From the Editor’s Desk: Focus ⭐

In the summer of 1980, I attended the KC Jones Basketball camp with two of my cousins as a gangly 13-year-old. The camp was in Lake Placid, New York, which had just hosted the Winter Olympics, though future camps would be held at Norwich University in Vermont. But this trip was notable to me for a series of random experiences. The drive there in my uncle’s little BMW, so unlike my parent’s car. Listening to Queen’s The Game, which had just come out, on cassette tape on repeat during the drives to and from. And getting to see my new hero, Larry Bird, in person.

KC Jones was an incredible human being. In 1980, he was an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics, the team he had won 8 championships with as a player two decades earlier. His annual summer basketball camp was an incredible experience for so many reasons, one being that Jones a continuous presence day and night and would thrill the kids by joining them in pickup basketball games. But that was a treat I discovered only after attending. Going into this camp, the big draw was that Celtics players would show up and speak with the camp and show off their skills.

This was always fantastic. That first year I attended, I got to see legendary point guard Nate “Tiny” Archibald. Backup center Rick Robey, a crucial kind of role player that’s almost completely disappeared from the league in the 21st century. And, of course, Larry Bird.

Bird had just completed his magical first season with the Boston Celtics, at the time the greatest single-season turnaround in NBA history. He led the Celtics to a bruising Eastern Conference Finals series with the Philadelphia 76ers, which the Celtics lost in 7 games. But he was clearly special, and like most Boston sports fans, I was looking forward to another decade of championships. But mostly, that summer, I was just looking forward to seeing Larry Bird.

It was disappointing, as is so often the case when you meet a hero. I’ve told this story elsewhere, but the short version is that I was seated at the outside of a half-circle of kids watching Bird shoot around, clutching a Kodak Instamatic camera, just taking in the surrealness of this encounter. And then a shot banged off the rim and arced high through the air in my direction. Bird backstepped to catch it before it hit the ground, and in doing so, he tripped over me.

Larry Bird. My hero. Tripped over me.

Which is bad enough. But he also swore at me, as if I had done something to cause this, had somehow come there to sabotage his career before it really got off the ground. Those were the only words we ever exchanged, as I was in shock and he never thought to apologize. And after a moment of terror and awkwardness, I just got up and slowly walked away.

Bird never came back to the camp, but he did lead to Celtics to three championships and could have easily won more were it not for various physical problems that I still feel responsible for. I continued to attend KC Jones basketball camp each summer until I was too old, and it was always terrific. I will never forget my nights posting up the legend himself in pickup games at night at Norwich University, and I even scored off him a few times.

But I will also never forget my Bird encounter. It took me a long time to understand this, but with time and experience I came to realize that Bird’s failings as a human being were predictable. Anyone who’s that good at something, who focuses that much on any one thing, will be lacking in other areas. It’s inevitable, and it’s the type of thing you see all the time when you know to look for it. Professional sports is an obvious example, given the world stage, just look at Michael’s Jordan’s gambling issues. Or look at our own industry, at Steve Jobs, the driven perfectionist who led Apple to its own record-setting turnaround but was, by most accounts, a uniquely terrible human being.

There’s a lot to learn there, of course. Whether it’s family or public personas, you can learn from both the good and the bad. My parents were horrible, and that was normal to me until I met my future wife’s parents and realized you could do things differently, and better. Celtics great M.L. Carr, who won two championships with Bird in the 1980s, was a terrific human being who wowed the kids with his skills at a later camp but really won us over with his personality. He wasn’t a top-tier player like Bird, but he was the better person. There was more balance there, I guess.

Flash forward over 45 years–seriously, the mind boggles–and I’m getting up there in age. My own basketball career, not noteworthy or illustrious in any way, finally came to a close the year we moved to Pennsylvania, when I was 50 years old. My writing career continues, it’s not as physical as many jobs, as does my role as a parent of sorts, forever playing second fiddle to my far more capable wife and wondering what role our respective parents may have played in that. And when I think on my own skills in life, the list is short and none would be useful in a post-apocalyptic world. But I’ve done OK for myself.

