Chapter V Principle 2 Focus: Sharpen Your Knife

Chapter V Principle 2 Focus: Sharpen Your Knife

If ever there were an unlikely candidate for scientific greatness, it would have been Mary Somerville. She was born into a poor Scottish family in the eighteenth century, when higher education was not seen as proper for a lady. Her mother did not prevent her from reading, but society at large did not approve of it. An aunt, seeing that behavior, commented to her mother, “I wonder you let Mary waste her time in reading, she never sews more than if she were a man.” When she did have an opportunity to attend school briefly, her mother regretted the expense. Somerville explained, “she would have been contented if I had only learnt to write well and keep accounts, which was all that a woman was expected to know.” As a woman, she faced even larger obstacles, with household duties and expectations taking precedence over any kind of self-education. “A man can always command his time under the plea of business, a woman is not allowed any such excuse,” she lamented. Her first husband, Samuel Greig, was strongly against learning in women.

一个叫 Mary Somerville 的女人，她年轻时没有接收过正式的高等教育。

Yet despite those obstacles, Somerville’s accomplishments were vast. She won awards in mathematics, learned several languages to fluency, and knew how to paint and play the piano. In 1835, she, along with the German astronomer Caroline Herschel, were the first women elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. The accomplishment that eventually brought her fame was her translation and expansion of the first two volumes of Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Traité de mécanique céleste, a massive five-volume work on the theory of gravitation and advanced mathematics, acclaimed as the greatest intellectual achievement since Isaac Newton wrote the Principia Mathematica. Laplace himself commented that Somerville was the only woman in the world who understood his work.

Somerville 仍取得了非常大的成就，数学领域获奖、会说多门语言，以及翻译了很多著作等。

The easiest explanation for the vast discrepancy in Somerville’s situation and her accomplishments would be genius. It is no doubt true that she possessed an incredibly sharp mind. Her daughter once commented that while she was being taught, her mother could grow impatient. “I well remember her slender white hand pointing impatiently to the book or slate—‘Don’t you see it? There is no difficulty in it, it is quite clear.’” However, in reading through her descriptions of her life, this seeming genius was beset by many insecurities. She claimed to have “bad memory,” recounted struggles learning new things as a child, and had even at one point “thought [herself] too old to learn to speak a foreign language.” Whether that was polite modesty or genuine feelings of inadequacy, we cannot know, but it does at least put cracks in the idea that she approached learning from a place of unshakable confidence and talent.

年轻时学习环境那么糟糕，还能获得这么多成就，Somerville 难道是天才吗？但她说，自己记性不好，小时候学新东西时总遇到困难，还曾一度认为自己太老了不适合学习外语了。作者认为这至少说明了认为她是天才的这个想法没那么可靠。

Peering deeper, another picture of Somerville emerges. She had a keen intellect, yes, but what she possessed in even greater quantities was an exceptional ability to focus. As an adolescent, when she was put to bed and denied a candle for reading, she would mentally work through the works of Euclid in mathematics. While still breastfeeding her child, an acquaintance encouraged her to study botany, so she devoted “an hour of study to that science” every morning. Even during her greatest achievement, the translation and expansion of Laplace’s Traité de mécanique céleste, she had to carry out all the household duties of raising children, cooking, and cleaning. “I was always supposed to be at home,” she explains, “and my friends and acquaintances came so far out of their way on purpose to see me, it would have been unkind and ungenerous not to receive them. Nevertheless, I was sometimes annoyed when in the midst of a difficult problem one would enter and say, ‘I have come to spend a few hours with you.’ However, I learnt by habit to leave a subject and resume it again at once, like putting a mark into a book I might be reading.”

