Rereading what I've written below, I note that I should lead with: I love your writing and always value your perspective.
--
Writers are often fond of dispensing the advice to narrow focus, and I think it's because of the sort of activity that writing is. I myself was also very fond of narrowing focus during my 20s -- I was doing graduate work in math, and avoiding mental clutter was helpful in making research progress (I don't make strong claims about my success in focusing, just that I appreciated the usefulness).
However, there are many domains where actors necessarily have to spread their attention between many different inputs. Business and politics come to mind. For business, I don't mean focus in the sense of finding a niche for your product and specializing to your customers, I mean - new technology, competitors, and economic forces will conspire to erode the payoff associated to any type of action.
Another quibble: formal work in multi-arm bandits often assumes that the payoff landscape and the action space are fixed in time. It should be clear that neither of these two assumptions is true about being an actor in the world, and that both suggest higher prioritization of exploration.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible that the most valuable benefits you derive from focusing on writing include intimacy with your work and a feeling of clarity. And from the perspective of extrinsic rewards, if outsize success is what you're after, as suggested by the anecdotes you supply, then it's worth noting that achieving outsize success often involves increasing outcome variance -- often by declining to hedge bets.
--
On the margin, I feel that more people would benefit from narrower focus, and from using decision theoretic metaphors in their life. But- remember to interrogate the assumptions of the model that you use, be wary that the abstractions you choose to express your decisions don't cleave reality well, and look for other metaphors, of course.
This is such a cool description of the phenomena, Henrik! And I really appreciated reading how you implemented it into your own life.
I have a concrete example of focus + skill development:
I am learning both Lindy Hop and Dragonboat at the same time. I am happy with this decision, because I wanted my life to have both. However, I am learning both much, much slower than if I chose one, and focused on it.
With both my week looks like:
* Dragonboat practice twice-a-week.
* Lindy Hop classes once-a-week or attending a social dance once-a-week.
My friend who focuses on dragonboat solely does:
* Outrigger canoe paddling 1-2 times a week
* Dragonboat practice twice-a-week
We both started at the same time, but she is miles better than me on every measurable level.
My friend who solely does lindy hop social dancing:
* Class once-a-week
* Social dancing 1-2 times a week
Also, miles more advanced on every measurable level.
I would rather be making slow progress on both at the same time at this point (though, debating switching to a model where I lindy hop when it is cold, and paddle when it is warm), but it illustrative to see how much of a skill trade-off that decision had.
Great to hear that you and your wife spend time writing and thinking together as part of your "family writing business". My husband Peco and I resonate with many points you raise here, including saying "no" to great opportunities because it would simply spread us too thin.
"Narrowing my life like this, at least doubled how much I could achieve. When I had more time, I had spread myself too thin to get stuff done." This strikes me as particularly relevant for a generation spread soo diffusely across virtual, sporadic, and saltatory disengagement. Thanks for writing!
So glad to have discovered your work Henrik. Despite also living quite a 'small' life (by the sea in Cornwall, UK, life is mostly beach walks and staring at the horizon), my mind is continually exploding universe that adores new ideas, new plans, new projects. Perhaps it's my neurodivergent brain wiring! Conversely I also love to go in very deep with a project and immerse myself fully. So it IS possible to find focus, but damping down my brain's enthusiasm for deep focus in too many things is hard.
Really appreciate this piece! What struck me was how you made the case for a "narrower life" so compelling. I was led to the necessity of pruning in your other essay https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/internet-a-user-manual/ and this one really hit home for me.
What really landed for me was the intentionality behind setting aside time for the season of exploration. While I had granted myself a sabbatical a few years ago, it was quite a shame — and now very clear on hindsight — that I hadn't granted myself full permission to explore without needing to have anything to show at the end of it. So what you shared and the approach you took was illuminating — these explicit rules are necessary, like a pact with oneself so the wholehearted exploration can happen, so the chances of being ambushed by our own exploit tendencies are minimized.
Thank you for so clearly articulating why “staying on the bus” is so important, and offering a way to think about getting on the right bus (or buses--up to three).
I am particularly interested in figuring out how to connect with others in an authentic way at the moment because I’ve been applying a laser-like focus to learning traditional realist art skills for the past two years. I shed nearly all other activities from my life as I commit to developing these skills. My husband thankfully cooks and calls me when it’s time to eat. (It’s good to have a team approach to life.)