Like many people my age, I discovered something late in life that those in my children’s generation just grow up knowing: Like many, I have some vague mental illness, ADHD, that surfaces in different ways for different people. I don’t have some symptoms, like hyperactivity, while others, like inattentiveness and restlessness, occur from time-to-time. But the core of this condition, as I think of it, is an ability to focus. When I get caught up in something, as I do, that’s all I see and all I think about. I will even dream about whatever it is I’m focused on currently, my mind repeating sequences again and again in ways that I find unhealthy. I’ve literally woken myself up to stop it occasionally. (I do not sleep well. As Stephen Wright once joked, I make mistakes.)

There’s a lot to learn about ADHD, a lot it can teach us about how the mind works and why we are the way we are. But long before I’d ever been told by anyone that I had this thing, I understood that I had something. A skill, an ability or even super-power, that enabled me to start writing and then just keep going. That seems obvious, maybe, but anyone can start something. The trick is completing that thing and, if you’re detail-oriented, as anyone on whatever spectrum can be, doing it correctly. Getting it right.

In my case, this means that I can write 1000+ page books, and have. It means that, left to my own devices, I will sit down and begin typing away on the computer and only belatedly realize that it’s the middle of the afternoon and I forgot to eat lunch. When I was younger, my original co-author and I used to stay up overnight writing, separately but in the same house, to meet book deadlines. And the work just happened. Today, I can’t do that, but I do work seven days week and often all day long. Typing. Always typing.

It should be obvious just from what I wrote above that this isn’t always healthy or good. And I have long understood that, too, have seen the addictive nature of it. But it was only recently that the double-edged sword of this ability to focus finally landed. That is, yes, this is a skill or even a super-power. But it’s also a weakness and a personal deficiency. As with Larry Bird, my ability to hyper-focus means that I’m not doing other things well. It means that I am focusing on one thing but ignoring others. Sometimes many others.

Last week, I got up on Monday morning and went through my normal routine. It’s nice being back in Pennsylvania for various reasons, but one of them is that I can get up early, usually between 6 and 7 am, read a bit, and then get to work at the time of the day when I am best positioned mentally to get things done. And so that day, I started writing at 8 am or so. I got really involved in whatever it was, so much so that I experienced that phenomenon noted above, being so focused on this one thing.

At 9:00 am, my watch and phone both chimed and burbled, pulling me out of my focus. Brad was texting me. 9:00 am is when we record First Ring Daily, at least when I’m in PA, and my heart immediately sank as I imagined he was waiting for me to show up on the call. This was the dark side of hyper-focus made obvious, I thought.

Then I read the text message. Which was a reminder that we were recording at 9:30 am each morning that week because he needed to drive his daughter to school. Which he had told me the previous Friday. And then he reminded me because he knows me all too well, knows that I likely forgot this immediately or shortly thereafter and certainly wasn’t thinking about it that morning. Knows that it would be me sitting on the call, wondering where he was.

Except that I wasn’t. Instead, I was so focused in that moment that I forgot about something I do literally every single workday and have for almost a decade. But I also forgot something I was told just days earlier by someone I actually care for and that thing was going to make my schedule a little easier. No one likes being on camera at 9:00, let alone every day at 9:00. This was a small nicety, but a nicety nonetheless. But it had exited my brain almost the moment it arrived.

This bothered me. I went into the bathroom to wash my hair and put in my contacts, and whatever it was that I was writing was quickly forgotten as my mind flooded with this reality, always there but suddenly more obvious than ever. There really is a dark side to focusing on just one thing, a lesson I should have learned as a 13-year-old in upstate New York. And that is one’s inability to focus on anything else. You can be good at many things, but if you’re truly great at just one thing, other things will suffer.

