Scott H Young

How do you become completely focused towards a goal without burning yourself out? Even if your motivation for finishing a project, getting in shape or graduating summa cum laude is high, 100% focus is almost impossible to keep up. Does achievement require obsession, or is there another way?

The most obvious solution to the burnout problem is simply to not work so hard. If you take time to rest, then you can still focus with the rest of your time. While energy management is a huge step up from chronic procrastination or being a workaholic, this approach is essentially a trade-off. You end up with unused time in order to prevent burning out.

A better strategy to keep your energy high without sacrificing your focus is to work on complements.

Immersion Beats Obsession

A complement is an activity that indirectly helps your goal, but is a completely different type of activity. Spending time on complements as well as your regular work can help you get more progress towards your goal without feeling like a sacrifice. This is a strategy of immersion instead of obsession.

The two criteria for a complement is simple:

1. The activity must indirectly help with your goal.
2. The activity must be fundamentally different than regular work.

Indirect Action

A good complement will help you make progress towards a big goal, although usually indirectly. If you wanted to get in shape, your regular “work” would be eating the right foods and exercising. Obviously it’s impossible to be obsessive here and stay at the gym 12 hours a day. There is a limit to how much time you can spend directly working on this goal.

However, if you are really serious about a health goal, you might want to add on a complement activity. These complements won’t substitute the direct work of getting to the gym, but they can support that work. Here are a few example complements for your health:

• Reading books on nutrition and exercise.
• Talking to people who have already reached your fitness goals.
• Experimenting with different cooking techniques to find great tasting food within your diet.

None of these activities, on its own, will help you get in shape. But by adding them to your project, you can get faster results without doing more work.

Fundamentally Different From Work

Complements must be a different type of activity than regular work. Reading books outside your classes may be great for indirect help in your studies. However, if you are having to read weighty textbooks as well, it doesn’t make a good complement.

If you want to add complements to help achieve your goal, look for activities that are completely different from the direct work you do. Some dimensions to consider:

• If your work is physical (e.g. exercising), pick non-physical complements.
• If your work is on the computer, pick non-digital complements.
• If your work is highly creative, pick complements focused on learning.
• If your work is solitary, pick social complements.

Think of your energy as being like a muscle. If you use it too much, you need to rest. However, that doesn’t mean you can get a bit more from using a different muscle. Compliments that help indirectly but differ in activity type allow you to become fully immersed in your project.

Finding Powerhouse Complements

Finding great complements requires broadening the scope of your project. Brainstorm for activities that would help with your goal but require different muscles. Don’t look at your project as just a linear sequence of steps to finish. Look for alternative ways you can boost your progress.

There are some complements that work well for a variety of situations. Here’s just a few you might want to consider:

• Reading. Books can become complements for almost any project. More knowledge means you can work smarter.
• Networking. Connections can help the inflow of new ideas and opportunities. Building connections with possible mentors or even peers can give you a strong support base.
• Courses. Take courses to get a bit more skill in a complementary area. Join Toastmasters to help with your communication, or learn a martial art to work on your self-discipline.
• Create. Building turns abstract ideas into skills. Don’t start entire new projects to work on, but small bursts of creative activities such as writing, music, art or programming can build complementary skills.
• Teach. Bring your current skills to other people. This could be in leading a volunteer organization, tutoring a beginner or writing a blog on the subject. Teaching helps by improving your own understanding of a subject as well as connecting you with influential people.

Direct Work First, Complements Later

The idea of complements also comes with a potential danger. That is, if you spend all your time working on the indirect activities, you might neglect the really important work. The goal of a complement is to make use of the leftover energy you can’t devote entirely to work. When compliments start to replace actual work (reading about health instead of exercising) nothing will get done.

The purpose of a complement is to move you towards immersion instead of obsession. By immersing yourself in all the different angles that help towards a goal, you can stay focused without exhausting yourself. Complete obsession with 12-hour workdays isn’t healthy. But if you immerse yourself, most of the activities that help your project won’t actually feel like work.

If nobody can work 100 times harder than you, then how can some people earn 100, 1 000 or even a 1 000 000 times the results? The answer is that most problems don’t work on a straight line, giving the same amount of results for each hour you invest.

