Looking At Selective Focus In Business

Drew Porter
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read

How Your RAS Inhibits Decision Making & How To Optimize For The Best…

It’s a common teaching in the pickup industry that training your RAS, or Reticular Activating System, is one of the key forces in getting good with girls.

What is the Reticular Activating System?

Imagine the moment when you walk into a coffee shop and you see the cutest girl (or guy, depending on who you are) sitting there chatting with her friend. Where does your mind immediately go?

  • Hold eye contact, smile, and immediately go start a conversation
  • Look away as if “you haven’t seen her yet”
  • Debate internally about whether or not “the other girl is her sister… or if she has a boyfriend…”
  • Immediately feel fear and look down

A focused RAS locks in on the prize and does not waver

The reticular activating system in the brain is wired for selective focus in any given situation. Humans are flawed creatures in the fact that we say certain things, but what we actually do could be completely different. Our logical brain may always say that we are focused on the customers not the competition, providing value not getting money, or a million other politically correct statements. However, if we have not taken a conscious effort to train our RAS, then these statements about us are most likely not true.

Congruence in your thoughts, words, and actions

When you get to this place of deep focus on the prize, then you’re at a place of congruence. This is why the high status guys always end up getting the girls. When you see the cute girl and you hold eye contact, smile, and start a conversation, the sub-communication is ‘I think you’re cute, let’s see if we have something here.’ From your sub-communications to your vibe to your sentences, everything carries the same message. It’s much more attractive than the wishy-washy guy avoiding eye contact & asking to borrow her extra chair as the opener.

You must have total congruence in business as well. Humans have an unbelievable nose for bullshit. If you are a salesman and you slightly waver in your pitch, a blogger and you write a sales pitch for your affiliate link, or a brand and you lie about your intentions, we sniff it out & react viscerally as human beings. The root cause of these situations is unfocusedness. We started the project with great intentions & when we didn’t get the material results we were hoping for, we switched strategies to a more selfish one.

How to train your RAS

  • The practice of deep work will bring the most ROI on your time. Deep Work is a book by Cal Newport that explains this a bit further. The basic idea is that you’re going to train your brain to be a marathon runner rather than a sprinter. This is accomplished by running mini-marathons with your work everyday.
  • Good, clean veggies everyday. I recommend making your own green juice. It’s a quick drink every morning, but it provides your brain with unbelievable nutrients to cultivate that deep focus.
  • Meditation. Back when we were cave men, we could go push ourselves to the max while hunting — we could come back tired, hungry, stressed out, and scared, but when we got back to the tribe we got to let go and be safe. Nowadays we never give ourselves a time to relax & unplug unless we have meditation. Give your brain this mental break & it will come back stronger.
  • Core competency. Your brain is able to get into a deeper focus when it can make different connections from it’s core skill. If you’re great at picking up girls, then your brain gets into a meta-focus when it is able to apply pickup principles to technology, reading, art, etc.
  • Physical exhaustion. Most of the time our brains only push us to about 20% of our actual potential. The other 80% doesn’t show up unless is absolutely has to. A good way to prove this to yourself (I’ve heard) is by training physically with a Navy SEAL. They push themselves outside of their boundaries physically & it’s wakes them up mentally to the fact that they can go beyond what they thought.

Assembling your board according to selective focus

Everybody always wants to look at the pessimists, the greedy, the hipsters, the nerds, or the loudmouths & draw lines in the sand. You want to convince yourself that your way of thinking is right & they are wrong. You shouldn’t be focused on the money, the design doesn’t matter as much as the utility, we don’t need advertising if we build a great product… all kinds of generalities.

But the fact of the matter is, if you want to build a successful business, you are going to need many different people focusing on many different tasks. You won’t be able to stay in business is you don’t have a pessimistic worry-wart looking out for your vulnerabilities, a greedy lawyer to look for ways to take out enemies, an arrogant creative who has a vision, an awkward nerd who knows how to code, and the obnoxious salesman who sells the product.

By all means don’t invite these people into your social circle, but as a businessperson, you can benefit from their selective focus. Just remember, when you drive by a carnival and you see all the potential for fun while the person next to you can only see the speck of dirt on the window, you can now clean your window and get a better view of the fun.

Put your board together in a way where you have as many different viewpoints as possible so that all vulnerabilities are addressed & and the most informed & centered decision will be made.

I hope you enjoyed. Would love to engage.

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