A conversation on focus and finding your life's work

I wanna post this conversation that I just had with my friend Patrick on his podcast, The Best Lick the Best, and I wanna tell you why. So a few weeks ago, he called me after listening to the episode. It was episode three eighty three, the one I did on Todd Graves. It's called Todd Graves and his $10,000,000,000 chicken figure dream. And Patrick asked me to come to New York and record an episode with him on the topic of focus. And if I had to simplify and distill what I've learned from this entire project, you know, eight years, maybe nine years, close to nine years, almost 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs read to one word. That is definitely the word that I would choose, which is focus. It is, I believe, it is the single most prominent attribute that the people that I study on the podcast have that I think the rest of the world lacks. In fact, I just flew to San Francisco to meet and have a conversation with my friend, Daniel Ek, who is the founder of Spotify. We probably talked close to four hours, and there's probably not another living entrepreneur that I've learned more from than Daniel. And he actually gave me really great advice, and I think he did this inadvertently. I don't even think he meant to. And the advice was related to focus. He had told me has, like, more and more people ask for your time. And this happens to all of us. Like, if you don't guard your time, he had a great line that he said about this. He said, if you don't guard your time, greatness will disappear. Another way to think about that is, like, if you lose your focus, greatness will disappear. That literally gives me chills. That is terrifying to me. And another thing that me and Daniel talked about is the fact that he has this really great idea that you really should be optimizing for impact, a positive impact on other people. And I believe that what I'm trying to do with founders has a positive impact on the world, and I should be very, very, very careful to not lose the focus on that. Because really what I believe is, like, the people I read about, the people that you and I study on this podcast, they're they were brilliant. They made incredible things. They built incredible lives, even though they didn't know each other. They lived at different points in history, lived in different parts of the world, worked in different industries. They arrived at very similar conclusions on how to build a great business. And I think the idea is very simple. I got this idea from Charlie Munger where he says find an idea and take it very simple, find a simple idea and take it seriously. And the simple idea I have that I'm trying to take very, very seriously and focus …