Very True by Verissimo

Alex (00:54)
Before we get into it, a quick note. This episode is a little different from what I normally do here. Most of the time on Very True, we're talking with founders about the messy reality of building startups, the pivots and the fumbles and the parts of the journey that don't make it into the press release. Today, I'm going to do something a bit more personal, a solo episode on a topic that's been sitting in the back of my head for the last few months, and that I finally worked into a piece of writing this week. It's about focus, specifically the relationship between what your body is doing and what your brain has room to do.

and why I think most of us, founders and investors included, have a backwards relationship with attention.

I came at this through endurance sports, but it's really a piece about how to think clearly in a world that's relentlessly trying to pull you in 15 different directions at once. If you're a founder, this matters because the kind of cognitive work the job really demands isn't always the kind of cognitive work the productivity canon tells you to optimize for.

There's a middle ground that I think a lot of us have been quietly using without ever naming and naming it has changed how I structure my own week. The full written version of this is up on my sub stack business model logic and the link is in the show notes if you'd rather read than listen or if you want to send it to someone after. But for now, let me walk through it the way that I worked it out, which is mostly out loud and on the move. Here we go.

Alex (02:05)
We live in an attention starved world that has trained most of us to be addicted to engagement without ever realizing it. And the strangest place I've ever noticed it is on a mountain bike. When I'm riding my mountain bike out in the hills going up some steep, complicated thing, navigating the rocks, coming downhill at 30 miles an hour over baseball size boulders. I got to be locked in I was recently listening to

another amazing podcast from Cal Newport where he discussed and went through his 10 year old book now called Deep Work and updated it for today. And he talked about this concept of training yourself for focus. And that really led me to double down on the concept of deep work in my own life, how I implement it and the different formats that that can take. As a millennial, I didn't grow up with technology in front of me.

And something that I've realized for myself is that I'm not under control. I'd like to think I am, but I'm not.

And I think most people are not either.

But I want to introduce this concept of Ambient Restlessness. And to me, it's this concept of using part of your brain for something and almost occupying it so that the other part of your brain can be calmer. And so you're taking that what I call ambient restlessness, you're directing it towards one activity, and then you're using the remainder of your focus on something else.

And there's a whole spectrum of what that can look like and the type of value that it can bring you

If you are an athlete, if you exercise, I think this will really resonate with you. But I think there's a lot of other things that can really make it work well.

So I'll start with a concept that Cal Newport talks about in his recent podcast, where he reassesses deep work 10 years later and says, how would I update it? And one of the things he says is that he recommended 10 years ago was quitting social media. And he didn't mean quit it and drop it forever. I respect the fact that he and other people who make a good living leveraging the power of social media.

have the humility to say that, but there's a lot of good that can come from social media. It's I think gone off the rails a little bit, but there's really quite a lot of good that can come from it, but it needs to be managed. recently I went on a video fast. I watched no videos for over a month. if something popped up on the screen, I closed it. No sports highlights, no nerdy engineering, geography content, no biking content, nothing. And.

What that allowed me to do was have calm and quiet in my mind instead of distracting it completely, but also reintroduce it to my life in a way that really I was in control of. But what Cal's point is on this is that focus is actually a skill. It's, it's not just a habit. It's something that you have to learn. It's something that you have to work on. And what he recommends is doing something that requires all of your focus.

And so if we start taking that apart and making it an active skill, that concept of engagement and focus, it actually can result in something that

One of my rabbis, one of my mentors has said many times, which is that you can't focus if you're not happy. And you also can't be happy if you can't focus. And these two concepts are very, very intrinsically tied. And this is why, I'm guilty of this. I'm sure everyone else is every once in a while you go down some, Instagram reel or YouTube short rabbit hole and you feel like garbage afterwards. First of all, it's burned up a lot of your focused capacity. But second of all, it just feels unproductive.

and it makes you exhausted. So you haven't done anything productive. You focused on something that is not active, but it's passive. And so what I want to get to is this concept of leveraging that high level of focus that can either be given or taken. And coming back to this concept of ambient restlessness that that really has created for an entire generation in a society.

and turning it into something much more productive. Nine months ago, I just, I always say I just Forrest Gumped it. I just started running. And that's been great.

