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At the end of my essay I wrote that my problem with focus (and a lack of it) is mostly that it’s a problem of self-deception. But I think it goes further: self-deception in general is what differentiates effective operators from shitty operators.

2:54 AM · Oct 20, 2022Twitter Web App

There are many forms that self-deception takes on. For instance: - We have product market fit but we can’t grow because we suck at sales/marketing/X. (But actually there’s no way in hell we’d use the product if we didn’t make it ourselves).

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- My co-founder, X, is a little difficult to work with, but we can work around their flaws. (But actually X is single-handedly holding back the company in their critical role Y and they need to be fired or sidelined as soon as possible.)

I think that the skill tree of operations is mostly going from “letting self-deception be a thing” to “being absolutely ruthless about lying to ourselves about anything”. The tension here is that you need to be a bit of a dreamer and an optimist at the early stages.

Consequently, it’s really common to see focus issues amongst early founder types. Whereas folk like me, who mostly suck at the early stage but are good executors, tend to lean towards focus and not lying to ourselves.

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Jul 18

The biggest interesting tension at the early stage seems to me to be - not lying to yourself (always a deadly thing in business) - having conviction that there’s something in your current idea (which is terrible and thus requires lying to yourself)

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(I’m over-generalising here; I know it’s possible to be good at both. Jobs is an existence proof of that.) But it helps to know where our biases lie. My bias is certainly towards focus/seeing reality clearly, which doesn’t lend itself as well to being kind to fragile new ideas.

One other thing that I couldn’t express as clearly in the essay — talking about focus is hard because it essentially boils down to judgment. Sometimes it’s right to focus. And sometimes it’s right to distribute attention across a few initiatives. Which is right? Hard to say.

And it’s not just a simple matter of “yes fills time, no makes time.” In a business context focus requires judgment about a set of initiatives and a set of goals. Focus implies ruthlessly ignoring everything that doesn’t contribute to a goal.

Ok I’m going to stop this thread here because so many of these thoughts are not fleshed out properly. I’m struggling to express something I feel keenly, that I’m starting to put into practice consistently and that I can recognise in others, but I find difficult to talk about.