Only now am I starting to recognize that I do indeed see more and better than I did before. And with my new objective vision I am able to be more critical of my abilities to execute on my internal (subjective) vision for what I produce. An emerging ability to critique my own work has me thinking that I might be nearing the time to start adding my own work, not just exercises in a curriculum to my life.
Never would I have developed this skill without intense focus and hours and hours of practice. (It’s the subtle color I think you now see because of your focus on the colorless life of a writer.)
Your article and Larson’s offer me a chance to think more about what to do now. Keep digging in for two more years to learn more and develop artistic skills I can’t yet imagine? Select a “bit” to play with the skills I have--painting images of barns, say--that might connect me to the world in new and interesting ways? A blend of the two? Or start developing an entirely new skill--become a personal trainer?
Just writing down these thoughts highlights for me a need to choose and shows how ridiculous my fleeting thought of getting on the bus that led to becoming a personal trainer is for me.
It’s at once wonderful and frustrating that humans are so complex--and, how much we want to connect with others in ways that allow us to share who we are. Yet, only in digging deep on one thing to the exclusion of others do we discover more about ourselves than we might otherwise learn from playing more bits.
Your piece makes me think that if I can only get on three buses, I’ll need one to nurture my family relationships, another to continually develop artistic skills, and a third, perhaps, to connect me with others that exploits the skills I most want to develop for myself.
Thanks for giving me a framework to think these things through, Henrik.
I've been thinking about this same subject in my life (focus would benefit me more) however have difficulty dispelling the guilt at the other things I then neglect, or the feeling that through choosing one/two, I lost out on vital parts of life. Sacrifice, as you say.
Great piece. I would add that the other challenge to narrowing focus is the commitment/responsibility one has to loved ones (eg parents and siblings, less so the people who live in your own household). I often find that I know the 1-2 things I need to focus on personally, but then need to help others with a problem they have -- leading to 5 things I end up dedicating time & attention to
It's tricky, though, because you do need writing material. And while that has nothing to do with the sort of self-helpy mindless travel that people associate with having an "exciting life," you can kind of tell when a writer has run through their stores of "hot material" (as Franzen has put it) and reached a limit. I guess that's the trigger for another explore cycle, but the symbiotic nature of the binary sometimes makes cycling through it hard.
It's not as though I have any sort of solution to this explore/exploit balance. I'm facing down my inability to do it all, and as I hone in on a writing/career/family phase of life, I can only hope that I've lived *enough* to carry me through my hoped-for books.
The saving grace is that I feel as though this takes less than people expect; Walt Whitman took only one major trip in his entire life, and George Eliot took maybe two; so quality trumps quantity anytime, but they would have been poorer writers without those short trips.
It would be very cool to see you become as prolific a writer as someone like Bryan Caplan, David D. Friedman, Scott Alexander, or (the late) Murray Rothbard. You've already got the interesting side down, so if this ramps up in such a self-reinforcing way as you hope, you'd have the killer combination of profundity and volume to bank on. Just be wary of whenever the recession inevitably comes as that may (or may not) affect the type people currently patronizing you.
And what your post means for me is that I may not be able to meaningfully get into the writing game since I already am reasonably strong with math and data science while still wanting to add fatherhood, Homotopy Type Theory/functional programming (kinda math), and maybe get back to playing bassoon. There are other things I've amateurishly pursued within the libertarian realm of thought for the past couple years, but it just doesn't seem likely that I'll be able to devote much more time to seriously studying it other than just reading the occasional article and having my life turned upside down for the n-th time.
I just stumbled onto your blog — not sure how I got here but I’m glad I did — and read this blog and the one about exceptional childhoods. They align well with what I’ve been thinking about recently. In particular, there’s been an increasing number of exceptional people in my life who have somewhat exceptional childhoods, which has gotten me to think about why I am not more focused.
I feel it’s important to preface that I’m an undergrad student. Most of my life, at this point, have been spent in school, where the phenomenon you wrote of about being forced to “exploit” when we haven’t properly “explored”. Nevertheless some people have gotten lucky in exploration and have found success in focusing on singular passions. Like you, I am also high in Openness and prefer exploring, and it has been difficult to grapple with anxiety-based urge to just “pick a direction.”