I shortly after that got back into biking. had always been into biking from when I was a kid. I started playing tennis again and tennis is very

focused. Actually, Cal Newport uses that as his example in his recent podcast. And so as I started biking again, I got back into road biking. And then I got back into mountain biking. And it's been a whole wild world. I was on a

mountain bike ride recently on a trail called the sugar trail, which is one of the most famous trails in Israel starts in Maale Adumim which is east of Jerusalem and goes down towards the Dead Sea to a town called Almog and then you hop in trucks and come back up the hill. It's like Enduro downhill intense. It requires like 110 % of focus because you're also running on tons of adrenaline and at the end of it you're

physically and emotionally exhausted as a result of that you almost have like a hangover, but what I've noticed is You can use these physical activities that also requires some cognitive load to Manage that ambient restlessness to a point of productivity Usually it's fostering Creativity it's fostering the skill of learning how to focus and do deep work

and creating that pattern in your life. Or it might just be entirely meditative. So I'll start with that mountain biking example. When you're actually doing the mountain biking part, you got to be locked in. It's 100 % focus, You can't really be listening to music. Maybe if you're on a trail that you know really, really well, but

If you're not focused, you're going to hit the deck and it's going to be very, very painful. I put up a video not that long ago of myself, mountain biking, first person view. I was probably going 30 miles an hour down some steep terrain, boulders, rocks, and like you trust the bike, you pick your lines, you're looking 15 feet ahead. It's absolutely exhilarating, kind of scary. I usually don't tell my wife or my mom that's what I'm doing.

But it actually, it's almost like a refreshing experience to have that deep, intense focus. Everything else, any other thing that was bothering you, any ache or pain that you might have, any issue you're having at work with your family, your kids, you know, whatever it may be, you just forget about it because you have to be completely, completely locked in. So one level below that is road biking.

Now with road biking, sometimes I'll listen to a podcast. Often I'm listening to music. Sometimes it's nothing depending on if you're, with a group or, or if it's social, but if you're on, bike paths, then yeah, podcast music, fine. Like usually they're fairly empty. If you're in traffic and you're going up a hill. maybe you can have something, but you're definitely on open ear headphones, you know, like the shockz. and.

You have to be listening closely. But when you're climbing, when you're on those bike paths, you actually have the space to hear something out. when you're on a descent going 40 miles an hour, no, you got, again, it's like mountain biking. You're completely locked in. But for large portions of a road bike ride, I would say you're in that 60 to 70 % range.

And that serves a purpose, It's these different bursts. It's these spurts. You can use the most music as motivation. You can engage with it. You can listen to a podcast that's maybe not quite as deep, where different noises will probably cut parts out. The next level below that is running. now trail running, probably more intense, maybe closer to mountain biking even. but regular road running, whether you're on the road, on the sidewalk,

on a running path. It's in somewhere and I put it in the range of 30 to 50%. For me, this is the sweet spot for podcasts and audio books where with running, you really want to just have things become automatic. You don't want to be thinking about every step. You want them to flow naturally. And there is something to be said for running in silence, for focusing on your form. But when you're running long or maybe when you're in a race,

or really pushing yourself, you want to kind of set it and forget it. so managing to that is really important. for me, I'm focused on navigating, I'm focused on not tripping over something, but it's not as intense, Because you can always just stop, if you're running in the street and you have to watch out for cars, that's one thing. But if you're running down a bike path, it's a whole different story.

And so, I ran a, my first half marathon a couple of months ago and it was actually down at the Dead Sea, which you're running on the levee, salt flats. There's nothing to see. It's extremely boring. There are some like potholes and things you need to be aware of in the salt that you're actually running on

I decided, I don't really remember exactly why, to not listen to any music for the first half and just try to manage to my pace and my goals and everything. And then in the second half, The fatigue started setting in and it started getting a little harder. And I was like, okay, I've been building a playlist for like the last 12 years in Spotify. It's time for that playlist.

If you want that playlist, reach out, I will share it with you. And I just found another gear. I was going at like, the 4:50 per kilometer range, like kilometer 12 comes along and I just turned on the music and boom, was like, I was down to like 430, 435. And the last kilometer, I picked a song, I think.

And it was like 415, 419, something like that. I just ripped it to the end. And that's where if I don't capture some of that focus or take it, I'll even say, away from myself, my brain will start thinking about the pain in my leg and, oh, my stomach's a little this and that. Instead, it's like, no, no, we've got to take that, ambient restlessness that's there where that lets your mind wander.

and help it and turn that into something productive. And so for the first half, I was fine. For the second half, I needed the music as that distraction and as that driver that drove me forward. The last example on the spectrum, frankly, I don't have any experience with. So please, if you think I'm completely wrong, ⁓ object to it, which would be lap swimming. Now I'll put this in contrast to ⁓ open water swimming, which I believe requires quite a bit of focus, but lap swimming is like being in a sensory

deprivation tank with chlorine in it, you're looking at the bottom of the pool, you're looking at the line, I am sure that experienced swimmers know how many strokes it takes them and they don't even have to count, they just know when to turn, they could do it blindfolded. And this creates something, I think almost completely different, which really is the only thing that's tempting me to try swimming maybe. And obviously, that drives me directly towards doing a triathlon, which everyone's been asking me about for a while. It's that's just meditation

And it's probably the closest thing that a Type A millennial rapid fire attention starved person is going to get to like a real meditation without doing something that takes a lot of discipline and a lot of practice. I'll give a quick shout out here to an app called Olo where they've figured out how to also help people who can't meditate, meditate by using really high fidelity sounds that put you in a certain

state of mind, they're they're all natural sounds from nature, music, different things. And I recommend checking out if you want to meditate, but you find meditating really, really hard.

