Crash Course on Starting a Business

So this has to be one of the most misunderstood concepts in the world. And I say that as a person who, you know, only just realized maybe a week or so ago that I myself was thinking about this all wrong. It’s the idea of laser like focus. See, when most of us think about this idea of unleashing laser like focus, we think about this small concentration of light that’s focused on a. A particular spot, this powerful amplification of light, or maybe focus. You know, if we’re using that example, it’s capable of incredible things, like you can cut through metal or a pesky to do list with a tight enough beam of light. But the problem I found with thinking about this aspect of a laser is that it’s the result of what’s come before it. And unfortunately, most of us, we don’t actually understand how a laser or laser like focus is even created.

I know I didn’t. I read an article last week that expanded my mind, and I realized the way I have been internally thinking about this is completely wrong. And I want to share with this, this with you. See, for the longest time, I thought a laser was just a highly concentrated beam of light. You know, like when you’re a kid and you’re lighting paper on fire with a magnifying glass. I just imagined that to get a laser, you just need a bigger magnifying glass. And this is the. This is the approach that I think most of us take to the act of focusing on an activity.

We believe we just need to try harder to condense the focus beam even tighter. Right, but that’s not how a laser. And that’s not how your mind works. So let’s break this down. This is pretty damn cool. I have a feeling you’re going to enjoy this one. See, let’s first define what a laser even is. Laser is an acronym that stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
But what does that even mean? Like, I don’t even know what to do with those words, that combination of light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Well, imagine a big collection of atoms inside of a box, and this box, for our purposes, is gonna have a bunch of mirrors in it to apply enough energy to the atoms inside of that box that one of them will eventually squirt out a photon. A photon is just, you know, a particle of light, a wave of light. So I’m not gonna get into the details of why it is that all the other atoms become what’s known as coherent. That is, they all start to copycat. As soon as that first atom squirts out the photon, all the other atoms follow suit. We’re not going to get into the details of that. Just take me out.
My word here. All right, so now we’ve got a bunch of atoms inside of this box, and they’re all emitting light. But instead of letting that light escape from the box, we’re going to trap it between the mirrors in the box, and we’re going to let that light, that energy, bounce back and forth through the atoms over and over and over again. And this energy, it’s going to continually stimulate those atoms to emit even more light. So the energy that we pumped into the system is, it gets the atoms to squirt out photons. Those photons blast around, creating more energy within the atoms. That gets them to put out more photons, so on, so forth. And now all we have to do is open a little hole in our box, and we let out a stream of coherent light.
And that’s what we call a laser beam. It’s pretty cool. Okay, so what exactly does this have to do with the concept of unleashing laser like focus? Well, instead of thinking of focus as the result of concentrating harder, the better way to think about it is how do we design our lives in a way that maximizes and directs the flow of our energy towards our desired result? How do we create an environment around us, like that box of mirrors, where our energy we’re pumping it in, it’s creating more energy, and it’s reverberating round, and it’s creating even more energy. And then we can focus that by just unleashing the box. So there’s two parts to this equation. Number one is maximizing the energy that we’re able to pump into these atoms. And we do that by pulling the three levers of energy, which we’ve talked about in a ton of different previous podcasts, which is your sleep, your nutrition, and your exercise. Those are the three biological levers we all have at our disposal for increasing the total output of our energy.
If you feel low energy, you probably need to sleep, eat something, or go move your body. Now, once we have maximized our energy, the second part of the equation is that we have to direct that energy. And I think the important part here is that by the directing of our energy, just like cutting the hole in the box and letting the coherent light out, it’s designing the environment so that the laser beam goes where we want. It’s not taking the laser beam, like, from the atoms themselves. And trying to manipulate this cloud of atoms to move and refocus the light in a different direction. I think that’s a lot of times how we treat our chaotic mind when it comes to the act of focus. No, we’re creating an environment where our focus beam is pointed in a particular direction, and that comes through designing our physical environments and designing our schedules, our workspaces, our states of being during that period of time in a way that points our focus in the right direction. And when you do this, you end up with a laser like focus, laser like concentration.

And I find this framework to be very, very helpful as a way of thinking about my own chaotic mind and how I can get the most out of it by singling in and focusing on the task in front of me. So hopefully you found this valuable. Hopefully you found this interesting. If you want more ideas and tips and tricks on how to do this, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast. If you think there’s somebody in your life that would get value from this message, do me a favor, share it with them. This podcast only grows by word of mouth. We don’t pay for any ads or anything like that. So the only way we can get this to spread and grow and to help more people is if you just take a moment and you share it with them.

And that would mean the world to me. Truly, it would. So I appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.