Brain equity, the truth about focus, and escaping competition.
It's the end of September. The skies have cleared. The sun is out again. Changing seasons is always a moment to take stock of the last quarter and look to the next. It's hard to believe we're in the fourth quarter. At least I'm amazed at that!
I was talking with a group who discussed how people can't wait for 2020 to be over with given all it's served up. And continues to serve up. As if on 01.01.21 the slate is wiped clean and we're magically given a fresh, blank sheet of paper devoid of all of the shit piled on this year. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. No matter how much we want it. COVID doesn't respect the clock. You can't walk out and lock the door at the end of the year and throw away the key.
Own your brain
But you have what no one else has. Your mind. Brain equity. Yes, everyone else has a brain too. But no one has yours. Or mine. You can't have mine. And I can't have yours. You have complete control over how you choose to use it. In the face of competition, you can escape it by being authentically you. The more authentically you you are, the more irrelevant the competition becomes. It's back to mindset.
Think of your brain like your own plot of earth. Your own private domain that you let people in or out of. You manage the gatehouse. The guest list.
You can farm it. Raise some goats and make goat cheese. You can plant a vineyard. And make the best Bordeaux ever. Or build a factory. You wouldn't treat your own property poorly, turning it into a superfund site. Why would you pollute your mind with needless drivel? Yet we do. We let companies manipulate us into giving us their attention.
Social apps are designed to keep us engaged longer and longer in order to show more ads more often. To own more of our time and our thoughts. To keep us from thinking and questioning. Because if we're the king of us, then they can't own us. They can't win. Why is it we're more apt to care for our homes and land then we are our minds? Is it because we can see our homes and land but can't see our mind? We can usually tell if something is needs fixing on
Junk information is to our minds what mold is to a house. We don't see it creeping in until it's taken over. We don't realize it's making us lazy. I thought of the mold because I was in Astoria, Oregon this weekend and there's a house that had a leak unattended for months resulting in mold taking over the house. You could see it coming out through the siding. The house needs to be rebuilt. Your mind can be rebuilt too. By controlling what you allow into it. You get to choose what information you consume. And I'd recommend looking a sources that expand your knowledge.
Just like building equity in real estate, you can build brain equity by acquiring knowledge that builds on your skills and interests. That help you create value for others. And for yourself. The mind is elastic. It never gets too full of good stuff. Throw a lot of crap at it and it gets dull and tired and lazy. But fill it with heaping helpings of information that expands you and you increase your creativity and productivity. Your potential grows and your future becomes richer for it. Think about the kinds of mental resources that you need to reach your goals.
A few years ago when I read Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, I understood the extent to which we're getting rewired. How we're not making serendipitous connections by pulling books off the library shelves that catch our eye. Even deep research has been affected. I don't know about you, but I love the internet for what it's made available. This isn't about unplugging. But about curating what we feed our minds.
Choose wisely because it's impossible to take in all the amazing information at your fingertips. You have limited time to work on things. Choose your entertainment wisely too. You might as well enjoy the best entertainment out there.
Like so many areas of life, it takes intention to choose where you focus your mind. It takes intention to eat well. To exercise. Your mind deserves your attention. It deserves your respect. And unlike the home you own or live in, it's capacity to grow is infinite. Limited only by what you put in it. Increasing your brain equity gives you leverage. And leverage is one key to building wealth. Your mind gives you the leverage of specific knowledge.
Focus is hard but good for you
You know that it's good to focus but often hard to do. It gets easier when you know where to go, but rarely is anyone too focused. I know I'm not. I'm working on increasing my focus by putting all of the new ideas that enter my head in a parking lot. The thing about focus is that when you're laser focused on something, you have to say no to other things. You can't hedge.
When you focus on many things, you minimize your risk of cataclysmic failure if you chose to focus on the wrong thing. Deep focus increases your accountability. And we don't like to be too too accountable most of the time. We'd rather be right. And we'd rather have an out. Focus requires that you have a sense of purpose and conviction. Back to the notion of being unpopular I talked about last week, deep focus means you might be.
Because my internal lawyer always wants me to give you the fine print, deep focus doesn't mean you're reckless. You still get to iterate and pivot. But it means you stand for something. This is advice I need to heed myself. I'm a master of creating options. I like to have alternatives should something not work out.
You might also argue that focus is counter to having a portfolio of work. But that, too, need not be the case. Focus means you commit and relentlessly pursue your a vision that connects everything together. Focus takes effort. And we're lazy so we don't focus. How many times while writing this did I admonish the dog for barking, check an email, or listen to a voicemail? Losing focus costs you time. It costs you creativity. It costs you impact.
When you watch a movie, there's always something in a scene that is the main focus. All else is supporting that focus. The best photographs give you a single point to focus on. They take your eyes there. Whether it's by composition. Or color. Or by selective focus. When everything is in focus nothing is. When you try to focus on everything you get nothing done.
It's the same as companies that try to be all things to all people. They matter to no one. When you lack focus it means you can't decide what's important. You haven't made anything a priority. Don't be mediocre. There is enough. Double down on focus. Odds are you won't over do it. What are you not going to do?
To put a little focus into what you can do with more focus, check out the site "Make yourself great again" which gives you an easy assessment for how you spend your time and what you could be doing with it instead (assuming you're spending too much on the distractions side of the equation.
Escaping Competition
I started this letter by talking about how you have what no one else does: YOUR mind. No matter what any of us does for a living, we complain about too much competition. I was listening to Naval Ravikant last week and he said, "Escape Competition through Authenticity".
If you are authentically you. And that 'you' is amazing. Then you have no real competition. Expect higher quality outcomes from yourself. And everyone around you. In fact, as part of your information diet, surround yourself with the best people you can. Expect more. Push those to expect more from you. And from themselves. There is no middle ground. For that is a field of mediocrity.
Elsewhere I'd once read where we want our leaders to be authentic, but not too authentic. You need to curate what authentic means to you. But that is within your power. No one gets to define you but you. Call it personal branding, call it edge, do the work and put yourself out there. No one else gets to be you.
In the same talk, he talked about valuing your time at an absurd amount. When you do that, it makes you reconsider how you spend it and what you spend it on. It makes you think about the cost of wasting your time. When you work for someone else, you rent out your time. And they'll pay you the minimum they need to in exchange for doing the work. You don't have the same risk, but you also don't have the same upside.
I believe in any scenario, you get to choose what you make of your time and your job. You can use your job to build skills and stability. Jobs are springboards. Self-employment can be a dead end. Again, it's in how and where you focus. In how you invest in your brain. The assets you build or deplete.
If you made it this far, the three things this week to challenge you are:
- Be intentional in how you tend your mind - cultivate brain equity
- Decide what you're not going to do in order to focus on the big stuff that matters
- Make your competition irrelevant by bringing all of you to the game.