4 Life Changing Reasons To Develop Focus

I am sure, we all know that focus is important. But, what kinds of kind of difference could it really make in your life? That is why I put this list of four life changing effects from having focus.

1. Your Work Will Become Incredibly Valuable

“The ability to create Deep Work is becoming incredibly valuable and rare ” — Cal Newport

For over the last 25 years, our economy has shifted. When the industrial revolution reached America, business was all about efficiency. How do we produce more widgets? Men and women were paid in exchange for time. However, today we don’t exchange time for money. Today we exchange money for information, in what Cal Newport calls an information economy.

How does focus make your work incredibly valuable in this information economy? Newport describes two “core abilities” that if one has, they will thrive. They are: “the ability to master hard things” and “the ability to produce at an elite level in terms of quality and speed.” See Cal Newport’s Book Deep Work for more information.

When you learn to focus with intensity, you are creating an experience know as flow or in Newport’s words, Deep Work. Studies have found that in this flow state is where the optimal level of performance begins.

Professional athletes experience it when they are in the middle of a game. You probably have experience it before to. You forgot about everything that was going on and you were able to only think of what was at hand? Wouldn’t you want that all the time? Then develop focus.

2. You’ll Learn More

As I said earlier, in addition to producing at an elite level, Newport has described the “ability to master hard things”, as crucial to succeeding in our modern economy. Once again, this where developing focus can help.

There was study conducted that was interested in what distinguished memory athletes, men and women who memorize the nonsensical things like the order of a randomly shuffled deck of cards, from other people. They that memory athletes didn’t have any significant difference in measurable memory, but in attention.

It seems pretty obvious. Of course, you are going to learn more if you focus on something. However, what I take away from this isn’t just that we should pay attention what we read, but that we need to develop the focus to dive our attention into a single thing. We must be able to direct our attention away from what doesn’t matter to the things that do.

You might not need to memorize 52 cards at will but you will need to learn new skills and information to keep up in the information age. Today, everything is trying to grab your attention. If you can focus, you will be able to learn complicated information and skill at a pace that meets the demands of this changing world.

The first to reasons primarily deal with your career. These last two deals with things that I believe to more important than a job or social status. Things that are less tangible.

3. You’ll have better Relationships

Let’s face it, people are complicated. We say what we don’t mean. We are sometimes the worst to those we love most. We have feelings that don’t understand half the time. We react to things unnecessary. Then we take this and we try to live with another human being. That sounds like it is set up to fail.

The great thing about being human, is that we get to communicate. Communication is how we resolve issues. It is how we get to a place of understanding. It is also how we show love and give thanks. Communication is more than just our words, but our actions. And we can communicate a lot to those we love.

Focus helps us to have better relationships, not because it is an easy solution, but because it has the power to communicate love, care and devotion. When you are with your family, BE WITH YOUR FAMILY. When you’re on a date with lover, be present with them. In simpler terms, wherever you are, be there.

There is no way to really measure a good relationship, but when can begin to focus more on those you care about, everything that you define as a “good relationship”, will manifest itself, because YOU showed interest and care for them.

4. You’ll Find Purpose and Joy

What counts is not so much whether a person actually achieves what she has set out to do; rather, it matters whether effort has been expended to reach the goal, instead of being diffused or wasted.

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi summarizes his research in his book Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Performance. Csikszentmihalyi argues that it is not in leisure that find happiness, but our greatest joy is found in the optimal performance of flow (as we described earlier).

He continues on stating that flow not only can make us happy, but it also the power to get us through adversity and to make meaning of our meaningless lives. He gives several examples of people who went blind, lost all ability to move their legs and even holocaust victims, who by shifting their focus from their situation to something they strongly believed in or a goal, they found joy in their suffering. Some even reported those moments as the best day in their life.

My favorite example is that of Victor Frankl. He was a holocaust victim, who latter wrote the bestseller A Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a psychiatrist, and before he was taken he was working on a method of therapy known as logotherapy or therapy through meaning. He doesn’t hesitate to state the horror that he went through in the concentration camps. Yet, he says that the thing that got him through, was finding meaning in his suffering. He saw the concentration camp as a testing ground for logotherapy. He decided to focus on what his suffering could do for others, instead of himself.

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