Lesson 2: How To Stay Focused While Self-Learning
Welcome to the second lesson of Self-Learning Quest!
You continue your journey and make your way from the Swamps of Disclarity into the Dessert Wastelands.
You begin sweating an ocean. The ground scalds your feet. For the first time in your life, you wish you were a camel so you could store some water in this dessert hell. What could survive out here?!
As if in answer, you hear a cacophony of laughs in the distance. Suddenly your jumped by—oh no! A Goblin Party. Yes, goblins party, and they drink beer too?
You start to lose sight of your original objective--to get a key was it? Ehhh, it doesn't really matter. Your focus turns to more interesting distractions. Like beer, chili, and, is that Goblin juggling balls? Cool. You could see staying here for a while.
To tame these foes—they’re simply to cute to kill—you must make it through the lesson and apply the action items.
Todays Challenge: Integrate One Insight On Focus Into Your Self-Learning Quest
"To be a master, you must first master yourself." - Genji, Overwatch
In 2011, Eric Barone was fresh out of college with a computer science degree but struggling to find a job. “I was just kind of nervous and awkward,” Barone said. “I didn’t do well at the interviews[7].” Barone started thinking, Why not make a video game? It’d be a good way to improve his programming skills, build some confidence, and maybe help him land a decent job.
Barone had never made a game before. He had no skills relevant to game development. He had no team of developers, artists, or composers—he had to be all of them.
Creating a hugely successful video game usually demands millions of dollars and the collaboration of hundreds of professionals, including developers, producers, artists, animators, designers, writers, and actors, all dedicating long hours over several years. Making a video game entirely on your own is like building a spaceship in your backyard using nothing but YouTube tutorials, a rusty toolbox, and a fervent belief duct tape can fix anything.
All Barone knew was he loved the Japanese game, Harvest Moon, and wanted to give it a modern upgrade. He began using a rudimentary set of tools called Microsoft XNA that would let his characters move around on two dimensional screens. He ripped some sprites from Super Nintendo Games and taught himself how to animate them. “There was no methodology at all,” Barone said. “It was just completely haphazard and scrappy and random.”
By the end of 2011, Barone had given up on finding a day job. He’d become obsessed with this new project, which he called Sprout Valley (later retitled Stardew Valley), and he wanted to finish it before joining the grind of full-time employment. Barone had no idea he had just signed himself up for the four and a half total years it would take to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week.
He was forced to make many sacrifices. His wife, Amber Hageman, had to juggle two jobs outside studying for her undergraduate degree. They lived mostly with Barone's parents. The loneliness was painful.
At multiple points, Barone completely burned out. Some days Barone didn’t work at all. He’d get up, put on some coffee, kiss his girlfriend goodbye, and then binge on eight-hour sessions of Civilization or old Final Fantasy games. When Hageman got home, Barone would click back to Stardew Valley so she wouldn’t know he was goofing off.
After years of working on the game, Barone lost all sense of if it was even good or not. In his words, "Imagine playing the same game, every day, for four and a half years. All day. I was just absolutely sick of it, I was bored. I didn't even have an objective sense of if the game was good or not. In fact, I thought it was bad." Finally, in 2016, Barone released his game Stardew Valley to the public.
In just a few months, it became the largest unconventional indie game hit since Minecraft, selling millions of copies and garnering a passionate fan base. I myself have fallen in love with the game, spending hours feeding chickens, fishing, and admittingly giving pieces of trash as “gifts” to the townsfolk because I thought it was funny. Eric Barone, who was twenty-eight years old and couldn’t open the front door of his car, had over $12 million in his bank account. He had the financial autonomy to work however he wanted, spend time with his wife and friends, and without the need to get a coding job.
Above all else, there was one skill that led to Barone's success: focus.
To build the game, he needed to learn game design, programming, animation, pixel art, composition, writing, and more. He needed to do this over four and a half years while avoiding distraction from other areas of life.
As Barone mastered his craft through focus, we can apply similar principles to our self-learning endeavors.
The question is: how do we build our focus?
People's struggles with focus generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one's focus.
If you can overcome these three struggles, you can build the degree of focus Eric Barone had creating Stardew Valley, and learn virtually anything you desire.
Starting To Focus: Fighting Procrastination
We procrastinate because there is a craving to do something else, an aversion to the task itself, or both. The good news is there are three ways we can fight procrastination.
The first step for fighting procrastination is to determine when you procrastinate and why.
Identify the internal triggers preceding procrastination. Is it hunger, pain, boredom? Note the context around procrastination. Most motivations for procrastinating sound silly when you verbalize them out loud. I should get some coffee. No wait, work first, reward myself with coffee later... A muffin would be good--banana chip muffin. As you repeat this exercise, you'll begin to spot procrastination patterns.
This does two things.
First, it informs you on how to manipulate your environment to reduce procrastination. Research shows it's often easier to influence behavior by changing our environment than changing ourselves (A fascinating science known as choice architecture in Behavioral Economics[1]).
Second, it prepares you mentally to navigate the internal trigger when it does come up. You have two options to navigate the trigger–you can evade it or question it. My favorite method to evade internal triggers is the "leaves on a stream" method. When an internal trigger to procrastinate comes, imagine you are seated beside a stream with leaves gently flowing by. Place each procrastinating thought on a leaf in your mind. Then, allow those leaves to float down the stream as you sit and watch. Bye procrastination!
But sometimes, internal triggers shouldn’t be resisted. Sometimes, they are meant to make you question. Why are you getting distracted from your self-learning? Is it a deeper belief/narrative that you aren’t worthy, that your self-learning is pointless, that you should be doing something else with your time? Diving into the why of the internal trigger and healing yourself will dissolve it, negating a need for a mindfulness approach in the first place (unfortunately, healing deeper narratives is outside the scope of this course but you know how to identify them).
