focus

When you're a young, high-potential kid, you're told of the things you can be:

"you're brilliant, maybe you'll be a doctor"
"you're so clever, you could be an inventor someday"
"you're so convincing with your opinions, you'd be a great lawyer"

In college, most of us start to specialize: accounting majors become accountants, engineers learn how to build, etc. But there's still some flexibility. Folks can work for a year or two and pivot into something new, go to grad school, etc. There's nothing permanent about the path you begin in your early 20s. But as you get older and advance in your career, the periphery narrows. It's much harder to excel and advance without a more singular focus. Corporate executives work around the clock. Surgeons practically live in the hospital. Pilots log thousands of flight hours.

Advancing - moving forward - requires focus. And in Economics, we're taught of opportunity costs. Making a decision, spending time or money on something, means rejecting something else. The high-potential youth eventually becomes the accomplished professional, but this comes at a cost. You can no longer be everything you want to be.

All of this to say, growing older and growing successful means focus, and focus means saying "no". It means setting the high-potential kid aside, and accepting that some youthful daydreams won't come true. It's counterintuitive, the realization that all of your dreams cannot coexist. I thought about this when listening to a podcast: a guest spoke of their childhood, saying "my dad was a firefighter".

Surely, his dad was more than a firefighter. Surely he was many things. But focus narrows what we can do, and what we do, like it or not, is our identity.

So pick a lane and focus.