September 15, 2015 — A Day without a focus.

3 min readSep 15, 2015

Last week I had a rather interesting conversation with a girl named Amanda.

She was a great blend of fun spirit and honest person to chat. At one moment we stumbled upon this topic of being 23 years old and being 30 years old. We both are still 23.

Just 7 years of difference, but as I feel these 7 years will come like lightning. So naturally my eyes somehow go towards articles from 30 year olds about their thoughts on past. So one of these was from Nic Haralambous who builds startups and is an ambition man. He basically shared his advices that he would give to himself when he was 20 years old.

What me and Amanda ended up talking about was knowing what you want from your career and life. I love to talk with people about these questions, because it releases this essential energy to usually boring conversations about the weather or other people — the latter is the worst, but I’m guilty of that too.

One thing led to another and I ended up sharing the story I love. It’s a story about dedicated athlete and his pure vision, which is framed with laser focus. He knows how to say no. When he is asked to go out for drinks — he politely says “guys are you kidding me I have an important practice tomorrow”. Everyone kind of laughs at him, because he is not professional, “he is not serious” they think. However, his attitude is dead sharp and sort of religious.

There is no way around it — he knows his focus.

On the other hand, if he says yes. Do he really has discipline against that goal? Just to make sure, let’s not get political here, I don’t mean that focused persons are saying no to their friends and not enjoying life. What I’m saying is that most of the times they do. And the best part is that whenever he decides to give his time, it’s really valuable. This time is so scarce that everything that he does outside his focus, go up in value.

So there’s the vision, the focus and discipline.

Vision is the hardest part to get around. It takes time to dig deep and own your vision.
Focus goes away fast, sort of like when strings on acoustic guitar goes out of tune. The vision is the tuner.
Discipline is all about saying “No”. Super easy way to check this — set a timer to 15 mins, then check how many time something or someone tried to interrupt you. Every time that happens and you stick to your discipline you know that you're saying “No” to everything else.

Yup, this is it — Thanks for reading. See u soon!