The power of focus

12th September, a year ago, I published my first book - How Art Can Change Your Life: Life lessons from artists past and present

A Chapter from the book; on the power of focus:

You are what your deep driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.

- The Upanishads

In the Hindu epic ‘The Mahabharatha’, Drona, the wise teacher of the Kuru princes (the Pandavas and their cousins), when he had taught them all he had to, decided to administer a final test. He pointed to a bird on a treetop and instructed the eldest of the Pandavas - Yuddhishtar – to aim his arrow at its head. While Yuddhistar took aim, Drona stood by and asked - “What do you see?”

Yuddhistar answered – “The tree, the bird, the bow, the arrow, my arm and you.”

Drona said, “Stand aside.”

He asked each of his other students in turn and received the same answer. He finally asked Arjuna, the best archer amongst his students. “Tell me, what do you see?” he queried as Arjuna took aim.

“A bird”, was the reply.

“Describe this bird to me.”

“I cannot. I see only his eye.”

“Then,” said Drona, “release your arrow.”

How often have we wondered at the power, strength or skill of another’s effort? How often have we marvelled at an Olympic champion’s feats? How often have we envied the wizardry of a gifted writer who seemed to use words like arrows to strike his or her target? How often have we been in awe of a great orator who seemed to throw his or her audience with conviction and charisma? How often have we envied the star salesman’s phenomenal success at closing sales?

Perhaps, we might have to grudgingly admit that super achievers have some things in common - perseverance and passion. AND the ability to focus.

It appears that excellence tends to come more readily when efforts are focused on specific goals or pursuits. Of course, there are extraordinary exceptions; Leonardo da Vinci being amongst the most oft-quoted. But such versatility is rare and most people are not blessed with it. For this majority, the power of focus is the tried and tested road to excellence.

We do not need to develop the focus of the famed Indian sages who could meditate for extended periods without food or water, in fact without even moving at all. We do not need the focus of a tightrope walker or the trapeze artist in most general tasks. We would hardly find much use for the intensity of focus that allows some people to bend spoons with their gaze. But what we can do is increase the level of intensity of focus on tasks, projects, people and passions that raise the quality of our lives.

For artists, focus had a very practical benefit.

Artists, being creative individuals, tend to generate a large number of ideas. If all were to be followed, then most certainly, little that is tangible would be achieved. Artists leverage the power of focus to select and back only those ideas worth the time and effort.

“It takes so much to shut out the world and all its distractions. This is the real work of being an artist, to carve out that space where your mind is free to fully focus on creating something.”

Australian figurative artist, Stewart MacFarlane

Focus and life purpose

The greatest benefit of focus comes when we apply it to our life goals, our purpose. But purpose in our lives, though it relates to what matters most, is not so readily recognisable.

The disease of our age is the mindless pursuit of everything else but those things which matter most. Jesus brings out this tragic irony beautifully in his parables on the kingdom of heaven. Comparing the kingdom of heaven to a banquet that a king gave, the story goes on to tell us that none of the invited guests turned up. The king sends his messengers to his invited guests telling them what they would be missing and urging them to come. But they make light of it. Some guests are caught up on their farms. Some in their business. And some were just plain uninterested.

It is not very difficult to lose sight of the essentials when our lives are cluttered with a myriad and confounding number of distractions. The secret of finding our purpose is perhaps in us seeing the value of those things that matter most. Two examples from the many that Jesus gave, explain how this works:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.”

(Matthew 13:44-46)

Focus is not a gift. It can be willed. And sometimes it takes trying circumstances to force focus.

Handel, in severe financial straits, locked himself up in his room and composed the ‘Messiah’ in three and a half weeks. It went on to become his ‘bestseller’ and one of the most revered compositions of English sacred music.

Mozart composed the entire Overture to ‘Don Giovanni’ the night before the premiere of the opera.

Mining the centre of focus

Focus is more than just concentration of effort at a critical moment in time. It also means sustained effort over a period of time.

It means entering and maintaining that ‘zone’ of consciousness where there is a supreme actualisation of your purpose. Sometimes, it is reached when the realisation comes that the centre of our focus yields even greater rewards the more we dwell on it.

American photographer, Alfred Stieglitz took over 200 photographs of the same subject, clouds, and the result was a masterful series titled ‘Equivalents’.

Take a look at some of the greatest French impressionist painters: Edgar Degas had ballet dancers as the subject of around 1,500 of his works. Camille Pissarro painted Boulevard Montmartre at different times of the day and in different weather conditions. Claude Monet painted over 25 works with haystacks as their primary subject in the 1890-91 harvest season in Giverny.

Japanese painter, Katsushika Hokusai’s created an astounding series of woodblock prints showing 46 views of Mount Fuji (different seasons, weather conditions, perspectives and distances). Hokusai went under at least fifty different names during his lifetime. But the name used on his grave is apt; it reads ‘Gwakio Rojin’ which means “Old man, mad about drawing.” Inspired by Hokusai’s work, a near-contemporary, Utagawa Hiroshige who lived and died in the city of Edo (now Tokyo), created 118 woodblock prints of various views of Edo; today amongst the most famous creations in all Japanese art.

In the world of music, Austrian composer, Johann Strauss II spent his entire creative life focused on one simple form of music – the waltz. While contemporaries around him conjured up serious symphonies, lavish operas and scintillating instrumental concertos, Strauss did what he did best, compose waltzes. You only have to listen to his most famous waltz, ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’, to understand why he was and is known today as ‘the Waltz King’.

