If You Can’t Focus…You Can’t Get Rich

Breaking New Alert: Your brain is getting rewired by breaking news alerts.

And not in a way that serves you.  Every swipe, every scroll, every 12-second IG dopamine hit you receive is making you dumber.

Our dumbphone addictions are training us to become reactive instead of creative…shallow instead of strategic…and busy instead of dangerous.  And if I know anything, it’s this:

If you can’t focus…you can’t create prosperity.

Not sustainably…not at scale…and not in a way that gives you true peace of mind and freedom. Because prosperity is created in depth, not distraction.

If right now you’re balling…you have focus and concentration, and you’re healthy, happy, and prosperous…go ahead and skip the rest of this post.

Now, for the rest of you, still here…

All the meaningful things you say you want…building a company, writing a book, creating content that makes an impact, starting a non-profit, developing a skill you can scale…they all require one thing most people have lost:

The ability to sit with a problem long enough to solve something that matters.

That doesn’t happen in between notifications.  It won’t happen while you’re half-working and half-scrolling.  It only happens when you go dark for a while and actually think.

Most of you know, I have an entrepreneur accelerator program called Breakthrough U.  One of the greatest friction points I get while coaching people up, is their resistance to daily reading as part of their daily personal development routine.  (Particular my young superstars in their 20s and 30s.)  But if you want to dent the Universe…

You must be willing (and able) to do deep work.

That’s what separates the outliers from everyone else. It’s your relationship with focus. You can stay in the pocket longer.  This is the difference between launching a Shopify store versus creating an ecommerce breakthrough. Authoring a blog with impact versus AI slop.  Contributing a chapter to a hack anthology versus writing the seminal book in your space.

You need to wrestle with complexity while everyone else looks for cheap hacks.  You need to train yourself to go deep while the world trains itself to stay shallow. Because that gap…is where the breakthroughs, money, and impact are.

Now let’s deal with the argument most of you are using to discredit what I wrote and why it doesn’t apply to you…

I’m calling bullshit.

To you guys saying, “I don’t have time for deep reading.  Books bore me.  I get everything I need to know from X or listening to podcasts at 2x speed.”  Allow me to quote Elon, arguably the busiest, most productive, most ADHD effected person on Earth:

“Read books, because the data of reading is much greater than when someone is speaking. What’s the output rate of speech? A couple hundred bits per second if you’re going full tilt. You can get several times that by reading. The main reason I didn’t go to lectures in college was because the data rate was too slow.”

Deep work requires deep thinking and deep thinking requires focus.

To everyone thinking, “Yeah, but I just don’t have the attention span for that,” again I’ll call bullshit.  Because you absolutely do have the ability to focus.  You’re just using it in all the wrong places.

Let’s take a football example…

You can’t sit through a 10-minute conversation about your future without checking your phone…but you’ll lock in for three hours on a game like it’s oxygen.

You don’t read books…but you know depth charts, injury reports, and playoff scenarios like you’re on the coaching staff.

You don’t have time for business strategy…but you’ll watch hours of breakdowns and podcasts so you can sound sharp in an argument.

You “can’t concentrate”…but somehow you can analyze betting lines, track odds, and place a wager on Polymarket like a hedge fund manager.

And if it’s not football, don’t hide…you’ve got your version. Movies. Gaming. Pop culture. Reddit rabbit holes. You know who you are.

So, let’s stop the B.S. You don’t have a focus problem.  You have a priority problem.  You’ve already proven you can do deep work. You’re just not aiming it at anything that compounds.

This isn’t to knock football, gaming, or whatever you’re into.  It’s to help you recognize the leverage you’re sitting on and not using.  Because if you bring that same obsession…the same curiosity, the same discipline, the same willingness to study…to your craft…

…you won’t recognize your life 12 months from now.

Attention is the new capital.  And right now, most people are spending it like they’re broke.  Founders, entrepreneurs, and other high-level achievers protect their focus like it’s equity. Because it is.

Builders don’t dabble.  They block time. Go deep. Build things that matter.

Stop asking how to focus.  Start deciding what deserves your focus. Then nurture your ability to focus and do the deep work…

Meditation. Journaling. Thinking time. No device time. Stop taking your fucking phone to bed and the dinner table.

At first, your brain will fight you. A lot. You’ve trained it to expect hyper-stimulation every few seconds.  That urge to check your phone…that itch to bounce to something easier…that’s not a lack of discipline, it’s withdrawal.  Push through it.

Because on the   other side of that discomfort is where the breakthroughs live.  That’s where you produce something that actually has value. That’s where you unleash leverage.

The people who learn to think deeply in a shallow world are the ones who will lead it.

Peace,

- RG