The second way to fight procrastination is to lower the activation energy to get started.
The easiest way to do this is to clarify the next step in your relevant project and where, when, why, and how you will be taking it.
We rarely procrastinate in games because these questions are almost always very clear. For why and how you should be doing it you should refer to the first lesson on creating a learning map. As for where and when the technique that will attribute to 90% of your results are implementation intentions. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear (2018, Chapter 5) explains how to set one[2]: write down somewhere, I will do X thing in Y place at Z time for my self-learning quest.
You can make it even easier to get started by using a technique I call Lightning Launch which works by telling yourself you only have to do an activity for five minutes. If you still don't feel like continuing after five minutes, you can stop, no questions asked. I find that often after five minutes of work, I get into the zone and continue going.
Action creates motivation.
Sustaining Focus: Fighting Distraction
Even if we can get started on our projects, we're often sneak-attacked by focuses other arch-nemesis: distraction.
Simply put, we get distracted to escape the pain of doing something whether it be doing a homework assignment, studying for a test, or something else. Our distractibility much like our tendency for procrastination depends on our ability to control internal and external triggers. Internal triggers are distractions which come from ourselves--things like physical discomfort, hunger, cold, boredom, etc. External triggers are distractions which come from outside ourselves--things like co-workers, friends, email, phones, etc.
We can become less distractible in three main steps.
The first step in fighting distraction is determining what and how long you should be focusing in the first place.
Refer to lesson one on creating a learning map to clarify what you should be focusing on. As for how long you should focus, contrary to what you might believe, the literature on focus doesn't promote longer periods of learning. Research finds retention is higher when learning is broken into smaller blocks spread out over the week and inside a single block you alternate between between different aspects of a skill or knowledge to be remembered--a technique called interleaving[4].
Fifty minutes to an hour is a good time for many learning tasks. If your schedule only permits more concentrated chunks of time you might want to take breaks in between of 10-20 minutes to give yourself a rest. Find what works for you. Some learning is better than none.
The second step in fighting distraction is navigating internal triggers.
Wowzer! It’s the same process as navigating internal triggers from procrastination. You’re learning.
The third step in fighting distraction is hacking back external triggers.
Minimizing external distractions before you start working will help you maintain better focus throughout your learning. Common external triggers include digital notifications, physical environment distractions, interruptions from people, devices, that delicious looking donut sitting in the fridge, and of course, video games.
You can treat the following as a checklist before you sit down to start focusing:
- Take your phone and thro—ahem, sorry I got a little excited--turn your phone on do not disturb during your self-learning time.
- Consider scheduling specific times to do admin work like messages. Don't worry, no one will fail to call you during your self-learning time for help while a meteor comes down to kill
- Don’t work in a space the Cookie Monster could call
- Communicate your focus time to those around you and set boundaries.
If you want a more in depth analysis of how to reduce internal, and external triggers I recommend checking out the book Indistractable by Nir Eyali.
How To Change The Quality Of Your Focus To Boost Self-Learning
Aside from getting started focusing, and sustaining focus, the third major problem people have with focus is creating the right kind.
In her book, A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley (2014) differentiates between two types of focus[6]:
- Focused mode thinking is, well, focused thinking towards a problem—writing something for example.
- Diffused thinking involves focusing on nothing in particular and instead letting our mind wander.
One of the secrets of supercharging creativity and learning is in switching between focused and diffused mode thinking.
This is because your brain works on problems subconsciously; that's why you often get the most creative ideas while shopping for groceries, in the shower, or laying in bed.
"The harder you push your brain to come up with something creative the less creative it will be." - Dr. Oakely
One rule of thumb I like to use is to give your brain a rest from a problem after you get stuck for a few hours at least but not for more than a day if it's the first time you have attacked that problem.
In Summary: How To Improve Your Focus
Focus is like any game skill.
With practice, it can be leveled up using a mix of consistency, progressive overload, and recovery. With consistent training you can learn to improve your ability to start, sustain, and alter the quality of your focus.
You'll find the more you train your focus, the more you adopt the identity of a focused person. Someone that can pursue the things they set out to do. That can embark on incredible feats like Eric Barone creating Stardew Valley.
🎯Take Action Today
- Take one or two of the insights from this lesson you believe is most relevant to your self-learning project and set an implementation intention for how you will incorporate it. Remember an implementation intention is worded by "I will do X thing at Y time in Z place."
The four guards of the Goblin Party approach you cautiously blades drawn. Thinking quickly, you cleverly snatch a plan. You offer some of your provisions to the party.
Realizing you want to join in, the goblins happily welcome you to their gang. You even learn how to juggle some balls! And, you check off “party with goblins” from your bucket list.
Thankfully, you soon remember the true focus of your journey and start off on your quest again.
References
- Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Nudge. Penguin. ↩︎
- Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: Tiny changes, remarkable results: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Penguin Random House. ↩︎
- Eyal, N., & Li, J. (2019). Indistractable: How to control your attention and choose your life. Dallas, TX, BenBella Books, Inc. ↩︎
- John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, et al., "Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques," Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14, no. 1 (January 8, 2013): 4–58, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.11771529100612453266. ↩︎
- Young, Scott H. (2019). Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. HarperCollins. ↩︎
- Oakley, B. A. (2014). A mind for numbers: How to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra). TarcherPerigee. ↩︎
- Schreier, J., & Chase, R. (2017). Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made. New York, Harper. ↩︎