Hey, everyone. Welcome to non trivial. I'm your host, Sean McClure. We are often told that if we want to be good at something, we should focus more. But a single real world task has multiple facets that must be honed. And you cannot learn those facets from the task itself. They must come from other areas of life. In this episode, argue that to be good at any one thing, we should do many things. Let's get started. D*** to focus.
If we want to get good at something, we a number of things that we might want to do. It's easy to get distracted. And if you want to be good at a particular thing, then we're told that we need to focus on it. We need to spend more time on just that thing. We need to kind of block out the distractions. We need to take it seriously. And we've been told this kind of message, obviously throughout our schooling, right.
Even though we have a number of courses, let's say, that we're taking when it comes to doing homework or preparing for an exam especially, we're told that we need to focus. So maybe go to the library, go to a place where it's quiet, choose that environment, kind of isolate yourself and really focus your mind on that particular topic. And the better that you're able to do this almost as a kind of discipline, the better you're going to do the thing.
And as we take this into everyday life, this message is still very much alive and well, and it's kind of stuck with us. And we hear it and see it all the time. We're kind of encouraged to get more focus in our life. We have to choose what's important and focus on that thing. Especially modern life is just filled with so much variety, so much stimuli that it can be hard to focus.
And so that we're told to try to find a way to kind of remove the noise, get away from it all, or just get better discipline or do whatever it takes to just apply more focus to your life. You shouldn't have too many things on the go. That to do list should be much smaller, all this kind of stuff, right? And obviously a lot of that makes sense. I mean, if you really need to home in on something, you do need to lend the majority of your cognition toward that task, right?
You need to focus the mind. You need to think about it. You need to spend time with it. We know that if we have an absolute ton of things to get done that this can be very distracting and it can kind of feel like our lives are getting pulled in too many different directions and we lose that focus and we kind of lose that sense of identity. Who are we? What are we meant to do? And all that. And so I think most of us would agree that a certain amount of focus is a good thing.
But I do take issue with this kind of message of it's all about focus and that you're always only supposed to have a few things on the go. That's not real life, right? A real life is full of variation, full of possibility, full of randomness and happenstance. And anyone who is partaking in the economy, in today's world, in the real world, and not isolating themselves to any great extent, anyone like that, which is like 99% of us, presumably have a lot of things to do.
And you can try to fight against that. You can try to remove yourself from that reality. You can try to isolate yourself, try to go live in a quieter place or whatever it is. But the end of the day, we're all hyperconnected via the Internet, and there's a lot of demands placed on us.
And if we want to do anything worthwhile in this life, we have to interact with people and there's different expectations, and we got to produce a set of outputs, and we're expecting outputs from others, and we want to be entertained and we want to enjoy ourselves. And there's just a lot going on at any given time, and that's real life.
I kind of take issue with this notion of, well, we're really just supposed to focus, and we're supposed to get a very reduced, kind of refined list of things that we work on. And the more we get that, the better off we're going to be, the more content we're going to be. I don't think that's really true because I think that separates you too much from the real world, and it's just not the real world.
Anything that is counter to the complexity of life is going to cause you problems because complexity is always going to win, right? Life is complex, and it's not something to avoid. We're kind of brought up with this notion of avoiding complexity, right? We don't want complicated lives. We want predictable lives. We want a good level of determinism there. We want stability, we want structure. And I'm not here to tell you that's all bad. It's not.
I mean, I've had episodes on the importance of structure, right? But I've also argued how minimal that structure needs to be because we need to embrace the beautiful chaos of life, right? What do we do with this, this notion that we're told to focus? Focus?
Well, I'm going to argue that actually a good number of us could benefit from a good deal of distraction in our life and that we should actually be taking on quite a few tasks because that's, one, commensurate with reality, with complexity, with the real world. But two, I'm going to argue that it's highly beneficial to do that, especially if you do it the right way, that it's a good thing to embrace many different tasks and have a lot of things on the go. Everything is a dosage.
Obviously, if you take that to the extreme, it's going to be problematic because you will get pulled in too many directions. Just like if you take structure and predictability too dramatic or too extreme, that's going to cause problems. Your life will be dull. There will be nothing new. You won't be creating anything, and I would argue you would never find contentment under pure structure. Right?
But we do need a good deal of distraction and aimless wandering and more to the point in this episode, a number of things that you're doing at any given time. I think we should be doing a lot of things. Okay. And this makes more sense in terms of just kind of the tractability of the problems. I mean, as we go through life, we have to solve problems on a regular basis. We're trying to come up with solutions to things, we're building things, we're creating.
And really what we're doing is we're just solving problems. And the way problems get solved is through diversity, is through variation. We know this, right? We got to work with people. There's got to be a range of ideas. You never have the information that you need to solve the problem up front. We know we have to kind of embrace the wisdom of the crowd, at least to a decent extent. We can't do it on our own.
