I Think I Have a Focus Problem

I haven’t written for the last two weeks, so this one is probably going to be a little all over the place.

A lot has happened.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I was going to start doing maths again. Since then, I solved around 20 algebra problems, around 20 arithmetic problems, and a few combinatorics problems.

I genuinely had fun doing it.

Then work got intense.

For the last couple of months, I had been working solely on a pretty massive internal API integration. It finally got completed, and I ended up migrating a lot of customers from one API to another.

Anyone who has worked on a migration like this knows how ugly they can get. You think you’re moving data from A to B, and then suddenly there are a hundred edge cases hiding underneath everything.

It was difficult. It was challenging. And I loved it.

There was something deeply satisfying about spending that much time on a complicated problem, pushing through all the weirdness, and eventually getting it done. It felt good to exercise that part of my brain again.

Then I turned 25.

It was probably one of the calmest birthdays I’ve ever had.

My girlfriend made me feel incredibly special. We spent a lot of time together, went for a walk, and she asked me some really deep and thoughtful questions.

There wasn’t some huge party or anything particularly crazy about it.

It was just peaceful.

And tbvh, I think I liked that more.

After that, I went back to work.

I’ve been spending more and more time on growth these days, which is an interesting transition for me. I’ve been a founding engineer, so I’ve had the chance to work across almost everything: I’ve built deep backend systems, worked on the frontend, helped support customers, and now I’m getting to experience what happens after the initial product is built.

I’ve lived through the zero-to-one phase.

Now I’m living through one-to-ten.

Hopefully, one day, I’ll get to see ten-to-hundred too.

That’s probably one of the most exciting things about working at a startup for me. You don’t just get one job. You get to see the company change, and you change with it.

Then my gf & brother gifted me a PS5.

I LITERALLY played it for like 14 hours straight.

I finished Spider-Man 2 in three days.

It was fucking amazing.

But the weirdest part wasn’t actually the game.

It was that, for the first time, my parents didn’t tell me to stop.

When I was a kid, I’d usually get told to stop playing after an hour or two. I understood why. They were looking out for me. They didn’t want me sitting in front of a screen all day and becoming addicted to games.

But this time, they didn’t say anything.

And I think I suddenly understood that they trusted me.

I’d become financially independent. I’d become more responsible. I was 25 years old. In some strange way, they no longer felt like they needed to protect me from every decision I made.

I could just play the game.

And I did.

For a few days, it felt like I was getting to live a tiny piece of my childhood that I never really got to have.

Then my eyes started hurting like crazy, so I had to stop.

I’ll probably play Wolverine when it comes out. I’ve already pre-ordered it, so we’ll see.

I’ve also been buying more maths books.

I ordered Introduction to Algebra by Richard Rusczyk, and I’ve been playing around with the idea of continuing down that rabbit hole.

Maybe I’ll solve the whole thing.

Maybe I’ll get bored halfway through.

I genuinely don’t know.

And I think that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

I have a tendency to want to do everything.

I want to get really good at my work.

I want to do maths.

I want to understand game theory. I’ve already gone through all of Professor Jiang’s videos.

I want to understand macroeconomics. I’ve watched all the Ray Dalio videos.

I want to learn Rust.

I want to build AI Apps, CDNs, pub/sub, file servers, kubernetes, really sophisticated systems.

I want to write really good Go microservices.

I want to understand DevOps more deeply.

I want to explore what the latest AI models can actually do.

I want to play around blender with gpt-6 astra.

I want to understand health properly.

I could keep going.

There’s always another interesting thing.

And that’s probably the problem.

I consume a lot of content.

I learn a little about everything.

I go down rabbit holes.

And then another rabbit hole appears.

At some point I’ve started wondering whether I’m actually becoming more knowledgeable, or whether I’m just becoming really good at being interested in things.

I love the idea of being a polymath. I still do.

But you can’t deeply understand ten things at the same time.

You can be curious about ten things.

You can explore ten things.

But depth requires something different.

It requires staying with one problem after the novelty disappears.

It requires reading the boring chapter.

It requires solving the hundredth problem.

It requires going back to the same thing tomorrow when there’s something else that looks more interesting.

And I think that’s the part I’m starting to struggle with.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it actually means to become dangerously good at something.

And I increasingly think the answer is focus.

Not necessarily doing less.

Just choosing what gets my attention.

So that’s probably what the next few weeks are going to be about.

Work will obviously stay one of the biggest things in my life. But outside of work, I want to put significantly more energy into my health.

I feel incredibly lucky about where I am right now. I’ve built a career I genuinely wanted. I have a relationship that means an enormous amount to me.

But I also feel like I’ve neglected my health while building those things.

So I want to fix that.

I’m getting deeper into the science behind it, too, because that’s how my brain works. I don’t really like doing something halfway.

If I’m going to learn about nutrition, I want to understand what actually happens when food enters the body, how that energy gets converted into ATP, how the system works, and why.

I’m listening to the goat Andrew Huberman a lot lately for exactly this reason. I like understanding the mechanism underneath things.

And then, mentally, I want to choose one or two things and actually go deep.

Maybe it’s maths.

Maybe it’s DevOps.

Maybe it’s Rust.

Maybe it’s AI and 3D.

I genuinely don’t know yet.

And maybe that’s okay.

I’m starting to notice the difference between being curious about something and actually choosing to focus on it.

I think I’ve spent a lot of time collecting interests.

Now I want to see what happens when I actually pick one and stay.

Oh, and one more thing.

I became an uncle.

That feels very strange to say.

I still feel way too young to be an uncle, but I have a nephew now.

Holding him in my hands was genuinely one of the best feelings I’ve experienced in a long time.

I’ve spent a lot of these past few months thinking about ambition, health, learning, work, focus, and becoming better at what I do.

And then this tiny human showed up, and none of those things seemed particularly important for a moment.

I just wanted to hold him.

I can’t wait to shower him with as much love as I possibly can.

Anyway, that’s what’s been happening with me.

I’m still figuring out what I’m going to focus on next.

We’ll see.