Attention! Focus.
#2. Lessons from life and death. Attention as our starting point. Charting our course.
Hello and welcome back. Another week, another chance to begin again.
Let’s get started.
Last week, I introduced myself and our company. TL;DR - We’re a two-man investment team conducting research and experiments to understand how technology evolves and impacts critical systems.
Today, we set the target coordinates for our first explorations.
To build on first principles, we need to drill down to fundamental truths. Once we have an axiomatic base, we can apply logic to expand and consider implications at the limit.
In this post, I’ll argue that your attention is fundamentally the most valuable resource.
Where you focus your attention (actively or passively) will come to define you, and you are capable of more than you know - both personally and professionally.
Lessons from life and death.
Life and death experiences are rare moments that fundamentally shift your reality and outlook in a short time.
I think of them as perspective shocks.
In my life, they have provided clarity that continues to guide my focus and motivation and impact how I structure my life and work daily.
Here’s what I learned from the death of a parent and the birth of a child…
Death taught me what matters most.
Losing a parent, or anyone you love, it reframes everything.
The everyday stresses, doubts, and distractions that consumed your thoughts suddenly appear in high contrast against an experience that shows just how little they mean relative to the loss.
Most of what seemed so important before really doesn’t matter.
My dad died in my late 20’s, four months before my wedding.
He was an intellectual heavyweight, a voracious reader and a researching doctor who published studies in medical journals. Google scholar shows 167 publications with over 14,000 citations as of this writing.
His final publication was an essay on his experience as a patient with terminal stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
In this reflection on mortality and consciousness, he bares his wit and dry humor, dropping references from Tolstoy to Shakespeare to Epicurus to Sheryl Sandberg. Normal, right?
Even in death, he continues to school me in lessons on curiosity, continuous learning, writing and critical thinking.
One of the early joys of writing this Substack is that in searching online for the public article, I found that while the full text is paywalled by the Annals of Internal Medicine, there is a free audio recording of one of the editors reading the article here.
I was incredibly lucky to have him as a role model of how to prioritize and balance family, self, and work with a deep commitment to all of them and little tolerance for any detractions.
As for what matters most? It is how and where you choose to focus your attention.
You can’t control how much time you have, your starting point, or your past.
You can control how you focus the time you do have left - with your loved ones, your work, and within your own mind.
If you don’t intentionally decide, that just means someone else is deciding for you. And these days, that someone is probably an algorithm or an ad.
Life altered my perception of time.
When our daughter was born, my relationship with time changed dramatically.
In the early days of taking care of a newborn, it is so all-encompassing that it’s hard to see more than a day into the future. In that way, my time horizon collapsed to the present moment.
Simultaneously, I also had a more vested interest than ever in a future beyond my own life. My time horizon now also extended out as I consider the world our kids will live in after I’m gone.
For those of you without kids, here’s a simple thought experiment that might bend how you think about time. Children born today will graduate high school in the year 2042. They will turn 30 in the 2050’s and 50 in the 2070’s….?!
The other big change came in what I’ll call my perception of time density.
What used to be just a small piece of a day is now a vast expanse of time. Before having a kid, 2 hours was nothing. After, two hours of uninterrupted time can feel like an enormous span with nearly unlimited potential.
The value and potential of the time I do have absolutely sky rocketed.
Attention as our starting point.
So why all the philosophical waxing? To get down to fundamentals:
Attention is our most valuable resource
When motivated and focused, even one hour of attention has huge potential
If you take your attention as your atomic unit, it can be a ruthless metric in analyzing how your are spending your time and the gap between your intentions and actions.
First, think about who you want to be.
Then, think about how you spent your day yesterday, or to be slightly more generous, how you spent your last week. Try checking screen time on your phone.
If you were to draw a pie chart that showed where you focused your attention, what would the factual accounting show? How much of your attention did you waste? How much of your attention did you actively apply toward actions that would move you closer to your goals of who you want to become and what you want to achieve?
Your history is a record of your actions, not your intentions.
The lesson is really the same as what’s taught in meditation - there is only ever the present moment. There is only ever today. How are you using your attention today?
To consider the same idea from a different angle… think about what some of the most powerful technology of today is trying to optimize for?
Capturing, and holding your attention. Enter infinite scroll and video content.
Our collective attention is literally worth trillions of dollars.
It can be a daunting realization. The biggest and richest companies in the history of humanity have been spending billions of dollars and decades of time with some of the smartest people alive to hack our brains and capture our attention. And it’s working.
It can also be a powerful motivator and paradigm shift to realize your attention is being steered, and then actively course-correct toward what you choose to focus on.
And it starts with one small decision today. What will you focus your attention on?
Charting our path.
Ok. So, now that we’ve decided to spend a portion of our precious attention on research and writing, we need to apply these lessons to our strategic focus.
Even though we plan to explore a broad set of topics, we need to make sure our intention is guiding our actions to avoid distraction.
Our goal is not to become experts in any one subject, but to incrementally gain insight from consecutive deep dives with critical analysis before moving on to the next.
For Andy and I at Sojourn Insight, our shared interest revolve around a few core pillars of finance, technology, and gaming.
If we abstract back from there and anchor to a few first principles that we can build upon, we land on something like the following:
Networks that delive value expand over time.
Initial focus on finance, energy, transportation, healthcare and data
Compute will increase and diffuse as capabilities progress.
Initial focus on the hardware, software and application of AI
Mode changes as technology evolves.
Initial focus on fundamental shifts in networks and technology interface
These will be our starting vectors, and we will continue to refine and iterate as we go.
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In the coming weeks, each post will pick one core theme and subset to drill into.
We will explore data sets where possible and attempt to gain an objective view, establish first principles to build on, and spend cycles considering the implications.
I love you all.
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What I’ll be writing about next week:
Mode Changes. Text to Talk. Extrapolating Applications.
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What I read/listened to last week:
Deep Dive: The Global Energy Transition - Chamath Palihapitiya / Social Capital
Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order - Ray Dalio
Tal Wilkenfeld - Lex Friedman Podcast
Episode 165: Vision Pro, Meta vs Snap, SaaS recover, AI investing - All In Podcast