$150.00 Bounty for Idea #3839Beta

Focus is usually defined in coercive terms—working without distraction or despite it. This framing sneaks discipline in through the side door.

• Deep Work: Focus is the ability to concentrate on cognitively demanding tasks without distraction.
• Indistractable: Focus is doing what you intend to do despite internal and external distractions.
• Hyperfocus: Focus is intentionally directing attention while deliberately ignoring everything else.

What all of these share is the assumption that focus is valuable because it resists distraction. Distraction is treated as interference to be pushed aside.

I think this coercive component should be removed. At the same time, empirical experience makes it clear that people do differ in their ability to stay engaged—and that this ability can improve. So something real is being gestured at, but mischaracterized.

Here is my Deutsch-compatible explanation of it:

Focus is the stickiness of engagement with a chosen problem.
It is not about heroic self-control—suppressing distractions or forcefully pushing competing thoughts away—but about how reliably engagement sustains itself without requiring repeated creative intervention. Creativity enables intentional action; focus determines how often that intentionality needs to be actively renewed.
When focus is weak, engagement is fragile. Minor distractions, impulses, or shifts in attention repeatedly pull us away, forcing creativity to be spent again and again just to re-establish intentional direction.
When focus is strong, engagement is stickier. The threshold for a distraction to take hold is higher. Distractions still occur, but they are rarer. And when they do arise, they are less disruptive, because our sticky focus allows us to handle them using sound judgment rather than succumbing to poor judgment.
Focus is a capacity we can train like any other skill. Periods of sustained engagement stretch that capacity, and—when followed by adequate recovery—our ability to stay engaged grows stronger

This reframing preserves what the popular literature gets right—that sustained attention exists and matters—while rejecting its coercive foundation. It replaces self-war with problem-solving, and willpower myths with creativity and judgment.

I would love to hear criticisms of this theory of focus. It is a core part of my book and, I believe, a necessary incorporation into a Deutschian / TCS view of the mind—one that fully addresses and refutes the popular focus literature referenced above.