What Actually is Focus?

The reframe

Focus is not 4am wakeups.

Focus is not cold plunge every morning.

Focus is not three hours of sleep.

Focus is not red light glasses.

Focus is not any of these things.

Focus is purely the REMOVAL of anything that's not aligned with your goal. Removal — not the addition.

Most operators get this exactly backward. They think focus is about adding rituals, optimizations, supplements, routines. Brandon Bean cold plunges. Andrew Tate red meat. Joe Rogan four-hour podcasts about discipline. None of it is focus. All of it is addition.

The hard work is subtraction. Everything you've built up, every habit, every input, every relationship, every app on your phone — focus is the discipline to look at all of it and remove anything that doesn't directly move the needle on your goal.

This sub-page is the breakdown of how I actually run focus across different seasons of work, the rules I run on inputs, and the goal-setting principle underneath all of it that makes the whole thing work.

Trench season vs Leverage season

Focus changes shape depending on the season you're in. Different work, different inputs, different optimization targets.

Trench season

You know exactly what to do. You just need to do as much of it as possible.

Right now, recording this case study, I'm in trench season. I know exactly what to film. I know exactly what value to give. The only constraint is execution volume. So everything is optimized for input maximization.

The setup:

• 1 energy drink, 2 energy drink, 3 energy drink, gallon of water
• Empty room, desk, nothing else in it
• Meal prep in the fridge
• Gym downstairs
• I'm in another state entirely — physically removed from anything that could distract me

This isn't a long-walks-and-reading season. This isn't a paying-for-mentorships season. This isn't sauna and conferences season. It's pure input. Remove everything that isn't the work and only leave the work.

Leverage season

After trench season, you enter leverage. The work is done. Now you analyze, refine, find the compound that takes you to the next level.

The setup flips:

• 1-2 hours of deep work daily (down from 10-14)
• Long walks
• More reading
• Conferences and mentorships
• Sauna sessions to just think
• Remove yourself from social media
• Optimize for unlocking the next-tier insight

Same overarching goal (8-figure, 9-figure exit). Different sub-goal. Different inputs. Different optimization target.

This is the most important nuance most operators miss: focus discipline isn't a constant. It rotates with the season. Apply trench-season inputs in a leverage season and you burn out without growing. Apply leverage-season inputs in a trench season and you procrastinate forever.

The 3 questions to identify your season

Before you optimize anything, answer these three honestly:

For me right now: trench season → #1 objective is shipping the case study → majority of profit comes from this info-product cash injection that gets dumped back into my e-com brand for the compound on the equity side.

Most operators can't answer question 3 cleanly. They guess. They lie to themselves about which channel is actually carrying the business. Get honest about it. Then your focus naturally goes where the profit is, not where you wish it was.

The honest take on the info → ecom strategy

While we're here, the actual reason I'm running this info play through the masterclass at all:

Ecom is the real business. Custom brand, MRR stacking, ~20% net margin until subscription compound hits — at that point margins climb because the MRR carries the operational cost while new acquisition adds to the bottom line.

Info is the cash injection. Easy cash, fast to package, low operational lift. Three to five days of recording → meaningful cash → dumped directly into the ecom brand's growth budget.

The model is the YC playbook in reverse — instead of pitching VCs for funding to dump into growth, I'm packaging my own knowledge for operators willing to pay to learn it, and using that as my own self-funded growth round.

If I only ran info, I'd burn out. I don't enjoy being a guru. I enjoy operating ecom brands. But the cash injection from this into ecom yields a much larger return than if I just stayed purely on the ecom side.

That's the honest math. If you're thinking about doing info, understand that ratio. Otherwise you're just a course seller, not an operator.

Volume negates luck

The mechanic underneath all of this:

Volume negates luck — if the volume is going in the right direction.

Picture a single drop of water hitting one specific point on a rock. Over a long enough period, the rock erodes. A dent appears. Then a hole. Then the rock splits.

A single drop of water has no power. Ten thousand drops on the same exact point — that's how mountains carve.

That's how you have to play this game. Focus = repetition. Repetition = boring. You have to be willing to be bored for a long enough period for the compound to surface.

