“Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life,” Ive said. “And the thing with focus is, it’s not this thing you aspire to, or you decide on Monday, ‘You know, I’m going to be focused.’ It is a every minute, ‘Why are we talking about this? This is what we’re working on.’ You can achieve so much when you truly focus.”
He added: “What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you end up saying no to it because you’re focusing on something else.“
Jonathan Ive on what he learned about focus from Steve Jobs.
I have never been good at this, always distracted by another shiny thing but something about the purity of this kind of focus has a deep, visceral appeal. Not sure why.
This is the first in a short series looking at what focus means and how to get more of it.
Thoughts for today:
Focus is less about choosing one thing to concentrate on and much more about saying no to 100 other things.
And it’s not an added extra. If everything is a priority then nothing is a priority.
