Focus, focus, don’t focus

I used to think that focus was the most important skill I could develop to build the business. And looking back, until I stopped messing around with every new opportunity that came my way, lack of focus was a dumb thing to be held back by.

Now I realise there are three parts to focus to, er, focus on which I’ll call Mad-Bastard Focus, Daily Grind-o-Focus and Out-Of-Focus.

Starting with my definition:

Focus is the ability to shine a questioning, critical light on all distractions and decide whether they move me toward, or away from the particular goal upon which I am supposed to be fixated.

Mad Bastard Focus

This is the Thing, the Thing that drives you to work.

It might be a financial goal, an audacious market position something far less interesting. Whatever it is, it needs to be clear and stuck in your head, otherwise you can’t ask yourself – does this stuff I’m about to do, opportunity I’m about to chase or call I’m about to put off move me towards or away from the Thing.

Once you get Mad Bastard Focus, life gets easier. Everytime someone suggests you should think about taking over that struggling coffee shop at the end of the road it’s a simple matter to run it through your Mad Bastard Focus Filter and reject instead of pontificating / round-bushing to avoid embarrasment.

Daily Grind-o-Focus

Of course, the Thing is immaterial unless you can actually sit down and do some work. I find the Pomodoro Technique (work for 25 minutes, break for 5, ignore everything except the job in hand) and GTD (fancy way of organising lists by project / context.. excuse to buy Moleskines / Mac Software) work for me. More another day.

Get Out-Of-Focus

Once you’ve got your Mad Bastard Focus on the Thing, and you’ve managed to actually do some work when you sit down instead of rolling from news site to blog to in-tray to coffee machine and wheels are in motion, you need to switch a different bit of your brain on. Notably, the right temporal lobe. That’s where the Eurekas! happen…

For me, it’s driving whilst listening to ebooks through one earbud which does it (seriously, exactly that). Some people swear by showers, meditation and even brainstorming. But for me, getting into the zone stuck behind a lorry on the M6 seems to bring all my best inspiration and Eureka! moments.

And those are the moments that have really taken a simple business idea and turned it into something brilliant.

The PLoS Biology site has an interesting study on brain activity during “Insight” Moments which gives a spot of scientifc basis to my motorway driving strategy developments (it gets pretty heavy pretty fast if you’re not used to reading academic text, but nonetheless it’s fascinating). It seems that Eureka / Insight / Aha! moments spark of a unique mental process in the brain. Pictures taken of the grey matter at the precise moment of solving a problem by insight showed activity in the right temporal lobe of the brain (same bit that processes jokes). If someone else gives you the solution, you get a different area of the brain firing up with a “Doh!” experience instead.

And, it seems:

“Solvers usually cannot report the processing that enables them to reinterpret the problem and overcome the impasse”.

Perhaps in here somewhere lies the secret of entrepreneurs.. maybe you’re genetically coded to be one by an ability to sporn Insight moments again and again…

But how do we make Eurekas in our out-of-focus world.. we can’t be spending hours on the motorway every time we’ve got a problem to solve..

Google led me to an ancient article online at Inc by Alison Stein Wellner entitled “Perfect Brainstorm” lead me to Paul Paulus at the University of Texas’ Group Creativity Lab. Paulus has conducted thousands of brainstorming sessions and figured out what’s going on. All very interesting, but requires other people for the group dynamic.. so no-go there.

There are lots of posts about being relaxed to have a Eureka moment, but I wanted to know why being in a particular zone seems to spur more ideas. For that we need psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Dr K and his team busily studied volunteers grappling with word puzzles, measuring their brain patterns. They found three things going on – people who sweated and analysed their way through a problem, people who were just stuck and couldn’t go anywhere and lucky folks who just “got” the answer but didn’t know where from.

But here’s the weird bit.. one third of a second before the inspired people got their inspiration, the brain flashed gamma waves from the right hemisphere.. it had the answer before the conscious volunteer… Robert Lee Holz writes about the whole thing in “A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight“. He also notes that people with a positive mood are more likely to experience Eurekas.

So it seems to provoke a Eureka, the best we can do is to adjust our mental position in relation to the environment, suitably relax / distract the consicous mind, tickle the brain with cross references and random thoughts and think positively..

I’m off for a drive.