This is the life-changing lesson this ex-Apple designer learned from Steve Jobs!

From the desk of Miles Everson:

It’s the last day of the workweek! I hope all is well!

Every Friday, I share insights on health, wealth, well-being, happiness, the future of work, book reviews, marketing, tips, and more in the hopes of enabling you to take your career and personal life to the next level.

Today, I will talk about a life lesson that Jony Ive learned from the legendary Steve Jobs.

This is an insight all of us can relate to so I’m thrilled to be talking about it.

Keep reading below to know more!

This is the life-changing lesson this ex-Apple designer learned from Steve Jobs!

Today’s digitally-driven and fast-paced landscape has so many distractions. 

A notification here or there could lead to a rabbit hole of scrolling, eating away at one’s focus and ultimately, productivity. 

With so many distractions, it feels so challenging to focus and  stay  focused nowadays.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, today’s  ”Mindfulness by Miles”  is all about focus. 

However, before we take a deeper dive into the topic and how it relates to productivity in today’s world, we need to emphasize just how crucial and transformative of a skill it is first.

Imparting A Life Lesson

Jony Ive is an industrial designer known for his work with  Apple  and for closely collaborating with the legendary Steve Jobs in the creation of products like the iPhone, iPad, and Macbook. He also worked on the design of the Apple Watch.

Ive departed Apple in 2019 and stayed on as a consultant until 2022. At present, he’s currently collaborating with  OpenAI  on its first device.

In an interview, Ive recalled that Jobs was  “the most remarkably focused person”  he’s ever met in his life. He said that so much can be achieved when a person truly focuses and that it shocks him  “how few people actually practice this.”

Ive defined true focus as a constant effort during every minute of every waking moment, rather than an internal switch that can be flipped on or off.

He even went as far saying that true focus comes from sacrifice. To him, focus means  “saying ‘no’ to something that you, with every bone in your body, think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you’re focusing on something else.”

That said, how exactly can you improve your focus?

As Ive said, focus isn’t simply an internal switch that can be flipped on or off. With this in mind, the first step you can take  is to get rid of the obstacles preventing you from achieving it in the first place .

Examples of obstacles include multitasking and procrastination.

Doing multiple things all at once is often assumed as a method that can help you get more done in less time. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

According to  Brown University Health , doing more than one task at a time takes multitasking tires out the brain and makes it less efficient, making a person more likely to be distracted and prone to committing errors.

For many high performers and leaders, the workweek is a marathon filled with meetings and hours of hard work. As a result, every minute and hour is optimized to maximize productivity.

Meanwhile, procrastination leads to the delay of the completion of tasks and shifts your focus away from what needs to be done to something else.

Another obstacle that can disrupt your focus or prevent you from focusing entirely is interruptions which can come in the form of device notifications, whether these come from a smartwatch, smartphone, or laptop. 

Moreover, and in connection to what was said above, information overload is a barrier to focus.

When you have so much information right before you, your focus becomes split and you’re unable to filter what you need to be paying the most attention to. 

So, the next time you’re working on a project or a task and having a hard time focusing, recall the insights we shared with you today. They just might be what you need to fully focus.

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