So this all has made a lot of sense to me over the last nine months since I started running and then biking again. But it took me back to something else, which is when I moved to Israel 10 years ago, I had this wacky schedule where I was spending some time in Yeshiva, but I was also working a full-time job and traveling a lot. had an apartment in Jerusalem and another apartment in Tel Aviv. Neither of them were very nice. And I had a car and I was driving back and forth a lot. And so

I have a friend who I'm very grateful to, to this day who recorded every lecture given in the Yeshiva that year. And every time I was on a drive, I was able to listen to one of those lectures. If I didn't have one to listen to, I was able to do a Pimsleur language class, which if you haven't experienced is basically a recording and it talks to you and then you talk back at it. And I've found that trying to do either of those things, which is

listen to an audio only shiur which is Hebrew for a lecture, or listen to a language class sitting at a computer screen or just in a chair and trying to do that. I find impossible. and I think that maybe 20 years ago we'd call that ADD. I think that's par for the course at this stage in this generation. It's really, really hard to do that. I think that it's fundamentally different if you're sitting in front of a person. if I'm in the room for the lecture,

It's a whole four dimensional experience. There's people there. I'm physically engaged with it. And so I can hear and experience what's going on. And I think that is the best still, but in the absence of that, if I'm driving, which I was a lot back then, it was before there was a train between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I would listen to the lectures and I got a lot out of them and I'm a note taker. And obviously I wasn't taking notes while I was driving, but part of my brain was engaged with driving.

which if you've ever driven in Israel, you know that that's a little bit more intense than driving in America in most places. but the experience of having part of my brain, occupied with this pretty monotonous task of driving kind of put that ambient restlessness at bay and allowed the other part of my brain to take in what I was hearing in this lecture and have it actually

affect me. And so sometimes you need two channels. Now, this gets talked about with Netflix shows where they actually started engineering these shows and directing them and writing them in a way I don't remember where I saw this where they know people are on their phones while they're watching the show, which might sound crazy, but check yourself next time you're watching something. Oftentimes one screen is not enough. And especially if it's like a drama or something

It's really hard to keep people totally locked in for an hour when they're used to getting 15 to 60 second, vertical phone clips that are designed to be hyper, hyper engaging. this happens all over the place. The question is, and it always comes back to is how do we use this to our advantage? How do we create this for ourselves in ways where we're taking control, not letting ourselves be taken under control?

and then turn that into something productive. And so I was able to figure this out 10 years ago with my lectures for my rabbis and then also with the Pimsleur language courses. But sometimes adding something to the sensory load actually helps you focus. Now, I don't know what this is called. I'm not a neuroscientist. I'd love to discuss it and hear what some of the experts have to say because something is certainly going on there and I know it's been studied.

This is my big idea again, it's this concept of keeping the ambient restlessness at bay and giving yourself the space to focus at different levels. And like in most things, maintaining the awareness of how to do that.

So I'm gonna take two things right now that I've learned from, Cal Newport, who I'm obviously a big fan of. One of them is this concept of deep work. And I'll mention something quickly, which is he talks a lot about deep work. He gives lots of great examples. One of the things that sometimes I struggle with is what I should be doing deep work on. I think some jobs and some lifestyles lend themselves very obviously to what that deep work needs to be. But I think that for others,

you actually need some of the creativity and different mind states to get to that creativity and spark it in order to even figure out where that deep work should be. And so this concept of productivity and deep work as this monolith that distractions are evil, you got to do deep work. I'd like to kind of, add something to it, which is this

semi-distracted state where we take advantage of this, ambient restlessness and use it as a tool to, lower the threshold of discipline that is required because that has a tax on us, think emotionally and probably also physically. And then use that and introduce those

distractions, whether they're physical or mental, in a way that actually can drive creativity. And I've also been reading Cal's book called Slow Productivity. And he uses a lot of references to things that happened a long time ago before we're in the age that we are now where this semi-distracted state has become.

a positive base case for most people. I'd like to, propose this idea that we can take those moments, and use them to our advantage to drive creativity, to drive productivity.

and to make the most of really where we're at and the tools that are in front of us.

For me, the biggest unlock on this has been the physical activity and understanding the contrast between the road biking, the mountain biking and the running and how each of those, ⁓ train me to focus better in the case of mountain biking, give me the space, really to relax in a lot of ways, but keep me engaged enough where I don't have issues sitting still, feeling productive like I am on the road bike where maybe I'm listening to something, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm just enjoying the scenery.