I mean, the entire notion that human intelligence is something just contained within one human skull in that individualistic sense is highly problematic. It's just not what we see. Intelligence is a very social phenomenon, right? And so even though we're often told to focus, to kind of narrow things down and really just put our efforts onto, let's say, the task at hand, I would argue that, one, this isn't really how problems are solved.
That's not when we look at the tractability, whether you want to talk about this mathematically, computationally, just looking at how society works, any type of kind of model that you apply to, that we see the benefit of variation right, again, within a certain dosage. But you need the diversity. You need different things going on. And the reason that is, I would argue, is because you get this beautiful cross pollination between the different tasks that you're doing at any given time.
So let's say you take your life well, even my own life, right? Maybe I've got like a couple of podcasts on the go. Maybe I'm writing a book. Maybe I'm trying to run a business. Maybe I'm doing something over here and on and on. And if you really take the list of all the things, there's a lot of things going on, a lot of tasks. And sometimes it's kind of tempting to be like, oh, I'm doing too many things. Maybe I need to narrow this down.
But the reality is that there's this beautiful cross pollination between the different things that I do when I'm working on a podcast. I'm learning something that helps with the business, which allows me to learn something which might help with a book I'm writing or an article I'm writing or some research I'm doing or whatever it is, on and on exercise even. Right. Anything that you do in life contains truth to it, right? It has core patterns to it. And those patterns are universally shared.
If they're really fundamental and they're really true, then they are universally shared among many other tasks that you could be doing. And so I would argue that it's quite detrimental to just focus on one or even just a few tasks because and here's really the point, the information that you need to do a single task well is not contained within the task itself. Okay? Some of it, obviously, is.
If I want to become good at, I don't know, writing blog articles or something, or playing tennis or golfing, obviously doing that thing again and again is going to be important, right? But to only do that thing, I think would be highly detrimental because it strips away the kind of multifaceted aspect of any given task. Any task that you do has what I sometimes call high dimensionality to it. Right? There's as many facets that have to be figured out on any given task. Right.
If you're going to be a good writer, it's not just like how to use words or how to put them together. There's obviously there's some narrative structure there. There's bringing your authentic self to it. If you're going to play tennis, it's not just swinging. There's different angles and momentum, and there's a whole mental game there. There's a psychology there. How do you calm down when things start getting heated? And on and on and on.
I'm sure if you talk to a professional tennis player, just how intricate and convoluted and complex that kind of situation is. And you can't learn those complexities just by focusing on the task itself. And yet that's kind of what we're told, right? We're told, if you want to be good at the thing, just go do that thing and do it again and again and just focus the mind. Focus the mind. If you want to be good at mathematics, just do math. Just do math. You got to focus. Stop getting distracted.
Don't go do the other things. Don't go also be into theater and also be into reading, I don't know, fiction books and all this. Or maybe just try to minimize that because you got to spend the time on the thing. But what I'm arguing is that to get good at any one thing is not so much about spending more time on that thing, although obviously, to some extent, that is true.
I would say even more it's about allowing yourself to tap into many other tasks that will share some core universal truths with that one thing you're trying to get good at. Right? So to learn the good tennis playing, there is something in reading the fiction book and maybe going to theater and maybe, I don't know, public speaking or learning math or something that would on the surface, obviously seems to have nothing to do with tennis.
But there are patterns there that are going to teach you something how to think, how to reason, how to have a certain psychology going into the game, and even the muscle memory. Maybe if we're talking about tennis or writing, how to structure. You can learn the structure of writing from things in podcasting, from things in public speaking, from things in mathematics, from things in art, whatever it is. And you have to choose the things that you're interested in.
But we will be naturally inclined to do a lot of different things in life because that is life. And I'm saying not to shy away from that. I'm saying that by embracing a lot of different tasks and realizing the power of it, we will tap into the information needed to do any one of our tasks particularly well. So quite literally, if you had like seven things on the go, each of those seven things could be highly they will benefit from doing seven things, right?
Any one of those seven things will benefit from doing the seven things because those seven things are talking to each other, right? There's this cross pollination of ideas, and that's really how it works. And you need to shift the context around. I've talked about before how the things that are most true are the things that are most invariant. And the only way to know what is invariant which doesn't change, is to notice that it's not changing when everything else does.
So you need to have that kind of flux, that variation difference in your life, have a lot of different tasks, and notice that as you do all those different things, what are the parts that don't change? And those parts that don't change are the most true, and those true things apply to any one of your tasks. Okay, so this is obviously like a complex system, right? Your individual life has many different tasks on the go, and you could model that kind of as, let's say, a network.