This is why focus requires goal-setting discipline. Without the right goal, the boring days break you. With the right goal, the boring days are just inputs.

The wrong-vehicle confession

The catch on volume: it has to be going in the right direction.

I did high-ticket drop shipping for a year and a half.

• Asleep at 2am, awake at 5am
• No social media at all
• No music — didn't even listen to music
• Didn't drive my truck the entire first year of college
• If I needed to go anywhere, I walked
• Pure work: high-ticket DS, marketing, Google Ads, store building, SEO, fundamentals

The focus was elite. The discipline was elite. The vehicle was wrong.

High-ticket drop shipping wasn't the right vehicle for me. The skills I built carried over — I now have fundamentals across marketing, advertising, store architecture, SEO, and business operations that let me ship work most operators can't match. But the destination wasn't right. I was rowing hard in the wrong direction.

This is why you constantly analyze. Am I working on the right things? Is this going to yield the output I actually need?

The bigger trap most operators fall into: getting emotional about sub-goals. "I have to make this product work." "I have to make this brand work." "I have to scale this past $X."

No, you don't. The overarching goal is financial freedom, taking care of your parents, building real wealth. The sub-goal is whatever vehicle is actually moving in that direction. If the vehicle is wrong, change vehicles. Don't burn five years of focus on the wrong direction.

When you find the right vehicle — focus, repetition, consistency, every day, even when it's boring. That's the whole game.

The 5 focus tactics I actually run

After all the philosophy, the operational layer.

1. Deactivate social media

I'm deactivated everywhere except Twitter and YouTube (necessary for the marketing of this case study). No Instagram. No Snap. No TikTok. Ghost on socials.

If you can't go full ghost, the minimum: screen-block social media and every messaging app until 9pm. Until then you're fully focused. After 9pm you can scroll if you want. Even then, hard cutoff before bed.

The reason this matters: social media is the single largest source of getting psy-oped by other people's ideas, advice, and direction. Cross-reference Module 10 → You Need To Psy-Op Yourself — you can't run your own psy-op while consuming everyone else's. Cut the inputs.

2. Schedule your days beforehand

If you wake up and figure out what to do that day, you're already behind. You need to know what you're doing before you do it. Otherwise you'll move around with no direction and overwhelm yourself.

My setup:

• Google Calendar as the master schedule
• Notebook for the day's task list (extracted from the overarching goal)
• Time-block everything — every block has a specific time, specific color, specific task

Example day:

Calls get batched together on specific days — never scattered across the week.

3. Batch tasks

Don't split similar tasks throughout the day. Your brain needs to shift modes to handle different types of work. Every mode-shift costs energy and time.

My batching:

• Recording videos = only record videos for that block. Won't record one video then switch to ads then switch back to videos. Record everything I'm going to record in one block.
• Making ads = 4 straight hours of only ad production. 30-45 minute break. Then potentially swap to a different task type.
• Customer support / team management = specific blocks, not interrupting deep work

Specific time, specific amounts of time, batched. Every operator should be doing this.

4. The 70% outsourcing rule

When you reach the point where your profit allows you to hire:

If someone can do something 70% as well as you can, give it to them.

Stop doing it yourself. You're not the constraint on that task anymore. Your hours need to go to the work that ONLY you can do at full quality (typically: creative strategy, hiring, major business decisions).

Live example: while recording this, I realized I'm still uploading ads to my brand. I know someone who uploads ads ~70% as well as I do. I'm writing it down — "Hire a media buyer" — and outsourcing it.

Cross-reference Module 2 → Hiring a Media Buyer for the actual hiring SOP.

The book that frames this best: Great CEOs Are Lazy. Free PDF available — gatekept in the masterclass resource library. It goes deep on identifying your constraint and outsourcing everything else.

5. Empty desk

The principle most operators ignore:

When you're working on something, nothing else should be in your visual or digital field.

My current setup, right now, recording this:

• Computer: only Tella (recording software) open
• Remarkable (notebook) for drawing the concepts I'm explaining
• Whop open for the download upload
• That's it
• No Claude open. No YouTube tabs. No Slack. No email. Twenty tabs not open.

