A thousand things scare me and give me anxiety every week. I’m telling you that up front because this is an essay about focus, and focus advice usually comes from people pretending their head is a quiet place.
Mine isn’t. When it gets loud enough, I do the thing I hate most: 45 minutes to an hour, running, in Florida heat and 100-degree humidity. I hate running. Genuinely always have. And it gets my brain back in order like nothing else I’ve found, which is its own kind of annoying.
So here’s the short answer, if you came here to focus better: stop waiting to feel focused. Focus isn’t a gift some people were issued and you weren’t. It’s a trainable skill with three inputs you control: subtraction (fewer things pulling at you), repetition (doing one thing at a time, badly at first), and recovery (sleep and movement, the two everyone skips). That’s the whole machine. The rest of this is how each part works on a guy whose head never shuts up on its own.
The protocol I hate
Why does the run work? Because anxiety is unspent energy wearing a disguise, and you cannot think your way out of a state your body is generating. I’ve tried. Sitting still and reasoning with a racing brain is like negotiating with a fire alarm.
Action is the override. Hard physical effort burns the alarm down to where thoughts can land again, and afterward the problems are all still there, but they’ve gone back to being their actual size. I don’t run because I’m disciplined about cardio. I run because it’s the reset button, and I’ve stopped being too proud to push it. From the man who hates running: it’s the best focus tool I own.
Nobody has focus. People train it
The lie in "I just can’t focus" is the word "just," like attention is eye color. Meanwhile there’s a trillion-dollar industry on the other side of your screen employing some of the smartest people alive to take your attention apart, on purpose, for money. Losing to that isn’t a character flaw. But staying beaten is a choice, because the same attention that gets fragmented can be rebuilt.
I run my companies on AI every single day, and I’ve said it plainly: I hate AI, but I have no control over how that plays out. What I do control is whether the tools work for my attention or against it. Same phone, same apps, same feeds; the only question is who’s aiming whom.
Subtraction first
Everyone wants a focus technique. Almost nobody wants the subtraction, and the subtraction is 80% of it.
You already know my pattern here: I don’t keep chocolate in the house because I’ll eat all of it, and I’ve worn the same black t-shirt for twenty years so mornings don’t bill my brain for a decision. Attention gets the same architecture, because I don’t trust the operator. Phone in another room during work blocks, not face-down, gone, because face-down is still a doorbell. Notifications off by default and earned back one by one; almost none earn it. One screen at a time. In my perfect day, the phone is away completely, and that detail was there before I understood why.
None of that is willpower. It’s removing the fight before it starts, which is the only fight I reliably win.
Single-tasking is a rep
The training itself is embarrassingly simple: one thing, a set time, and when your attention wanders, you bring it back without the drama. That return IS the rep. Wandering isn’t failure; it’s the weight. No wander, no workout.
Expect to be weak at first. Ten honest minutes, maybe. It builds like anything builds, and it builds fastest on something you actually care about, which is why real obsession is sustained attention and not intensity. Nobody has to teach you to focus on a thing that has your whole heart. The training is for everything else, and for protecting the obsession from the phone.
The inputs I keep losing
Now the humility section, on schedule. I track my recovery in a competitive group with my friends, and I hold the worst sleep and the highest strain in the community. Publicly. Every week. Sleep is the input I keep losing, and I feel it exactly where you’d expect: the tired version of me has the attention span of a goldfish in a thunderstorm, loses every subtraction battle, and reaches for the phone like it’s medicine.
So I’m not preaching recovery from above. I’m reporting from below: on the days I’ve slept, the focus techniques barely feel necessary. On the days I haven’t, none of them are enough. That ratio should tell you where the real leverage is, and it’s not in another productivity app.
Attention needs somewhere to go
Last thing, because focus-for-its-own-sake is a gym membership nobody uses. Attention is a loaded weapon looking for a target, and if you don’t give it one, the algorithm happily will.
Mine goes to the companies, the writing, the training, the people at my table. Yours goes wherever you point it, but point it somewhere on purpose, daily, or it gets pointed for you. The scariest sentence in the modern economy is one nobody says out loud: I spent my whole attention and have no idea what I bought.
A thousand things will still scare me next week. The head stays loud. But loud and aimed beats quiet and scattered, and aimed is available to anybody willing to subtract, rep, sleep, and occasionally suffer through a run they hate. I’ll be out there in the heat, not enjoying it, getting my brain back. Eyes up.
Tyk Sullivan
Serial entrepreneur in Tampa, Florida. Founder of Plutus Capital and NUMEN. More about Tyk →