This is a common way to model any kind of situation or system that is complex. And all that really says is we're going to think of it as basically a bunch of balls with lines connecting the balls, right? That's really what it is. So if this was a cloud of gas, you could say, okay, the atoms in those gas are going to be like little balls that are bouncing into each other, right?
If this is a herd of sheep, and you want to look at the dynamics of how sheep seem to herd and form whatever incident, those would just be like balls with lines between them, right? You create the abstraction when you build a model. And a very common way to do that is to model complex situations as a network. And a network is really just a bunch of balls with lines between them, and the lines are the interactions between the balls, right?
And so, presumably, if you can kind of model that correctly, you can know something about the complex system or situation because you understand the balls and their interactions. Okay? Now, the reason why I'm bringing that up is one way you can kind of model a complex situation or system as these balls and lines is to think about a property of a network called entropy. I've talked about entropy before. Just think of it essentially as how disordered or random a system is.
And I know some people get caught up in the semantics, and some scientists say, well, it's not exactly disorder, because, yada, look, it essentially is disorder for all intents and purposes. It's just the state of kind of randomness or uncertainty or unpredictability or disordered mess that a system is in. Okay? You're not wrong if that's the take you have on it. So that's entropy, okay? The property of entropy.
So if you take any situation, the herds of sheep, right, a group of people, the atoms in a gas, a bunch of people in a theater, someone screams Fire. And they all try to kind of get out the door, whatever it is, and you're trying to look at the dynamics of how people are doing and how crowds function, you can model that as a network, and a property you can assign to that network is entropy, which is just how disordered this is.
There's a number of reasons why you might want to do that, but you can give that a number, right, how disordered that is. Well, what you can find in these models is that the higher the entropy in a complex system, a network, the more disordered it is. That comes from having more lines connected between the balls, right? Which means there's more connectivity and interaction between the different nodes or the balls of the system.
So if we're talking about a bunch of sheep and those are the balls of the system, the more those sheeps are kind of interacting with each other, the more random it is. That makes sense, right, the more kind of disordered it is. And if we take that system and we say there are a lot less lines between the balls, whatever those little agents are, the sheep, the people, the gas, atoms, whatever, then we say it's more structured. It tends to be more predictable, kind of more deterministic, right?
It's more obvious what it is. The entropy is lower. Okay, so why am I talking about this? Well, the system or the situation that I'm talking about in this episode, we have a lot of different tasks, let's say, on the go. So that's our situation, right? And each task could be like a ball in the system. And what I'm arguing for is that if you have a good number of tasks on the go, it's really beneficial to have those tasks talking to each other.
In fact, that's the benefit that I've been saying, that if you have a lot of things on the go, those tasks essentially quote, unquote, talk to each other, meaning you're finding connections between them. They have these similarities. And the way we do that is to typically we find analogies between things, right? Like I'm doing this over in the podcast and then your mind makes these kind of analogical connections to something that you're doing in your business or something like that, right.
Even though on the surface these things don't really have anything in common, I'm noticing some kind of deeper structure in the one task and that could actually benefit that other task. And then I go and do something in the business and I build upon that same structure. So it doesn't really matter what task you're doing. You're kind of building at some level, you're always doing the same thing, right?
The ultimate task, which doesn't really have a label or a name for it, but whatever it is that's shared among all your tasks, that's the thing that's being improved. Right. So the reason why I'm talking about this if we look at complex situations and we model it as a network and we show that the disordered state or the entropy gets higher when you have more connections between things, this makes sense because you can see the benefit of having a kind of randomness or disorder in your life.
In other words, it's not really beneficial to focus everything down into very few tasks because what you need is that randomness. You need the distraction. I think we could all benefit from a decent deal of distraction because the more of that you have, the more things that are kind of in flux, the more information you're sharing that you get, the more information sharing you get in the network, the more any one task you have in that system is going to benefit.
So imagine it's like a ball, right? So if we have seven tasks on the go, it's kind of like seven balls, right? And obviously it's much more high dimensional. That because every task is interacting with the environment. But just for simplicity, it's like seven balls, and we want those seven balls talking to each other. And the way that you get those seven balls talking to each other is to make sure that you have those seven balls on the go.
You don't say, well, yeah, there's seven things I'm interested in, but I'm only going to do two. No, you do the seven things or the ten things or the 20 things. You have lots of things on the go at any given time. And that's going to increase the disorder. That's going to increase the kind of flux that your system is in. But because of that you get the information sharing.
And this is something that we know, this is how systems work, and we want to try to kind of maximize that information sharing. Now, that's not necessarily the same as saying, let's maximize the disorder. Obviously I'm going to do 100 things and your life will just go in all directions and you'll have no focus at all. I'm not arguing for no focus, but I would argue I am arguing that the majority of people probably have a bit too much focus, believe it or not.
