On doing the thing that got you here

When monks meditate in a monastery, they need no conception of time. That's all there is: meditation, eating, sleeping. When it's time to eat, a bell's ring reverberates throughout the monastery, entering the monks' consciousness. It's time to eat, then return to the main thing.

This is similar to how professional athletes live their lives. Everything they do revolves around practicing their sport and recovering from practice. All peripheral matters can be managed by others, and athletes are paid well enough that they don't have to worry about these marginal concerns.

When you achieve some notoriety in your field of expertize—and this includes athletes—you start getting opportunities to do things that detach you from the main thing. Speaking engagements, non-profit roundtables, coaching/mentoring requests, and more. You may feel flattered at such opportunities because finally someone sees you and wants to engage with you.

For monks, this effect is virtually non-existent. Living a monastic life means exactly that—focusing solely on the main thing, with no distractions.

Professional athletes benefit from entire support teams who manage their opportunities. This delegation ensures the athletes' mental space remains free to focus on their main priority: their sport.

In the case of work, there doesn’t seem to be similar incentives. People are almost always left to their own devices to figure it out. And this often turns into a spiral of agreeable acceptance of opportunities that lead further away from the main thing. This, I argue, is undesirable because it removes you from the main thing. You also don’t want to absolutely not accept any opportunity, because some exploration breeds motivation and creativity. You want to do some exploration, and mostly exploitation (keeping the main thing the main thing).

Dave Fontenot (HF0) organizes a 12-week founders retreat where they allow a group of repeat founders (that already had success and hence expanded their scope of opportunities) to live a monastic life building their product, which is the main thing. All the rest is taken care of by the HF0 team.

So, I have been asking some question-prompts to reflect on this:

How would i need to change for that to take place? What habits would i get rid of? What beliefs would i discard? What experiments could i run to test some hypotheses immediately? How could i create the circumstances to make space for periods of intense focus on an important project?