If you focus and stare at the plus sign below for 15-20 seconds, you’ll notice the purple dots eventually disappear (Troxler’s Fading).
Intense focus is good. To do anything amazing you need an inordinate amount of focus. But with that focus, you can lose sight of everything going on around you.
You can be a perfect captain with the exact heading and shore in sight, but that doesn’t matter if your ship has leaks that will sink it before it gets to the destination.
With your dedicated focus, make sure you step back occasionally and reexamine the obvious.
Ask: Why are we doing this? For whom? And what benefit?
At one start-up I worked at, it turned out we were paying about $600-800/month too much for hosting. The hosting decision was made before the more technical people started working there. As things were moving so fast, no one really questioned the hosting situation since we were all focused on shipping our work out the door and bringing in new revenue. It wasn’t until I became frustrated by the slow manual install process for WordPress that we discovered the leak.
You need to be extremely focused to do great work. But don’t forget to step out of focus to ensure your ship isn’t sinking.
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