You might feel like you're not being particularly productive, but it might be because you actually have too much focus. You might assume, well, no, I think it's because I don't have enough focus. I think I need to really sit down and take the time. But if you notice you're never doing that, it's probably because you're missing the motivation to do it. You're missing a lot of those other pieces of information that overlap with the multifaceted nature of that single thing you want to do.
In other words, you need to increase the entropy. You need to do more things because you'll get the motivation to do task A from doing task B. You'll get the information you need to do task B from task C and vice versa and back and forth. You need more lines between the balls of your system. This is something that we know about how complex systems work.
We know that information sharing happens because of that flux, because of having more nodes and increasing the entropy of the situations you're in. Okay? So I think you should do many things to be good at any one thing, even though there might be some ultimate thing you want to be good at, which is often true. Or maybe two or three, like really select things. There's nothing wrong with that.
I think that should, in some sense, be the focus of your life, but you're not going to achieve it by only doing those few things. You have to breathe life into what you do. You have to tap into information from a variety of sources that on the surface might look nothing like the few things that you really want to focus on but are obviously still things you're interested in. So do a lot of things and let them die off naturally.
You might have 20 things on the go, but ten of those might you're interested in them for a month and then they kind of fall away and that's fine. And you invite new stuff again, everything is in flux. Everything keeps happening the way nature does. Right? And so I just want to end this episode giving something a little kind of practical because you might say, okay, I think that makes sense. Let's just do a quick recap. I said, look, we're always told to focus, focus.
And when we're not being productive, I think the tendency is to try to focus more on the few things or the one thing that we really want to do. And I'm arguing that that's not really commensurate with what we know about problem solving. And if you model a complex system, you could actually look at the amount of disorder in that system.
We can see that the disorder is quite beneficial because you can show mathematically if you want, but even just and sense, if you think about it, it's getting more interactions between those balls, right? More things are kind of in flux and there's more information sharing and that's what we want to tap into. We got to tap into that information sharing between the balls of our system, which in this case are the different tasks that we're working on.
So I think you need to do many things to be good at any one thing. I think instead of focusing on the focus, you should focus on the ability to tap into the natural variation of life, right, of the real world. But I think a practical a way to do that because you might say, okay, well, I'm just going to go do a bunch of things then and say, well, where is dose makes the poison, right? So where is that dosage?
Like, how many things should I do and how do I know if the information is really being shared? Well, I think you have to look, this is kind of like the tangible lever you can pull to make this a reality. You always got to look for the universality. Universality means look for the things that are shared among all your tasks and that's the real thing you're trying to get better at. And that's something that's going to get updated all the time.
And you probably don't really have a label for it, right? That that universally shared property among all the different things you're doing doesn't really have a name. There's no category you can put it into. It's kind of almost a bit ephemeral. Ephemeral. And yet it's the most important thing. Okay, so if I'm doing a bunch of podcasts, there's something structurally happening that seems to, let's say, work good with podcasts.
I also notice that kind of structure seems to lend well to the way maybe I manage people or do something in my business or build software. Maybe. I also notice this is something similar that's happening with the artwork, maybe that I'm creating or something. Remember I talked about that pencil sketching and you notice the high levels of abstraction and then you add the details. Well, that's a property that doesn't just belong to art. You see that in business. You can see that in podcasting.
You could see that in writing blogs or writing books, whatever, playing tennis, right? Whatever it is, you will see these same patterns. As long as you're always looking for that sharedness, that universality, then it will help you choose what tasks to work on, and it will help the cross pollination between the tasks, and it'll make you more comfortable that, yes, I'm going to go read this book on fiction, some fantasy novel or something. You might say, oh, I don't have time for that.
Come on, I've got to do. But you know that because you're looking for shared properties, that that's not a waste of time. You know that maybe watching that movie or reading that book or playing that game or writing this blog post, even though it has nothing to do with your business, you know, it's going to help. The business is going to help. Your podcast is going to help your tennis game, whatever it is that you're interested in, because you're always looking for the universality.
You're looking for the shared properties between things, and over time, I think you'll get the right number of tasks and the right things that you should be working on, but it will be highly varied, and it won't be a waste of time. It's like going for a long walk. Sometimes it seems hard to justify. You know, you like the walk. You know, you like to contemplate, but it's hard to justify.
But if you understand the universality between your tasks and you understand the benefit of doing many different things and of inviting the entropy into your life, then you'll know that long walk is not a waste of time or that novel that you're reading or that movie that you're watching or that tennis game you went and played or the golf game or whatever it is. You know, it's not a waste of time because it is related to those other things in your life, and they all benefit from each other.
Okay, so that's it for this episode, as always, thanks so much for listening. Until the next one. Take care. Sham SA. Nancy sam it.