How do you focus without losing yourself?
It's a question that's been with me for a while.
I'm not talking about focus in the micro as concentrating my attention. I was ok with that, certainly sometimes struggling with it, like we all do, but I found methods and rituals that helped me focus - in the micro - consistently.
No, I'm talking about focus in the macro: focusing on what really matters, the big life direction. Knowing what it is in the macro that deserves my concentrated attention in the micro.
It seemed to me that 'being focused' in the macro was the opposite of being a generalist. If I wanted more focus in life, I had to cut off parts of myself. Because I considered myself a generalist. I had multiple fields of work for clients across industries and even sectors (private, public, politics, civil society). I had interests outside of that work, and every month a new interest seemed to pop up.
I thought focus came at the cost of losing myself: it meant picking one line of work, a career - and giving up the other paths, projects, interests that gave me joy and meaning and tickled my curiosity.
Why did I want that macro focus in the first place?
For the clarity
For the sense of consistency - that my daily actions were building toward something bigger
For the anchor when uncertainty hits, something to return to
For the depth of experience, the opposite of feeling myself spread too thin
So for a long time, I felt stuck in the middle: wanting one, but not willing to give up the other.
One day, I come across the book 'Both-And Thinking' by Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis. As the title suggests, it deals with the dilemmas we often treat as problems to be solved - when in fact, many of them are paradoxes to be managed. Unlike dilemmas, where one side eventually wins, paradoxes persist. Progress comes not from choosing a side but from learning how to hold and work with the tension between them.
That started changing my perspective.
What if I handled my dilemma like a tightrope walker? To not be fixed on either focus or living my generalist life, but to be OK with always balancing, moving in one direction and then the other - consistently inconsistent.
Or, what if I created a mule out of my dilemma? Not one, not the other, but a creative integration - being a focused generalist.
That started to resonate with me much more.
Later, as I was doing research for an article on cognitive biases in politics (see what I mean with thinking I was not being focused?!), I realized I was falling for a classic cognitive trap that explained why I felt stuck on this question.
The cognitive bias: substitution.
It's when we substitute a difficult question with an easier one. We do this, because we want to save the effort of thinking hard and our brains love heuristics, shortcuts to give us what we want with the least effort.
My difficult question was: How do I focus without giving up on being a generalist?
And I unconsciously substituted it with a couple of easier questions - depending on my mood:
Which niche is the best to go into? (external market validation disguised as clarity on what mattered)
Which task should I focus on today? (answering a micro focus, but not macro focus, question)
How can I organize myself better? (improving efficiency as distraction from being effective)
How do I combine everything I do into one clean sentence? (branding mistaken for clarity)
What should I cut to feel less overwhelmed? (but not being any clearer on what was essential)
I kept answering these easier questions. My brain liked the answers, primarily because they were answers. They gave closure, temporarily at least.
And yet, none of these easier questions ever really resolved the deeper one. Not just because these easier questions don't answer the deeper question.
But because the deeper question is not meant to be resolved. My question - focus or being a generalist - combines classic paradoxes and tensions of life:
Whole and part: the desire to live an integrated life vs. the desire to focus on one piece at a time
Control and flexibility: the urge to choose and direct vs. the wisdom to allow and adapt
Today and tomorrow: the value of planning ahead vs. the pull to do what energizes me right now
Work and life: the aspiration to do meaningful work vs. the truth that not all meaning comes form work.
These are not tensions to solve. It's not one or the other, it's both, to varying degrees, at different points in time. It's meant to be 'managed' or - better: it's meant to be lived. As long as there's a sense of aliveness, you're doing well.
And it’s what the world needs:
“People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth.
No, no!
Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.” - Joseph Campbell in ‘The Power of Myth’
If you’re stuck between wanting more focus and not wanting to give up the richness of your generalist self, maybe it’s not a matter of picking sides.
Maybe you don’t need to find the one thing. Maybe you need to stop demanding certainty from a question that was never meant to be answered.
What you can do is choose, with intention, what to lean into next.
That’s not a compromise. That’s the practice.