Fourteen years ago, while driving back on the M4 from Galway to Dublin, I was listening to a Tim Ferriss podcast. He was still early in the medium, but had already begun to define the business and personal-development podcast space. Tim is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek — a book that shaped my postdoctoral years at Cambridge and one I will return to in a later post.
For now, I want to go back to that drive east towards Dublin, at 120 km/h, with Tim in my ear. He said a sentence that has shaped how I operate — and questioned me in the years since.
It went something like this: “I do not invest in founders who have more than one project because their focus is diluted.” I am paraphrasing. I am not a journalist. But that thought, which may have passed unnoticed for thousands of other listeners, reverberated strongly with me.
During a PhD or postdoc, you can be working on one, two, or even three research projects simultaneously. It is a complete division of effort. Even the greatest labs in the world work this way, hoping to hit upon a major scientific discovery. In business, I applied a similar pattern: building two or three websites at the same time and being drawn towards the next shiny idea, often at the expense of the main goal.
For fourteen years, I have carried that soundbite with me and wrestled with the pull of building something new. After a week or two, I usually realise the project will not replace the main task I have set out to do, and I should bin it completely. I jump back into driving the main project forward — until the next crossroads appears and I try my hand at another fanciful project that might match or supplement what I am already doing.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice — you get the point. At some stage, you build a catalogue of failures and develop the maturity to see that what is boring and consistent can become difficult to beat. If you focus on building a “moat”, as Warren Buffett calls it, around an idea, you can build something that is unbeatable: perhaps generationally brilliant, perhaps disproportionately rewarding.
I am at a point now where I catch myself very early with these ideas and immediately bin them. What I have learned is that you need to think constantly about the one problem you are solving — to understand it, fear it, and execute at a level that no one else can dare to achieve. In my periods of deepest focus, whether scientific or commercial, I have found concepts that brought us to another level.
If I had built a competing project where my time, effort, and mental bandwidth were divided, I would never have built the neuronal connections to solve what truly matters.