These Mental Biases Keep You Out Of The Top 1%

Step-by-Step Tutorial: Mastering Explore and Exploit Dynamics to Achieve Your Goals

Step 1: Identify Your Primary Pursuit

1. Imagine an oasis representing your highest professional goals and various boats representing different projects or pursuits.
2. Choose one boat that represents your primary pursuit, the one you want to apply your compounding focus to immediately.
3. Focus on this one pursuit as if it were the only thing you could pursue, cutting out all other distractions.

Step 2: Prioritize Within Your Primary Pursuit

1. Filter every decision within your primary pursuit by asking, "Will it make the boat go faster?" in terms of progress towards your goal.
2. Identify and offload any non-essential tasks, commitments, or projects within your primary pursuit that may slow you down or cause dispersion.
3. Cut out heavy cargo that does not directly contribute to moving the boat faster, streamlining your efforts for maximum impact.

Step 3: Persist with One Pursuit

1. Continuously ask yourself, "Will it make the boat go faster?" for every decision and action within your primary pursuit.
2. Resist the temptation to explore prematurely and stick with your chosen pursuit to allow compounding focus to take effect.
3. Keep sailing through plateaus and challenges, accepting decreased flow during execution phases and finding flow in hobbies to sustain you.

Step 4: Walk the Stairway to Flow

1. Accept that peaks are reached by persevering through plateaued terrain in your primary pursuit.
2. Tame the need for constant stimulation and excitement by focusing on simplicity and persistence.
3. Balance exploitation with exploration by taking up hobbies that feed your desire to explore while staying focused on compounding in your primary pursuit.

Step 5: Choose the More Focused Option

1. Simplify your pursuits into two buckets: compounding focus and strategic neglect.
2. Avoid half-committing to mediocrity by focusing on one primary pursuit with deep and consistent attention.
3. Embrace the binary approach to avoid dispersion and sustain compounding focus for long-term success.

By following these steps and mastering explore and exploit dynamics, you can defeat dispersion, claim compounding focus, and achieve your goals faster while becoming the captain of your own success.