The desk itself: only what's getting done is in front of me. Headphones, computer, notebook, maybe water (on the ground, not the desk). Energy drink in the corner if I need it.

Be extreme about this. Protect your mind. Remove every input that isn't directly contributing to the work in front of you.

The goal-setting principle (the real foundation)

This is the part of focus that breaks most operators, and the part the productivity community completely misses.

Your goal isn't $100k/month. Isn't $10k/month. Isn't $1M/month.

Money is what's called a lagging indicator of work. The work produces money — but with a delay.

• You build ads tonight → ads optimize over 2-3 days → spend ramps → revenue follows over the next 2 weeks
• Five years of failure and study compound into the systems that let you produce a case study like this one
• The money doesn't catch up to the work in real time. It surfaces on a lag, often when you've moved on to the next thing entirely

If your goal is money, you're chasing a lagging indicator. You'll burn out before the compound hits because the feedback loop is too slow to reward you in the moment.

But there's a deeper problem.

When money is your god

If money is your goal — your real goal, the one you actually optimize for — then anything that doesn't make money becomes a net negative.

• Your mom calling to check on you → net negative
• A girlfriend or boyfriend who wants time → net negative
• Praying, faith, studying scripture → net negative
• Helping a friend through something → net negative
• Anything that costs time and doesn't produce dollars → net negative

And at the extreme: scamming people becomes a net positive. It produces money fast. If money is your god, anything that produces money is good, and anything that doesn't is the enemy.

This is why money can't be the goal.

What the goal actually has to be

You have to set the goal at the level of values, principles, and meaning. Real questions to sit with:

• What are my values?
• What are my principles?
• What is the overarching thing I'm pursuing?
• What am I willing to suffer for over an extended period of time?

When you can answer those clearly, the goal sits at the level of identity and meaning, not numbers on a screen. Anything that's a net positive to that identity stays. Anything that's a net negative gets removed.

Money becomes a byproduct. A meaningful byproduct, yes — money is leverage to take care of the people you love, build the life you want, fund the work you believe in. But it's downstream of the actual goal, not the goal itself.

When you set goals correctly, the boring days of focus stop breaking you. Because the boring days are now in service of something that actually matters to you. That's when the rock-and-water mechanic actually works.

Cross-references

• Module 10 → You Need To Psy-Op Yourself — the deeper layer underneath focus. You can't focus on the wrong subconscious programming
• Module 10 → Defining Success — sets the overarching goal that focus serves. Without success defined correctly, focus has nothing to point at
• Module 10 → Introduction / Time To Lock In — the framing that opens the whole module
• Module 2 → Hiring a Media Buyer (+ all hiring SOPs) — the operational mechanic for the 70% outsourcing rule
• Module 4 → How To Properly Run Split Tests — the trench-season discipline of running enough volume for clean signal
• Module 5 → The Brief & Concept Tracking System — applied focus on ad concepts: removing the non-aligned ones, doubling down on what fits
• Module 7 → Sales Campaigns in Meta / How To Launch — the momentum principle, which is trench-season focus applied to ad scaling
• Module 8 → Shopify Apps & Setup — the empty-desk principle applied to your tech stack (lean stack, no bloat)
• Module 9 → Brand Case Studies — the trench-vs-leverage season framework applied to 3 real brands, with the actual focus decisions made at each stage

What's gatekept inside the masterclass

• Full 12-minute video walkthrough with the live whiteboard breakdown of the rock-and-water analogy, the trench/leverage diagram, and the focus tactics demo
• The Google Calendar template I run for trench seasons — exact time blocks, color coding, batching structure
• Great CEOs Are Lazy — the free PDF link, plus my annotated reading notes on the chapters that hit hardest
• The full season-shift transition playbook — how I move from trench → leverage and back without losing momentum
• My actual current room setup — photo walkthrough of the trench-season environment I'm filming in right now
• Specific outsourcing decisions — me walking through, for a real brand, exactly which roles I outsource at which revenue tier and why

Want the full video walkthrough, the Google Calendar template, the Great CEOs Are Lazy PDF + reading notes, the season-shift playbook, and the live room setup walkthrough? All inside the RunItUp Masterclass → Join here

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