Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about focus lately and I’ve been considering how I’d like to have more of it. As I contemplated this issue I began to consider, “What is focus?”.
I’ve seen and heard some extremely good metaphors for it over the years. For instance, I recall someone comparing it to a knife. I knife focuses the user’s effort onto a thin edge. As a result, that effort is multiplied and the knife easily cuts through many things, whereas a spoon, which is less focused, does not multiply a person’s effort as much, and would have much more difficulting cutting through things that the knife could. I remember another person comparing focus to a laser beam. Again, and again, the concept of barriers being easy to “cut” through when focus is applied comes up.
So I started asking myself more about this subject. I thought to myself, “okay, so how does focus work?” How do people sharpen themselves?
Some things began to come back into my memory. One of the first things I thought about was how vision focuses our thoughts. When we are looking at or envisioning something, our thoughts are drawn to it. It also occurred to me that questions are a way that we often focus ourselves. Asking questions causes us to focus on finding an answer.
Well, as I thought about this, it occurred to me that I focus all the time. So why do I seem to be having a problem with focus?
This is where I started to realize that while I may have improved my focus in some areas, I am not controlling, very well, how that focus is being applied. It’s as if I have a spoon in one hand and a knife in the other, and while I’m having difficulty cutting my food with the spoon, I am having no trouble, whatsoever, carving notches into the dinner table with the knife. I guess what I’m trying to say is that focus does us little good if it is not directed at something that will benefit us. Additionally, if we focus on too many things as once, we have essentially lost that focus.
I suddenly had this vision of “The Death Star” from the “Star Wars” movies. As I envisioned this, i thought about these lasers that would converge on a single point, to deliver even more power, through that point to break through whole planets, if they got in the way.
Now I’m not advocating the removal of rebel planets. All I am saying is that I am beginning to see focus as having many facets.
It seems as if, a person would have even more focus, if they were to consider a single problem at a time from multiple different angles. Rather than focusing different parts of our thoughts on numerous different things during a given period, what if we were to bring all of our consciousness to bear on a single topic. What’s more, if we were able to expand this to the concept of a mastermind group. What if that group were to get together and focus all its collective attention on a single problem. How quickly can you imagine problems being solved. I imagine pretty quickly.
I’m not sure where to start with implementing what I have just considered, but I sense that in order to achieve useful focus, I am going to have to use what I have discovered here. If anyone has any additional considerations, I would love to hear them. Please comment.