The Stonecutter’s Dilemma is a good example of this problem. As a stonecutter, you might crash your hammer into a rock a hundred times without seeing anything more than a scratch on the surface. Then, on the hundred and first blow, the entire rock splits in two. It wasn’t that your 101st strike was particularly strong, instead, it revealed the unseen damage built up with the hundred strikes before it.

Malcolm Gladwell calls this phenomenon a tipping point, of which he wrote a book by the same name. In the book, Gladwell describes how some diseases work on an exponential scale. A thousand people with a 24-hour flu, each contacting fifty people a day, might infect a thousand more people, keeping the virus from exploding.

But if those thousand flu carriers contact another five people each day, they might infect 1100 people instead of 1000. That 1100 would infect over 1200 the day after and it would only take a few weeks before the flu has tipped and spread over an entire city.

Tipping Points and You

The tipping point phenomenon, where crossing a certain threshold has runaway consequences, can have a big impact on your work. Tipping points happen in some areas of life more than others, but it is still important to keep this imbalance of effects in mind.

Blogging and earning passive income are areas highly affected by tipping points. Some of the posts I’ve written on this website have received hundreds of times the traffic than regular entries. A small increase in quality and bit of luck can cause word of mouth traffic to explode.

Although your health doesn’t have compounding returns, gaining weight can be seen as a negative version of the tipping point. Eating 100-200 calories more a day than you burn off can result in gaining an extra ten pounds over a year. Less than a muffin more per day is enough to throw off the balance.

How to Make Use of the Tipping Point

The most important lesson about exponential growth is to realize that results won’t match up with effort. Unfortunately the bigger the potential upside (setting up a six-figure blog, launching a best-selling book, etc.), the bigger the delay. Here are some tips (no pun intended) on using tipping points in your daily life:

1. Focus on first-order improvements. A first-order improvement is an increase in quality. Eating healthier and eating less is a first-order improvement, losing weight or dropping your blood pressure are second-order improvements. Focusing on first-order improvements keeps you moving forward before you reach a tipping point.
2. Look for easy tips. Find areas that, if you made a concentrated effort, could easily expand into further possibilities. Working on a productive habit to save you an hour each day, might give you the time you need to invest in yourself. Getting yourself to exercise regularly could give you the tip you need in your energy levels or self-confidence.
3. Get internal validation. External validation comes from being successful and getting results. However, if tipping points rule your efforts, then you won’t get validation even if you are doing everything right. Picking work and activities you find intrinsically motivating can give you the psychic energy to keep persisting, even if external progress is flatlining.
4. Projects before goals. I like to distinguish between projects and goals. While a project is something you invest energy and build towards, a goal simply represents a destination. By emphasizing projects, your feedback stays tied to your results.
5. No tweak is unimportant. Even little improvements can push you closer towards a tipping point. Perfectionism is bad when it keeps you from finishing. Instead work like open-source software which is always released, but is constantly being tweaked or improved.
6. Plan for the worst. The worst-case whenever dealing with a huge-upside tipping point is that it will never come. You might be the aspiring author, struggling entrepreneur or actor forever. Only take on long-haul projects if you can enjoy the process. That way even if the worst-case does happen, you’ve still had a great ride.

Starting Points for Exponential Thinking

Tipping points aren’t the best model to use everywhere, but there are some places you might want to do more exponential thinking. Here’s a quick list of ideas to get the snowball rolling:

1. Learning. If you learn holistically, then each idea you pick up increases your ability to learn new ideas. Exponential learning isn’t something most people consider when reading a book.
2. Money. Does your money earn you money? Even if you aren’t investing large amounts, you can still open up an ING account to keep whatever money you don’t need for checking.
3. Skills. Learning new skills tends to work on a logarithmic scale. That is, it can take six months to have 80% proficiency and twenty years to get 95%. However, the value of that skill tends to work exponentially. One designer might only be 10% better than you but earn 10x the income.
4. Social Networks. Increasing the amount of new people you seek out each day improves your social circle in an exponential fashion as one person refers you to their friends.