And then running where the body is almost, it's fully engaged in something else and allows me to take in audio content, react to it, mull it over. Half the time I'm running, I'll be listening to something. I'll stop not running, but I'll stop listening. I'll open up a voice note and I'll start recording whatever's on the top of my mind. And that's been a really powerful thing for me as well.

So there are two failure modes here. And one is that the activity demands more than you have and you try to consume it anyway. if you're listening to a deep audio book, some emotional story, and you're riding on a downhill mountain biking track, the chance that you retain or are affected by anything that you are listening to is just about zero. And

it's just not productive. It's just noise. And it actually probably increases your chance of injury, which is not good. The other failure mode is that this activity that you're using doesn't do anything, It doesn't demand anything of you. And the result is that the content just can't come in because your brain is just bouncing off the walls. It's just wandering. And so

I think that you've got to find your spots, for me, it's the running in a podcast or driving in a pimsleur or, walking and an audio book. and then

The other thing that I've tried to incorporate into this is this concept of muted sessions. I don't know. I don't know what we want to call it, but this concept of biking, of walking, of running, of driving just in silence, which a lot of people recommend and what it allows you to do.

besides all of the meditative and focus things is actually understand your baseline. If you take a data point and say, okay, I'm mountain biking downhill. Let me just, right before I start, think for a second, what do I have left to focus? are there other thoughts bouncing in my head? Am I thinking about what I'm gonna have for dinner? Like, no, absolutely not. okay, now I'm running. And am I thinking about who won the,

the NBA championship? Am I thinking about some email I have to respond to? okay, so that's some level. And then if I'm just sitting on the couch, like sometimes I can't even sit still, right? I gotta look at something. So taking those data points for yourself, understanding where you're holding will allow you to use those moments, I think, to the best of their potential. this has come up many times in the various frameworks that I've developed, but

The key here is that idea of awareness, If you maintain awareness of your state, you can turn almost whatever state you're in into something productive and you instinctually develop the frameworks to make that happen. I've been through this now, interestingly with wearables, right? Where I use a whoop, I have this tendency

to want to measure everything and optimize everything. And I think that if you're an optimizer, there's this pull to like not do something if you're like not sure if it's the right thing. And the whoop has removed that pull for me, I just, know what I should be doing, But at a certain point,

You look at that data and then you just meditate for five seconds. How am I feeling? I woke up this morning. My recovery says 65%. Okay, but how am I feeling? What do I notice? Do I notice my head? Do I notice my heart, my limbs? Whatever it may be to the point where you can just guess what your recovery is going to be without looking at the app. And you kind of grow out of these things. I think this is where

Andrew Huberman is holding. I think it takes a long time and it also again depends on your perfectionistic optimization style personality, but that applies here to your brain as well of understanding what do you have the capacity for? Like what are you up for right now? And dialing in that piece and there's two benefits to that. One, you use your brain in a really productive

way that doesn't tire you out by doing two things at the same time, or maybe not doing two things at the same time, doing zero things, doing one thing, whatever, maybe, maybe some people can do three or four things, I don't know. But I actually just had a friend tell me a funny story that he listened to like an emotional audiobook while running a marathon. And like at mile 20, the guy dies. And that like, destroyed him. I'm like, that is a crazy thing to do.

I think you need better consistency, less emotional up and down. but the main point here is I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do. I'm giving you my own process of awareness and calculation. think everyone can get to a point where they realize this goes well with that. And that goes well with this. And the first benefit is you get a lot done.

You actually feel refreshed afterwards instead of worn out because you are actively driving what your attention is going to versus, a YouTube rabbit hole, which you usually feel physically and emotionally drained afterwards. And the second thing is that afterwards, instead of feeling physically and emotionally drained, you actually feel like you accomplished something and not just one thing you accomplish two things, If I go for a run, I upload the run to Strava, which is a great

social network, or I get closer to my strain goal on whoop And that's an accomplishment and it feels good. And then on the other side, I go, ⁓ I listened to this podcast and either A I learned something or B, I just thought through something, I'd love to get to a point where I can go out, silently on a run or a bike ride, and have a single topic that I want to focus on. And as I go,

generate the thoughts, generate the notes, the content, the voice recordings, whatever it may be that I can work through that and leverage that that state that I'm in that semi distracted, focused enabled state.

So this is all to say that I would encourage everyone to A, exercise, but B, try to maintain that physical and mental awareness of how different types of distractions, instead of just being that distraction can actually be turned into something productive. If you want the written version of this, it's up on my sub stack and let me know what your mountain biking is.

What's your full focus? What's your half focus? They might not be sports. They could be something totally different. They could be coding, whatever it may be. Thank you for listening. As always, feel free to submit any questions on Q &A portion of verytrue.fm.