她很聪明，但是与聪明相比，她更强大的能力是专注。当晚上要睡觉并且家人不给她蜡烛用于阅读时，她会在心里琢磨数学知识。在给她孩子喂奶时，一个熟人推荐她学习植物学，然后她每天早上会花1小时学习这些东西。她每天都有很多琐事要干，但同时她也在做自己的学术工作。她有时候很烦自己在研究一个问题时被人打断，要求陪聊，但她习惯了，并且可以快速进入状态，在之前结束的地方继续研究下去。

In the realm of great intellectual accomplishments an ability to focus quickly and deeply is nearly ubiquitous. Albert Einstein focused so intensely during his formulation of the general theory of relativity that he developed stomach problems. The mathematician Paul Erdős was a heavy user of amphetamines to increase his capacity for focus. When a friend bet him that he could not give them up, even for a short time, he did manage to do so. Later, however, he complained that the only result had been that mathematics as a whole was set back a month in his unfocused absence. In these annals of extreme focus, one often conjures up an image of solitary geniuses laboring away without distraction, free from worldly concerns. However remarkable this is, I’m more interested in the kind of focus that Somerville seemed to possess. How can one in an environment such as hers, with constant distractions, little social support, and continuous obligations, manage to focus long enough not only to learn an impressive breadth of subjects, but to such depths that the French mathematician Siméon Poisson once remarked that “there were not twenty men in France who could read [her] book”?

在世界上获得伟大成就的人群中，focus quickly and deeply 是非常常见的。爱因斯坦因太过投入相对论的研究，得了胃病。还有其他的一些例子。人们脑海里认为，这些人都是在非常安静和没有干扰源的环境下专注工作的。但作者更感兴趣的是，像 Somerville 这样的例子。在这么嘈杂的环境中还能做出如此成就，还能将一些学问研究得如此之深，他想知道是 Somerville 怎么做到的。

How did Somerville become so good at focusing? What can we glean from her strategies in getting difficult mental work done in less-than-ideal conditions? The struggles with focus that people have generally come in three broad varieties: starting, sustaining, and optimizing the quality of one’s focus. Ultralearners are relentless in coming up with solutions to handle these three problems, which form the basis of an ability to focus well and learn deeply.

Problem 1: Failing to Start Focusing (aka Procrastinating)

The first problem that many people have is starting to focus. The most obvious way this manifests itself is when you procrastinate: instead of doing the thing you’re supposed to, you work on something else or slack off. For some people, procrastination is the constant state of their lives, running away from one task to another until deadlines force them to focus and then having to struggle to get the job done on time. Other people struggle with more acute forms of procrastination that manifest themselves with particular kinds of tasks. I was more like this second kind of person, where there were certain types of activities I would spend all day procrastinating on. Though I have no problems writing essays for my blog, when I had to do research for this book, I dragged my feet. Similarly, I had no problem sitting and watching the videos of MIT classes, but I always tackled the first problem sets with considerable trepidation. Had it not been for the intense schedule I was on, I might have found excuses to avoid doing so for much longer. In fact, writing this chapter was one of the tasks I procrastinated on a great deal.

主要讲拖延，讲到了两种拖延的类型。

Why do we procrastinate? The simple answer is that at some level there’s a craving that drives you to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself, or both. In my case, I procrastinated on writing this chapter because I had a lot of ideas and I was unsure where to start. My anxiety was that by committing something to paper, there was a good chance I might end up writing it poorly. Silly, I know. But most motives to procrastinate are silly when you verbalize them, yet that doesn’t stop them from ruling your life. Which brings me to the first step to overcoming procrastination: recognize when you are procrastinating.

“因有太多点子，反而导致自己拖延不开始动笔写作。”我也遇到过这种情况，有太多的书，反而不知道从哪本开始看比较好，导致拖延。
打破拖延的第一步：在拖延的时候，认识到自己在拖延。

Much procrastination is unconscious. You’re procrastinating, but you don’t internalize it that way. Instead you’re “taking a much-needed break” or “having fun, because life can’t always be about work all the time.” The problem isn’t those beliefs. The problem is when they’re used to cover up the actual behavior—you don’t want to do the thing you need to be focusing on, either because you are directly averse to doing it or because there’s something else you want to do more. Recognizing that you’re procrastinating is the first step to avoiding it.

大多数拖延都是无意识间发生的。脑子里产生的让自己休息一会，玩一会的想法，其实都表面的，真实的底层的想法其实是你不想做自己应该专注做的事情。

Make a mental habit of every time you procrastinate; try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else. You might even want to ask yourself which feeling is more powerful in that moment—is the problem more that you have a strong urge to do a different activity (e.g., eat something, check your phone, take a nap) or that you have a strong urge to avoid the thing you should be doing because you imagine it will be uncomfortable, painful, or frustrating? This awareness is necessary for progress to be made, so if you feel as though procrastination is a weakness of yours, make building this awareness your first priority before you try to fix the problem.

