Focus

When Alexander confronted and defeated Darius, first at Issus and then on the plains of Guagamela, the Macedonian army was outnumbered 3 to 1 and fighting in a hostile and foreign land.  How was this young king able to win these battles and gain control of the known world?

Alexander was able to focus his best strength at the place where it could make the most difference; the heart of the Persian lines, and their king.

In the ancient world large armies would basically line up and drive at each other in waves until one broke and ran.  The Macedonians could not afford to do that.  Instead, Alexander used his veteran companion cavalry and hardened hoplite phalanx to drive a stake through the Persian army’s heart.

To begin the battle Alexander attacked the Persian far right with his mobile cavalry.  This caused the front line of the Persians to stretch in that direction.  Alexander then disengaged his veterans and wheeled a narrow wedge, led by Alexander personally, into the center of the Persian line where the king was.

With this focusing of power he was able to break the larger Persian force by cutting off its head.

Focus enables you to multiply your forces for effectiveness.

You can use focus in your life and your training to do the same.  You can take your limited energy and ability and focus it to achieve goals that you may not have thought possible.

The first thing that enables focus is having clear, compelling, quantified goals.  That’s why qualifying for Boston is such a focusing goal.  It is black and white.  There is no wiggle room. You either have the time or you don’t.

The goal gives you a clear point to line up your resources towards.  The goal gives you a way to sort and filter your activity – it either moves you towards the goal or away.

The goal needs to be compelling.  Because to achieve the goal, if it is a worthy goal, is going to take investment and sacrifice, real or imagined.  The goal needs to have enough gravity to pull you emotionally through the hard times.  You need to be able to answer the question “is it worth it?” in the affirmative, even when you’re in the darkest place.

The goal becomes your beacon when you are thrashing in a sea of desolation.  You can see in our interview with Jonathan today some of the tactics to make your goal more compelling, to help you own your goal.

First is declaring the goal.  The simple statement of “I will do this or die trying” engages the ego.  The ego doesn’t like to lose.  It’s a dangerous and tricky psychological game but you are basically tying your self-worth to the goal.

The next thing is declaring the goal publicly.  This gives you the emotional heft of not wanting to look like a failure to your tribe.

Then there is the self-talk or mantra.  These are basically affirmations.  “Unicorn don’t care!” what a great affirmation.  What a great way to cut through to the core of feeling sorry for yourself.

Every great project has a great mantra.  I think Alexander’s army had some sort of mantra based around Xerces trying to conquer the Peloponnese earlier, you remember that whole 300 Spartans thing?  These social mantras rally a whole organization around a goal.

With the goal in place and the appropriate, sustainable energy around it you are ready to drop your focus down into the execution of the project.

The first step on focusing your energy is to find out what it is going to take to get to that goal.  How do you do that?  You find someone else who has done it and mirror the successful behaviors they used to achieve that same goal.

Remember, the key to successfully using focus is to only do those things that are going get you to the goal.  By copying a success template, you save yourself a lot of trail and error.

Sometimes this means not only copying the success template, but also find a mentor or mentors.  This is another reason that these transformational goals have a lasting impact; they require the participant to upgrade his or her quality of advisers.

This understanding of how others got there also gives you a frank assessment of how much of an investment is going to be required.  In our world that means looking at the training and realizing you are going to need to commit to more miles, harder miles and more hours.

This can cause some people to step back once they realize the investment required.  But if the goal is compelling, and they can whip up the passion for it, they can flip the script and make the difficulties part of the driving force that focuses them even more.

Now you have found the support system and the plan it is time for execution.  Time to invest your focus in the day to day activities that stack up to enable you to reach the goal.  This boils down to finding or creating the habits that allow you to execute to the plan.

In one of these transformational projects, chances are you will have to do some pattern breaking.  You will have to do things differently than you have before.  Whether it is committing to a diet or doing the miles you cannot earn the right to achieve that goal without making the investment.

Focus allows you to make sacrifices.  It allows you to weigh your decisions in the light of the goal.  Sometimes this will manifest as selfishness and self-serving.  But, that is the core of it.  You are serving yourself and you are serving the goal.  When you focus you will naturally pull away from other activities and people that are not on that path.

Mantras help with the execution as well.  Looking out the window at a snowy, windy, below zero day and having the self-talk to get you out the door.  Running a 2-hour tempo run on a morning so cold they are chipping dead bodies out of the Charles River – takes a certain self-talk.  Unicorn don’t care.

And in the end, we celebrate.  That focus has earned us the right to stand among the few who did the focused work to fight for a goal.  If the goal is worthy you may not achieve as much as you hoped but the journey will still change you.

Consider yourself blessed if you are one of the lucky ones who have found a goal that compels you.  A goal that you are so passionate about that it forces you to focus your entire being on it.  A goal that changes you.

That is the stuff of life.

That’s focus.