Ironically–or perhaps not coincidentally, come to think of it–I’ve been engaging in what I think of as focus months, months in which I focus on a single topic. The focus in January was security, for example, and in February I turned to writing what became De-Enshittify Windows 11. And so on. This month, my focus is on books, well, not really books per se, but one book, the Windows 11 Field Guide. Which, when you think about it, is both a product and victim of my ADHD hyper-focus.

I’ve written about this a lot, too much, perhaps, but that’s one way I work through things. Writing is thinking, as they say. Long story short, I have this book, this massive tome, that I’ve wanted to cut down in both length and size for years. I’ve done so in various ways over time, but this past year, I set out to rethink the book and rewrite it even. And boy, has that effort failed. As recently as April, I was convinced I would find a way to create a new, shorter book and that me focusing on this above all else would not be necessary. I would just do what I usually do, and work on the book around other my other writing.

But I couldn’t get it there. In the sense that writing can happen in a flood and that success breeds success, that I can write and then write more and keep going, the opposite is also true. I had what I still think are good ideas, but would run into issues big and small as I tried to implement changes with different types of content for the book. These things are blockers, and they have a devastating impact on my ability to write. Where I can usually crank out words, I found only frustration.

As you may know, I hit reset. Finally. I decided to just update the existing book by pulling in the content from a book I thought would be quite different. I exorcised out-of-date content, began rewriting and consolidating chapters where possible, and made other changes. And last week I wrote about the sudden success I had had in these efforts. The page count and file sizes were coming down. This is progress. Progress on a thing I had been stuck on for almost year. A nice season-over-season turnaround, if you will.

The problem, of course, is me. Everything takes longer than expected, nothing works as well as hoped for, and even some of the least interesting content in the book requires whatever technical setup, from virtual machines to specific configurations, and whatever combination of hardware devices and lots more I am literally trying to block out of my mind as I write this. There are entire chapters of this book that are conversely difficult to write and update but also will be read by few. I know this. It’s the job, and I get it. But that doesn’t make it any easier. Or any less time-consuming.

But the progress continues. And this week is a perfect storm of timing, with my wife away on a cruise with her college roommate. I am home alone, and while there’s a one-person Lord of the Flies situation bubbling below the surface, this is allowing me time throughout each day to update more and more of the book. When I left things with the previous update, the book was down to about 103 MB in PDF form and about 990 pages in length. Today, after consolidating the help and recovery, apps, and XBOX PC and gaming content into individual chapters and updating two other standalone chapters, the book is about 93 MB in PDF form and about 960 pages in length.

I literally spent almost the entire weekend on this.

This is good in some obvious ways, and there will be further improvements. The page count will go up and down, depending on what I’m changing, and there is new content occurring, of course. But the file sizes (the book is in EPUB format as well, now 76 MB) should continue to go down because of how I’m changing the image format. It’s heading in the right direction, basically, and this week I should be able to crank through even more of it. I have new chapters tied to audio/video in and out, home networking, AI, and other topics, new content for existing chapters, and some possible future consolidations, most notably for Microsoft Edge, accounts, security, and command line interfaces.

It’s a mess in many ways, a mix of writing styles and layouts. But I’m finally touching content I’ve not looked at in years and it feels good.

But it also feels off.

One of the issues with hyper-focusing on the book is that I can’t do other things I may want or need to do too. Or at least not to the level I would otherwise. And so the central struggle of my life remains, this need to find a balance I know I will never achieve. I have so much I want to write, from hardware reviews to editorials about AI and whatever else. And I will. But I also have this need to fix this book, to solve the elusive problem of its size and weight, and to better position it for future editions. I will do all of it. Eventually.

Please bear with me here. My wife’s vacation is my time to put this super-power to work, but it’s also something I need to rein in when possible. Life is still happening, I need to leave the house from time-to-time, interact with others, and do things that are not me typing in front of a screen. I also have to type things in front of a screen that are not this book. You get the idea. Ideas are easy. Making those ideas happen can be problematic. But it’s time to focus.