想要改善自己拖延的毛病，先培养一个心理上的习惯：try to recognize that you are feeling some desire not to do that task or a stronger desire to do something else。在遇到这些时刻时，问问自己，哪种感觉更强烈：是因为特别想做别的事情，还是觉得做自己本该做的事情会让自己感到不舒服、痛苦和沮丧？
让这种知觉训练至自动化。

Once you can easily and automatically recognize your tendency to procrastinate, when it occurs, you can take steps to resist the impulse. One way is to think in terms of a series of “crutches” or mental tools that can help you get through some of the worst parts of your tendency to procrastinate. As you get better about taking action on the project you’re working on, these crutches can be changed or gotten rid of altogether when procrastination is no longer a problem.

一旦你可以轻易地且自动地认识到自己有拖延的倾向了，你就可以在这时候采取一些措施来抵抗这些冲动。一种方法就是通过一些 crutch 来帮助自己度过拖延冲动最强烈的时候。当你越来越擅长 taking action on the project you’re working on，这些 crutch 可以进行一些调整，或者在拖延不再是一个问题时直接摆脱这些 crutch。

A first crutch comes from recognizing that most of what is unpleasant in a task (if you are averse to it) or what is pleasant about an alternative task (if you’re drawn to distraction) is an impulse that doesn’t actually last that long. If you actually start working or ignore a potent distractor, it usually only takes a couple minutes until the worry starts to dissolve, even for fairly unpleasant tasks. Therefore, a good first crutch is to convince yourself to get over just the few minutes of maximal unpleasantness before you take a break. Telling yourself that you need to spend only five minutes on the task before you can stop and do something else is often enough to get you started. After all, almost anyone can endure five minutes of anything, no matter how boring, frustrating, or difficult it may be. However, once you start, you may end up continuing for longer without wanting to take the break.

第一个 crutch

As you progress, your first crutch may start to get in the way. You may find yourself starting but then, because the task is unpleasant and focus is hard, taking advantage of the five-minute rule too often to be productive. If this is the case and your problem has switched from being unable to get started to taking breaks too often, you can try something a little harder, say the Pomodoro Technique: twenty-five minutes of focus followed by a fiveminute break.* Keep in mind that it’s essential not to switch to a harder goal when you’re still mostly impeded by an earlier problem. If you still can’t start working, even with the five-minute rule, switching to harder and more demanding crutches may backfire.

In some cases, the moment of frustration may not come at the beginning, but still be predictable. When I was learning Chinese characters through flash cards, for instance, I’d always feel an urge to give up whenever I couldn’t remember the answer to one of my cards. I knew this feeling was temporary, however, so I added a rule for myself: I can only quit when I’ve remembered the most recent card correctly. In practice, the cards were quick, so this usually only took an extra twenty or thirty seconds of persistence; however, my patience for doing flash cards went up dramatically as a result.

Eventually, if working on your project is not troubled by extreme procrastination, you may want to switch to using a calendar on which you carve out specific hours of your day in advance to work on the project. This approach allows you to make the best use of your limited time. However, it works only if you actually follow it. If you find yourself setting a daily schedule with chunked hours and then frequently ignore it to do something else, go back to the start and try building back up again with the five-minute rule and then the Pomodoro Technique.

Eventually, you may reach Mary Somerville’s level of focus, one that she could activate on a moment-to-moment basis, making a decision as to whether she had time to spare. Despite her formidable capacity for focus, it seems that even Somerville would deliberately block out time for the study of particular subjects. Therefore it was a conscious habit, not merely spontaneous studying, that enabled her many successes. For myself, I find that some learning activities are so intrinsically interesting that I can focus on them for a long time without pressure. I generally had no problem watching lectures during the MIT Challenge, for instance. Other tasks, however, required the five-minute rule for me to get past my desire to procrastinate. If I had to scan and upload my files, they’d often build up in a pile before I would finally tackle them. Don’t ever feel bad if you have to back up a stage, either; you cannot control your aversions or tendency to distraction, but with practice you can lessen their impact.