I love the analogy to the multi-armed bandit problem and it usefully clarifies a lot of my similar thoughts on this topic. My response to my personal crisis over not focusing enough was to write a post reassuring myself and other students that exploration is an okay thing to do while in college. I’d forgotten to consider the question for later times, and I’m happy to know of the decreasing temperature metaphor for handling this. Thank you!
Thank you for the essay! I’m at the point where the standard education runway around me is about to fall away, and I need to figure out what interests I want to cultivate. It is hard to release the fantasy that I can do many things, or even multiple things well. This essay was a useful reminder.
One thing I am curious to hear your thoughts on is when the exploration itself has an intrinsic value separate from eventual exploitation. For instance, I feel this model underestimates the value of having a broad base of experience to draw on. In some areas, particularly ones without a clear pipeline of development, earlier unrelated exploration often ends up being essential to success. I recently met a man who in his youth became an HVAC technician, read deeply into the Nuclear Winter literature, and ran a furniture making business that his dad had started. None of these skills seemed to intersect until he came across a charity working to improve the resilience of our food system after catastrophe. Then, this trio of skills gives him valuable knowledge into how one might build greenhouses to scale after a nuclear attack.
Similarly, if we take your “friends in the city” example, you might still want to explore socially even as you are about to move away. Loose friendships can connect you with opportunities later down the line, so meeting new people or cultivating acquaintances might still be valuable, even if you can’t really hang out with them as much.
More broadly, life is long. Your interest now might fade in the future, so having a broad base of skills can build resiliency. How do you build this in? (This line of thought is similar to Russet’s, I think).
There are other ways that exploration might be valuable as well, which I won’t get into here, but I was wondering how you (or the commentariat in general) dealt with this. Is it an argument to explore slightly more than you might feel is natural? Does it push against eventually focusing? Or was this already implicit in the essay and I missed it?
Rereading what I've written below, I note that I should lead with: I love your writing and always value your perspective.
--
Writers are often fond of dispensing the advice to narrow focus, and I think it's because of the sort of activity that writing is. I myself was also very fond of narrowing focus during my 20s -- I was doing graduate work in math, and avoiding mental clutter was helpful in making research progress (I don't make strong claims about my success in focusing, just that I appreciated the usefulness).
However, there are many domains where actors necessarily have to spread their attention between many different inputs. Business and politics come to mind. For business, I don't mean focus in the sense of finding a niche for your product and specializing to your customers, I mean - new technology, competitors, and economic forces will conspire to erode the payoff associated to any type of action.
This framework comes from a different culture of thought, but I think it may be interesting to you to consider a characterization of activities that's sometimes used in the fitness world. Here are two examples: https://www.otpbooks.com/dan-johns-four-quadrants-infographic/ and https://medium.com/@danjohn84123/yes-even-parenting-is-a-quadrant-activity-33b708998dee (if you'd like to pursue this further, I can dig up more/better references)
--
Another quibble: formal work in multi-arm bandits often assumes that the payoff landscape and the action space are fixed in time. It should be clear that neither of these two assumptions is true about being an actor in the world, and that both suggest higher prioritization of exploration.
On the other hand, it's certainly possible that the most valuable benefits you derive from focusing on writing include intimacy with your work and a feeling of clarity. And from the perspective of extrinsic rewards, if outsize success is what you're after, as suggested by the anecdotes you supply, then it's worth noting that achieving outsize success often involves increasing outcome variance -- often by declining to hedge bets.
--
On the margin, I feel that more people would benefit from narrower focus, and from using decision theoretic metaphors in their life. But- remember to interrogate the assumptions of the model that you use, be wary that the abstractions you choose to express your decisions don't cleave reality well, and look for other metaphors, of course.
This is such a cool description of the phenomena, Henrik! And I really appreciated reading how you implemented it into your own life.
I have a concrete example of focus + skill development:
I am learning both Lindy Hop and Dragonboat at the same time. I am happy with this decision, because I wanted my life to have both. However, I am learning both much, much slower than if I chose one, and focused on it.
With both my week looks like:
* Dragonboat practice twice-a-week.
* Lindy Hop classes once-a-week or attending a social dance once-a-week.
My friend who focuses on dragonboat solely does:
* Outrigger canoe paddling 1-2 times a week
* Dragonboat practice twice-a-week
We both started at the same time, but she is miles better than me on every measurable level.
My friend who solely does lindy hop social dancing:
* Class once-a-week
* Social dancing 1-2 times a week
Also, miles more advanced on every measurable level.
