Focus without discipline
Edwin de Wit started this discussion about 13 hours ago.
ActivityI’d welcome criticism of my theory of focus. Specifically, the claim that focus does not depend on discipline.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.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.
Extra context for those interested
Most models of the mind are wrong. They treat distractions as inevitable annoyances—exploitable bugs in our evolutionary wiring—that must be overridden rather than understood. The supposed antidote is to train the ability to overcome distractions. On this view, willpower, self-control or grit is required for success: something you must strengthen so you can push through resistance. We are at war with our own minds, and many things simply suck and must be endured. Discipline = freedom.
From a Deutschian / TCS perspective, this framing is deeply mistaken. Distractions are not mere inevitabilities. They are signals—indicators that something may be wrong or misaligned. Taking those signals seriously is rational; dismissing them merely because they are “distractions” is irrational. The relevant question is not how to suppress them, but what problem they might be pointing to.
Addressing such problems does not consume willpower. It consumes creativity. Creativity is — among other things — the currency of intentional action: generating and criticizing ideas about what to do next. When we force ourselves through distraction-signals, we spend creativity to override our own warning systems—and train ourselves not to trust our minds.
Optimizing for ever-stronger defensive strategies is therefore a poor strategy. It amounts to stockpiling and mobilizing massive amounts of valuable creativity in order to do something harmful: coercing yourself through unresolved conflicts. Hyper-discipline can work —the army being an obvious example—but it often achieves productivity by damaging the inner environment, suppressing signals rather than resolving their causes.
A more effective optimization target is a life in which unwanted distractions arise less often. This shifts attention away from defense and toward shaping what we do and how we do it so fewer internal conflicts arise in the first place. And when distractions do occur, we should deal with them through rational sound judgment—by resolving the underlying problems—rather than swatting them away only for them to cause more damage and come back even fiercer.