When Beethoven wrote his one and only opera ‘Fidelio’, he struggled to compose the right overture (the opening instrumental piece) for the opera. For the 1805 premiere, he composed one overture, which he then revised for performance the following year. Still not finding the overture as the appropriate curtain-raiser to the opera, a third version was composed for a planned performance in 1808 in Prague. Finally, for the 1814 performance, Beethoven abandoned all three versions and wrote a new overture which in its fresh musical material seemed most apt for the opera. In his doggedness to get it right, he not only solved his problem for the opera, but in the process gave the world three other overtures which are today amongst the most popular overtures performed in the concert-hall. The ‘Overture Leonore 3’, though not used any more to open the opera, stands alone amongst overtures in the entire repertoire for the sheer magnificence of its utterance.

There is something mesmeric about such stories of intense focus. It is almost as if great artists found that in retaining their focus on one theme, they could mine its depths to extents that would not have been reached without that investment of time, effort and concentration.

Perhaps these artists, in their own way, show us something of that mysterious but very real power of the chant. Spiritual thinkers of diverse backgrounds have sworn by the power of the chant; be it Vedic mantras, Gregorian chants, or Buddhist chants. One book of the Upanishads, the ‘Māndūkya Upanishad’ is devoted entirely to the one syllable ‘Om’ (or ‘Aum’), which in Hinduism is the mystical syllable, the first vibration that manifested God and created the world. It is the syllable that encompasses all reality, represents the energy of the Supreme Being, is the end to which all life strives and its ‘mindful’ repetition has the power of transforming life and attaining oneness with the divine. Perhaps repetition of this original vibration was one way the great mystics discovered to help create resonance. We all do this instinctively (though not always mindfully) when we sway to music, rock in an armchair or fall in step with another while walking.

Respecting the ‘zone’

One of the common traits amongst artists is their keen understanding of how they work best. This often translates into daily rituals that become iron-clad in their regularity.

Beethoven was a firm believer in the stimulating power of a long walk. In every season, in city or country, he was known to set out on long walks after his mid-day meal that often marked the period when his fertile imagination stretched out furthest into uncharted territory. Ideas that came to him were immediately written down on music paper he carried with him. Back at home, he did spend countless hours revising his initial ideas on paper, but it appeared that he relied on his long walks to fuel the fire. Tchaikovsky was an equally firm believer in the power of a long walk.

Mozart, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Bacon, Haruki Murakami are all people who rose early and spent a good part of their early morning at work.

Beethoven, Brahms, Kierkegaard and Balzac loved their coffee.

Of course, some of the aids to stimulating creativity tended to veer into dangerous territory. For example, W H Auden, Ayn Rand and Graham Greene used narcotics.

When conditions conspired to frustrate artists in the zone, they very often pushed through just so that the fruits of their inspiration were not wasted.

English writer, Thomas Hardy wrote ‘Far from the madding crowd’ in Dorset. At times, when he ran out of paper, and he found himself ‘ín the zone’, he would use large dead leaves, woodchips, stone and slate just to put his inspiration into words.

American writer, Ernest Hemingway made it a rule never to finish writing a sheet to start another sheet unless it was in mid-sentence. It saved him the uncomfortable prospect of staring at a blank page with a pause that could lead to a halt.

English writer, Magnus Mills (short-listed for the Booker prize for his novel, ‘The Persistence of Beasts’) worked as a bus driver. He wrote down ideas on the reverse of overtime slips as his bus idled at red lights.

Focus demands discipline. Among the biggest misconceptions of the creative life is that artists find discipline counterproductive to creativity. It is through discipline that they achieve the mastery of their art.

Goethe, in his poem ‘Nature and Art’ says:

“To achieve great things, we must be self-confined:

Mastery is revealed in limitation

And law alone can set us free again”.

Michelangelo’s sculptures derive their power and realism not only from his genius, but also from his knowledge of the human body built through hours of painstaking dissection of cadavers.

Yehudi Menuhin in his book ‘Theme and Variations’, says “The price of freedom for all musicians, both composers and interpreters, is tremendous control, discipline and patience; but perhaps not only for musicians. Do we not all find freedom to improvise, in all art, in all life, along the guiding lines of discipline?”

It is also through discipline that artists complete artworks and leave, over the years, a body of work. This is not to be underestimated – the ability to actually complete a quantity of work. Often, the delusion is that it is only quality of output that is difficult to achieve. To artists though, quantity is also a key challenge. One of the most remarkable examples of a disciplined creative approach to completing work at hand was that of the Victorian era novelist, Anthony Trollope, author of the ‘Chronicles of Barsetshire’, the Palliser novels and ‘The Way We Live Now’. The author of 47 novels, several short stories and travel books, his practice was to target writing a fixed number of pages per week. He went beyond that to allot a fixed number of words per page (250 words) and he actually counted out every word he wrote to ensure he reached the word-length target per page. Each new book was started by first deciding the total number of words he would aim for and then splitting that allotment across weeks marked off in his diary. This way, he always had visibility of progress towards target. No wonder he was so prolific despite a day job at the post office. Apparently, Trollope wrote for three hours starting at 5.30 am – a practice that he remained faithful to most of his life and that enabled him to complete his writing before breakfast every morning!

If we give power to what we focus on, then it is critical that we review the ideas and projects we focus on. Are we able to cut through the clutter in our lives and find focus? Are we able to recognise and respond to the times when we are in the zone?