I would rather be making slow progress on both at the same time at this point (though, debating switching to a model where I lindy hop when it is cold, and paddle when it is warm), but it illustrative to see how much of a skill trade-off that decision had.
Great to hear that you and your wife spend time writing and thinking together as part of your "family writing business". My husband Peco and I resonate with many points you raise here, including saying "no" to great opportunities because it would simply spread us too thin.
"Narrowing my life like this, at least doubled how much I could achieve. When I had more time, I had spread myself too thin to get stuff done." This strikes me as particularly relevant for a generation spread soo diffusely across virtual, sporadic, and saltatory disengagement. Thanks for writing!
So glad to have discovered your work Henrik. Despite also living quite a 'small' life (by the sea in Cornwall, UK, life is mostly beach walks and staring at the horizon), my mind is continually exploding universe that adores new ideas, new plans, new projects. Perhaps it's my neurodivergent brain wiring! Conversely I also love to go in very deep with a project and immerse myself fully. So it IS possible to find focus, but damping down my brain's enthusiasm for deep focus in too many things is hard.
Really appreciate this piece! What struck me was how you made the case for a "narrower life" so compelling. I was led to the necessity of pruning in your other essay https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/internet-a-user-manual/ and this one really hit home for me.
What really landed for me was the intentionality behind setting aside time for the season of exploration. While I had granted myself a sabbatical a few years ago, it was quite a shame — and now very clear on hindsight — that I hadn't granted myself full permission to explore without needing to have anything to show at the end of it. So what you shared and the approach you took was illuminating — these explicit rules are necessary, like a pact with oneself so the wholehearted exploration can happen, so the chances of being ambushed by our own exploit tendencies are minimized.
Thank you for so clearly articulating why “staying on the bus” is so important, and offering a way to think about getting on the right bus (or buses--up to three).
I happened to read your piece just after finishing Jeremy D. Larson’s NYT article “Want to Try a New You in the New Year? Try Committing to the Bit” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/magazine/commit-to-the-bit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K00.ei6e.u66RVjj-Wnuy&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare), so I was primed to think about “what” would be my “bits”. Your article then offered an algorithm! (Yes! I love a good plan.)
I am particularly interested in figuring out how to connect with others in an authentic way at the moment because I’ve been applying a laser-like focus to learning traditional realist art skills for the past two years. I shed nearly all other activities from my life as I commit to developing these skills. My husband thankfully cooks and calls me when it’s time to eat. (It’s good to have a team approach to life.)
Only now am I starting to recognize that I do indeed see more and better than I did before. And with my new objective vision I am able to be more critical of my abilities to execute on my internal (subjective) vision for what I produce. An emerging ability to critique my own work has me thinking that I might be nearing the time to start adding my own work, not just exercises in a curriculum to my life.
Never would I have developed this skill without intense focus and hours and hours of practice. (It’s the subtle color I think you now see because of your focus on the colorless life of a writer.)
Your article and Larson’s offer me a chance to think more about what to do now. Keep digging in for two more years to learn more and develop artistic skills I can’t yet imagine? Select a “bit” to play with the skills I have--painting images of barns, say--that might connect me to the world in new and interesting ways? A blend of the two? Or start developing an entirely new skill--become a personal trainer?
Just writing down these thoughts highlights for me a need to choose and shows how ridiculous my fleeting thought of getting on the bus that led to becoming a personal trainer is for me.
It’s at once wonderful and frustrating that humans are so complex--and, how much we want to connect with others in ways that allow us to share who we are. Yet, only in digging deep on one thing to the exclusion of others do we discover more about ourselves than we might otherwise learn from playing more bits.
Your piece makes me think that if I can only get on three buses, I’ll need one to nurture my family relationships, another to continually develop artistic skills, and a third, perhaps, to connect me with others that exploits the skills I most want to develop for myself.
Thanks for giving me a framework to think these things through, Henrik.
This is a really good essay! I’m so happy to hear that writing (income) is close to supporting your family.
I love this.
I've been thinking about this same subject in my life (focus would benefit me more) however have difficulty dispelling the guilt at the other things I then neglect, or the feeling that through choosing one/two, I lost out on vital parts of life. Sacrifice, as you say.