Problem 2: Failing to Sustain Focus (aka Getting Distracted)

The second problem people tend to encounter is an inability to sustain focus. This can happen when you’ve sat yourself down to study or practice something, but then your phone buzzes and you look away, a friend knocks on the door to say hello, or you spin off into a daydream only to realize you’ve been staring at the same paragraph for the last fifteen minutes. Like the challenge of initiating focus, sustaining focus is important if you want to make progress learning hard things. Before I talk about how to sustain focus, however, I’d like to raise a question about what kind of focus is the best to sustain.

专注状态被打断的情况：手机响了、朋友来找你玩了、做白日梦发呆等。

Flow, a concept pioneered by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is often used as the model for what ideal focus looks like. This is the state of mind you associate with being “in the zone.” You stop being interrupted by distracting thoughts, and your mind becomes completely absorbed in the task at hand. Flow is the enjoyable state that slides right between boredom and frustration, when a task is neither too hard nor too easy. This rosy picture, however, does have some detractors. The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, the researcher behind deliberate practice, argues that flow has characteristics that are “inconsistent with the demands of deliberate practice for monitoring explicit goals and feedback and opportunities for error correction. Hence, skilled performers may enjoy and seek out flow experiences as part of their domain-related activities, but such experiences would not occur during deliberate practice.” Ultralearning, with its similar focus on performancedriven learning, would also appear to be unsuitable for flow, in the same way that Ericsson originally argued for deliberate practice.

My own thought is that a flow state is not impossible during ultralearning. Many cognitive activities associated with learning are in the range of difficulty that makes flow possible or even likely. However, I also agree with Ericsson that learning often involves entering into situations in which the difficulty makes flow impossible. Additionally, the self-consciousness that is absent in flow may need to be present in both ultralearning and deliberate practice, as you need to consciously adjust your approach. Working on a programming problem at the limit of your abilities, pushing yourself to write in a style that is unfamiliar to you, or trying to minimize your accent when speaking a new language is each a task that goes against the automatic patterns you may have accumulated. This resistance to what is natural may make flow harder to achieve, even though it is ultimately beneficial for accomplishing your learning goal.

My advice? Don’t worry about flow. In some learning tasks, you’ll achieve it easily. I often felt as though I were in a flow state while doing practice problems during the MIT Challenge, drilling vocabulary while learning languages, or drawing. At the same time, don’t feel guilty if flow doesn’t come automatically. Your goal is to enhance your learning, and this often involves pushing through some sessions that are more frustrating than what could be considered ideal for flow. Remember, even if your learning is intense, your use of the skill later on will not be. Investments made in pushing through learning now will make skillful practice a much more enjoyable activity down the road.

After considering how you should focus, let’s consider duration. How long should you study? While this problem presumes that you’re getting distracted and giving up focusing long before you should, the literature on focus does not suggest that ever-longer periods of focus are optimal from a learning standpoint. Researchers generally find that people retain more of what they learn when practice is broken into different studying periods than when it is crammed together. Similarly, the phenomenon of interleaving suggests that even within a solid block of focus, it can make sense to alternate between different aspects of the skill or knowledge to be remembered. Therefore, if you have several hours to study, you’re possibly better off covering a few topics rather than focusing exclusively on one. Doing so has trade-offs, however, so if your study time becomes more and more fractured, it may be difficult to learn at all.

What’s needed is a proper balance. To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks. If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn. Of course, these are merely efficiency guidelines; you ultimately need to find what works best for you, considering not only what is optimal for the purposes of retention but also what fits your schedule, personality, and work flow. For some people, as little as twenty minutes might fit their lives best; others may prefer to spend an entire day learning.

Supposing that you’ve found a chunk of time to learn that is as optimal for you as it can be, how can you sustain your focus during that time? I’ve found that there are three different sources that cause focus to break down and distraction to occur. If you’re struggling to concentrate, look at each of these three in turn.

Distraction Source 1: Your Environment