Monday Mindset: Charlie says...
Your success requires the aid of others
A trusted network is something no entrepreneur should be without.
Decisions, decisions, decisions
Are your decisions influenced by the seemingly most pressing or most recent event? Maybe that meeting you just had, or what a colleague just happened to ask you about?
It’s understandable. Too often we react to things in the short-term and we react emotionally. But does that produce your best work?
Short-term is easy. Work is meant to be busy, right? We chop & change between tasks and that way it feels like we’re moving fast.
As I write this I know that’s what I do quite a lot. But I’m working on it.
I know that my best work comes when I think. Properly think.
But thinking needs focus. And, if you’re like me, needs help from others1.
Munger-Style Thinking
As some of you may know from my newsletter on investing—here—I’ve learned a lot from Value Investors such as Guy Spier and Mohnish Pabrai and they, I’m sure they won’t mind me saying, learned a lot from the late Charlie Munger, the less-well-known but some might say driving force or secret weapon of Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway’s success.
Value investors are fans of investments that compound, but can other things compound too? Does a sustained focus on a problem, market or product compound over time? What about relationships? I think they’d say it does.
So while many founders chase the latest trends2, it doesn’t take a genius to see now that Charlie’s success didn’t come from reacting quickly but came from thinking deeply and being patient.
We often think of focus as concentrating intensely on something for a short time — all morning just writing that one email update, or an afternoon just calling customers.
But, as the quote below from Charlie suggests, it’s also being able to concentrate on something for a long period of time.
“I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
Charlie Munger
I often wonder, did Charlie ever find focusing difficult? Did it take practice for that genius mind of his?
Cultivating a long attention span
Founders often mistake activity for progress — constant emails, meetings, and social media can feel like we’re moving longs well after all.
However, it’s deep, uninterrupted work on what truly matters that makes the good become great. The real breakthroughs happen when talking to customers, building products or thinking about strategy without any distraction.
So perhaps we’d benefit from deliberately engineering some deep work and focus into our lives3.
Jony Ive talks about Steve Jobs’s focus here and William Green’s advice to himself in this TEDx talk, “Subtract, simplify, and don’t be a fool”, resonated so much with me that I wrote it on my own whiteboard at home. I can see it ever day and it reminds me not to be busy just for the sake of it.
All this takes practice
Focus is a habit and it takes practice. And patience. You don’t, or at least I know I won’t, suddenly become Charlie-level-super-focused overnight. Plus if you get out of the habit the focus wanes and the attention span gets shorter.
Have you had periods of intense focus? What have you tried before?
Please reply and let me know.
Thanks for reading,
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“Your success requires the aid of others” and all that 😇
I’m guilty of this too — back in 2009 or so I was desperate to escape the corporate world and took to importing rubbish electronics from China and exporting British bedsheets to Africa! All a miserable failure.
One way is to schedule dedicated time offline, and not just an hour here or there. Matthew invested in Unplugged and has an Unplugged lock-box to help with that.