Great piece. I would add that the other challenge to narrowing focus is the commitment/responsibility one has to loved ones (eg parents and siblings, less so the people who live in your own household). I often find that I know the 1-2 things I need to focus on personally, but then need to help others with a problem they have -- leading to 5 things I end up dedicating time & attention to
It's tricky, though, because you do need writing material. And while that has nothing to do with the sort of self-helpy mindless travel that people associate with having an "exciting life," you can kind of tell when a writer has run through their stores of "hot material" (as Franzen has put it) and reached a limit. I guess that's the trigger for another explore cycle, but the symbiotic nature of the binary sometimes makes cycling through it hard.
It's not as though I have any sort of solution to this explore/exploit balance. I'm facing down my inability to do it all, and as I hone in on a writing/career/family phase of life, I can only hope that I've lived *enough* to carry me through my hoped-for books.
The saving grace is that I feel as though this takes less than people expect; Walt Whitman took only one major trip in his entire life, and George Eliot took maybe two; so quality trumps quantity anytime, but they would have been poorer writers without those short trips.
Love love love this. Shared with all my friends.
Really needed this to kick off the year. Thank you, Henrik!
It would be very cool to see you become as prolific a writer as someone like Bryan Caplan, David D. Friedman, Scott Alexander, or (the late) Murray Rothbard. You've already got the interesting side down, so if this ramps up in such a self-reinforcing way as you hope, you'd have the killer combination of profundity and volume to bank on. Just be wary of whenever the recession inevitably comes as that may (or may not) affect the type people currently patronizing you.
And what your post means for me is that I may not be able to meaningfully get into the writing game since I already am reasonably strong with math and data science while still wanting to add fatherhood, Homotopy Type Theory/functional programming (kinda math), and maybe get back to playing bassoon. There are other things I've amateurishly pursued within the libertarian realm of thought for the past couple years, but it just doesn't seem likely that I'll be able to devote much more time to seriously studying it other than just reading the occasional article and having my life turned upside down for the n-th time.
I just stumbled onto your blog — not sure how I got here but I’m glad I did — and read this blog and the one about exceptional childhoods. They align well with what I’ve been thinking about recently. In particular, there’s been an increasing number of exceptional people in my life who have somewhat exceptional childhoods, which has gotten me to think about why I am not more focused.
I feel it’s important to preface that I’m an undergrad student. Most of my life, at this point, have been spent in school, where the phenomenon you wrote of about being forced to “exploit” when we haven’t properly “explored”. Nevertheless some people have gotten lucky in exploration and have found success in focusing on singular passions. Like you, I am also high in Openness and prefer exploring, and it has been difficult to grapple with anxiety-based urge to just “pick a direction.”
I love the analogy to the multi-armed bandit problem and it usefully clarifies a lot of my similar thoughts on this topic. My response to my personal crisis over not focusing enough was to write a post reassuring myself and other students that exploration is an okay thing to do while in college. I’d forgotten to consider the question for later times, and I’m happy to know of the decreasing temperature metaphor for handling this. Thank you!
Thank you for the essay! I’m at the point where the standard education runway around me is about to fall away, and I need to figure out what interests I want to cultivate. It is hard to release the fantasy that I can do many things, or even multiple things well. This essay was a useful reminder.
One thing I am curious to hear your thoughts on is when the exploration itself has an intrinsic value separate from eventual exploitation. For instance, I feel this model underestimates the value of having a broad base of experience to draw on. In some areas, particularly ones without a clear pipeline of development, earlier unrelated exploration often ends up being essential to success. I recently met a man who in his youth became an HVAC technician, read deeply into the Nuclear Winter literature, and ran a furniture making business that his dad had started. None of these skills seemed to intersect until he came across a charity working to improve the resilience of our food system after catastrophe. Then, this trio of skills gives him valuable knowledge into how one might build greenhouses to scale after a nuclear attack.
Similarly, if we take your “friends in the city” example, you might still want to explore socially even as you are about to move away. Loose friendships can connect you with opportunities later down the line, so meeting new people or cultivating acquaintances might still be valuable, even if you can’t really hang out with them as much.
More broadly, life is long. Your interest now might fade in the future, so having a broad base of skills can build resiliency. How do you build this in? (This line of thought is similar to Russet’s, I think).
There are other ways that exploration might be valuable as well, which I won’t get into here, but I was wondering how you (or the commentariat in general) dealt with this. Is it an argument to explore slightly more than you might feel is natural? Does it push against eventually focusing? Or was this already implicit in the essay and I missed it?