The Most Underrated Skill Of 2025 - Focus

Imagine a world where you had plans, and you actually followed through on them

Imagine a world where your work got done on time without distractions.

Imagine a world where you didn't feel stressed and anxious like you were wasting your life but instead felt accomplished and satisfied with the progress you were making.

Imagine if that world was your life — what would that be like?

The reason why your life is not like that is because…

You are not focused

It's not just you, everyone is struggling with focus. You are just not seeing their struggles.

In 2025 focus is gone, stolen, and replaced by a world full of distractions.

You live in an environment where limbic hijacking is common and generates billions of dollars.

An infinite stream of entertainment, junk food and online shipping is at your fingertips. Anything that gives you that easy dopamine is readily available.

The generations that grew up with these distractions have become sedated.

You don't have to feel boredom

You don't have to feel discomfort

You don't have to feel anything unpleasant because whenever you feel that resistance stir up inside of you, there's always an easy out.

Limbic hijacking tricks your brain into expecting you will get the thing you want immediately. Your brain doesn't understand that instant gratification is bad for your development. Your brain only sees the desires, triggering motivation to get it and responds when it gets the reward shortly after.

There is no work. There is no struggle. There is no resistance.

Instant gratification made you impatient and fragile.

The quality of your life is defined by your ability to identify targets and be persistent while pursuing them. The bigger the goal, the longer the time horizons and the more time and effort it will take.

But whenever you don't allow yourself to feel pain and desires, identifying what you want is impossible.

You need to find focus. So, let me introduce you to …

Lens' law of focus

Which is something I totally made up.

Let's think about focus like you are using a camera.

What is the main job of a photographer or videographer?

It's to have the thing you want to capture in focus.

If your subject is out of focus, it is blurry, but if it is in focus, it is clear.

Focus is clarity. The reason why you struggle to focus is because you haven't created sufficient clarity.

Every camera lens has a focal length. Low focal lengths zoom out and give you a wide shot, while high focal lengths zoom in and give you a close-up. Both are necessary to create clarity.

A big mistake people make is believing that focus is only used on a high focal length lens. It gets you up close with the subject to see it clearly in detail. Everything around the subject gets blurred.

Focus is locked in. Concentration is high. You are doing the thing and being productive, free from distraction.

What a lot of people miss is, why and how did you select this subject to bring into focus?

An observation I have seen in my life is I am more likely to get distracted and procrastinate if I need to make a lot of in the moment decisions.

umming and arging about what I should do. Making decisions requires a lot of energy.

So if what I need to do isn't very clear, I need use energy to make that decision. This is problematic because the default is nearly always the lower resistance activities or distractions.

You create that clarity by zooming out and getting perspective of where you are and where you want to go. You need to put a wider lens on the camera.

Getting perspective is not about being productive and doing the thing. People often have the misconception that your brain is only actively engaged when you are working.

In fact, when you are doing nothing, when you give your mind space to contemplate and explore, your brain is still working at full speed.

It creates new connections and pathways for you to explore. That is where the best insights, ideas, and creativity lie. This is where focus starts.

When was the last time you gave your mind space to freely wander like this? If you struggle answer that, it is because you have been sedated with modern distraction.

Distractions take your subject out of focus and cause you to lose perspective.

People live their lives like an out of focus camera. The details are blurry. There is no plan. There is no intention. Their attention gets captured by the lowest resistance distraction.

Perspective creates clarity. Clarity creates intention. Intention creates focus.

Steps to find focus in 2025

What does this actually look like in practice?

I was distracted more than I would like last year in 2024. I didn't make the progress I wanted to make in my goals. Obiviously I do not want this year to be a repeat of that.

Here are the steps I have found to be most useful to create clarity and find more focus. I plan to lock these habits in this year.

1. Get perspective

Over the Christmas break I zoomed out as far as I could.

I rewrote the vision I have for my future. The life I want to live.

I rewrote the anti-vision for my future. The life i do not want to live.

It's important to recognise you are not only moving towards something but also away from something.

This gives you persepective of where you are and where you want to go. But you won't be able to write your vision and anti vision in one go.

You will need to add it as you go through life. As you experience pain, wrestle with your demons and begin to work it out, you will see what you don't want and what you do want. It's a continual process of reflection that you need to create space for.

Now you must create clarity.

1. Create clarity

Clarity is created when you zoom in on the landscape of your mind.

I wrote where I want to be in the 12 months for the main areas of my life. These are my 12 month goals.

Zoom in a little further.

I wrote the milestonesI want to achieve in the next 3 months to be on track with these yearly goals.

The camera is focusing in and you can start to see the targets in more detail.

1. Set intention

Writing down targets for the 3 months means nothing unless you form an intentional plan of how you intend to reach them.

You need a plan.

Zoom in a little further.

I brainstormed the tasks I need to complete every week for these projects for the next 3 months.

I wrote down the most important — these are my weekly targets I must hit.

The weekly targets are broken into the most 1 - 2 important tasks for each day of the week.

The trick here is to find the sweet spot of what you can do per week.

• Too little and you will become bored and lose focus.

• Too much and you become overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious.

The optimal experience is in between. That is where flow is found.

I will be trying to do the same tasks on the same day at the same time each week. This step was my downfall last year. I was too flexible. I didn't create the neccessary habits.

Structure enables repetition and repetition is how habits are formed.

1. Find Focus

The power of focus is that distractions become less distracting.

The subject is in focus and it comes from a place of meaningful perspective. Your attention is naturally drawn to what is in focus and the rest is blurred.

Those were the best weeks of my last year. Finding focus was not so hard.

Maintaining perspective, however, is difficult. It requires creating time for an unoccupied mind. I didn't do enough of that last year. Instead, distractions crept in, occupied that mental space and reduced clarity.

A target for this year is to find more time for rest. More hours of unoccupied contemplation. Because if distractions are less desirable in hours of 'boredom' perspective and clarity will be maintained. And focus will follow

The main idea from this post that I hope you take away is focus isn't just about concentration and productivtity. There is a balance between that and stepping back opening up the lens to a wider focus free from distraction.

That's all for today. Find your focus

Josh