deadline. It’s ironic that it’s the founders in the limelight—the ones speaking at those conferences and throwing those parties—who tend to get the attention and the investment dollars, because it’s actually the invisible, focused founders that you really want to bet on. (This is one of many ways that I think VCs could be more efficient, but that’s a topic for another issue.)
In short, focus is how you win. You simply cannot do many things well at the same time: this is as true of organizations as it is of people. Both are bad at multitasking! It’s true for individuals because of the cost of context-switching. You need big, focused, uninterrupted chunks of time to make progress on anything valuable, anything worth working on.
It’s not as immediately obvious why this is as true of organizations as it is of individuals, but it has to do with the fact that the people responsible for running those organizations are also individuals with limited time and brainpower. A person, or a group of people, can focus on doing one thing really well. If you ask them to divide their time between several tasks, you’ll get a bad result for all of them. This is more or less universally true, and it’s scientifically proven.
The need for focus is true for all organizations, but it’s doubly true of startups which are by nature resource-constrained. You simply can’t outcompete the incumbents on all, or even several, product attributes. In order to have a fighting chance, you need to pick one: the one thing you’re confident that you can do 10x better than anyone else. (If you can’t think of any, you’re probably in the wrong line of work.) Literally the only chance you have of succeeding is 1. Convincing your team that this goal is achievable, and worth working towards; 2. Convincing your customers and the market at large that the goal matters and is achievable; and 3. Actually delivering what you promise. Each of these requires a singular focus.
Big, successful companies eventually reach a stage where they’re forced by the pressures of capitalism to grow into multiple product lines and multiple industries. In other words, they eventually lose focus—and that’s exactly when they lose competitiveness and are most vulnerable to asymmetric challenges by focused upstarts like you and me.
Thing #2: Hard 😵
If focus is so essential to success, why is it so difficult? On the individual level, it seems obvious that the cause is a constant barrage of notifications from various apps, our complicated lives, and the expectations of the modern workplace and modern life more generally. I wrote about some of these distractions, and what to do about them, last time I wrote about focus.
It’s a bit less obvious what causes companies to lack focus. The easy answer is undisciplined employees, and I think this is definitely a factor. A company is of course composed of fallible human beings, and as a result it often exhibits a lot of the same failings as its constituent members. If all of the managers and executives at the company have too much on their plates, are constantly jumping from task to task, and aren’t able to focus on one thing for a sufficiently long period of time, then the company itself will exhibit this same erratic behavior. Having said this, even a company with a bunch of individually focused employees may still lack focus overall.
Why is this? I think it boils down to the temptation to do many things, unappreciation of the value of focus and a misunderstanding of the harm caused by the lack thereof.
Let’s start with the first. A company has many jobs to do. It has to recruit and retain staff by keeping them happy and busy with meaningful work. It has to maintain existing products and develop new ones, and constantly refine its pitch. It has to maintain relationships with suppliers. It has to recruit and retain customers, keeping them happy by delivering a delightful product or service. It has to make money for shareholders. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Ask any executive any day of the week to exhaustively share their task list and it’ll include these things and 100 others.
It can feel so overwhelming that it’s tempting to just pick a task that sounds doable first thing each morning and dive in. But this is a terrible form of task management, and of management in general. Not all tasks are created equal, and working on any one task temporarily blocks work on all other tasks, and may also permanently close other doors. Some tasks might seem easy, when in practice they’re actually much harder than they seem. And when your customers are asking for something it’s hard to say no to them, at least in the beginning. Finally, what’s easy or optimal for one person or one team, or in the short term, is in fact often at adds with the overall company’s long-term interest.
If you’ve never been part of a real focused team or organization before, where the entire organization executes full throttle towards one central, defining purpose (more on this in a moment), then it may just not be obvious how important and valuable focus is. I think 99% of people at 99% of organizations feel that they’re doing just fine by picking a task and diving in, without considering how relevant the task is to the mission at hand. And I get it, because it makes you feel busy and productive, especially if it’s something a customer asked for.
But these short term wins may ultimately prove pyrrhic, because it may cause much bigger problems down the road that aren’t quite visible yet. That’s the other thing about focus: it requires an incredibly high bias towards a long time preference, something that most people—and most organizations—simply aren’t capable of.
Thing #3: How 🧮
An organization needs two things in order to focus: a framework and a process. Both are quite straightforward, but in my experience the need for these things isn’t always obvious. As a result most of the teams and organizations I’ve been part of have been missing one or both of these.
Let’s start with the framework. To use a computer science analogy, the framework is the “data” that the decision process “algorithm” acts upon. In simple terms, this consists of things that are predetermined and change rarely if ever: a mission, vision, problem statement, and values. These are the very first things you should work on whenever you start a new project or organization—if you intend it to last long enough to do great things.
The starting point should always be values. What are the things that you, as an organization, stand for above all? What truths do you hold in the highest esteem? Simply put, what do you value most highly?
Coming up with values for an organization is by definition a bit more complicated than discovering your personal values since there are multiple people involved, but the process is actually easier than it sounds. All it takes is the project’s founders getting together in a room, writing down the things they each individually value the most, and looking for common ground. It helps to put a particular emphasis upon why the founders chose to work together on this particular problem. There’s no perfect number but I recommend no less than three values and no more than 10.
Once your values are in place you can work on the other elements of this founding “constitution”: mission statement, animating problem, and vision statement. Lots of books have been written and lectures have been given about these topics, so I recommend doing some homework and looking for good examples, but also, keep it simple! The mission is simply the animating sense of purpose that gets you (and the rest of the team) out of bed in the morning and excited to come to work. The problem statement is a way of reframing the mission as a question (you probably don’t need both). And the vision statement is what it sounds like: what does success look like in three or ten years?
As an example, here’s what I’d offer for Spacemesh:
Mission: The world’s most decentralized blockchain.
Problem: Why can’t an ordinary person, without lots of resources, hardware, or expertise, participate successfully in mining in any major blockchain network today?
Vision: One billion people around the world running nodes on their home computers or mobile devices, participating in consensus, helping secure the network, and being rewarded for their contribution.
With this in place you can move onto process, i.e., the algorithm by which tasks are prioritized. Highly-paid consultants have beaten this subject to death, too, so I won’t say a lot about it here, but I will recommend one approach that’s always stood out to me as exceptional. It’s attributed to Steve Jobs, though Warren Buffet suggests a similar exercise for the individual. It goes like this.
As part of a team offsite or retreat, gather all of your senior executives and team leads and ask each of them to give you a brain dump of their top priorities. Expect to have around 100 items on the list. Then, have the group come to consensus on the top 10 most important items on this list.
Next, take a big, thick marker and, in the most theatrical manner possible, cross off items 4-10. These are the most dangerous, “avoid at all cost” anti-priorities. The remaining three items from the top of the list are the only things the entire organization should be focused on, at least until you repeat the exercise the following quarter or year. (I find that there’s something powerful about the visual and tactile experience of writing priorities down on notecards or on a big list, and then crossing off or physically discarding those items. Whenever possible, actually do this together in one room!)
This exercise works as well for individuals as it does for teams! The point is that you simply cannot do many things well at once, so pick the one, two, or maximum three things you intend to work towards at any given point in time and do them well! More than three and you get distracted. More than three and the message, to both your team and to the market, gets diluted. Only once you’ve made progress on these items, consider moving on to the less important items.
You can only be focused, and therefore you can only be successful, by being as ruthless about the things you won’t do as about the things you will.