How to become dangerously focused

A radical formula for the best work of your life

Image credit: ma.to / Reddit

We’re living through a focus epidemic.

People are wasting the best hours of the day looking at their phone and not being present. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. Everywhere you look, there are people addicted to screens instead of being addicted to winning.

If you sneak up on them, you’ll see most of them are scrolling Instagram Reels or TikTok (or a similar platform). It's worth asking: do we really need to overload the brain with so much input? Is all the extra information making us geniuses, wealthier, or giving us 6-pack abs? Nope.

The modern brain is fried. Brain cells are being lit on fire by choice.

My brain was cooked too. Then I took a radical approach to reclaim my focus, which has completely changed my life.

It’s made me a dangerous human being. It’ll make you dangerous too.

The overlooked idea hiding in plain sight

When I broke down my focus problem, I learned an uncomfortable truth: I was a scatterbrain at the highest level.

When I went one layer deeper, I realized I had no priorities in life. Without priorities, I just drifted from one urgent task to the next. Whatever was loudest in my life dominated my calendar and thoughts. That’s no way to live, man.

This is how a lot of people live – DIRECTIONLESS.

Without direction, stuff just fills up their time. Technology made everything more convenient. With that innovation came the accidental convenience of being able to fill up your time with literal bullsh*t.

The way to win back your focus is to have a priority.

It’s harder than it sounds though. Most people can’t decide on a singular priority. Life has taught them to prioritize too many things. Everything seems more urgent than it is (by design).

So I had to develop the skill of prioritization. I had to decide:

• What do I want out of life?

• What’s the #1 goal that can get me there?

• What do I love doing that brings me energy?

Only when I did this 10,000-foot view exercise could I figure out my priority. But knowing wasn’t enough. The hard part was what came next.

If I visualize it for you, it looks like this. I had a big chunk of stone and every day I had to carve away pieces. By the end, what I was left with was the statue of David with a modest-sized penis.

The analogy might seem smart, but in practice it meant 1) saying no to almost every ask and 2) being disciplined in holding my boundaries.

This is what made me dangerous. People could tell from the way I handled tasks and emails that I wasn't f*cking around anymore. I had one priority, and nothing was going to throw me off the game.

The level of discipline almost wasn’t human.

I’d describe it as bland, cold, boring, and if I’m being real, lonely. Only with that level of ruthlessness and discipline can you prioritize anything in life.

---

Oh, and don’t give me the “I’m neurodivergent and I can’t focus” line.

I’m almost certainly ADD, ADHD, PTSD, autistic, and everything in between. Some of the most successful people in the world are neurodivergent – I’d argue it’s a superpower. Focus is only impossible if you tell yourself it is.

---

Focus must be tied to your survival

A goal is a fantasy. Visions are p0rn. Systems are idealistic.

None of these modern self-help tools actually work, because if they did, humans wouldn’t be at peak burnout, peak loneliness, and living through a meaning crisis.

The workaround I found is that you must tie what you focus on directly to your survival. When I sit down to write essays like this, I have a photo of my two daughters next to me. I look at their tiny faces and imagine they will starve if the essay doesn’t get done.

It’s a delusion.

My daughters probably won’t die if I don’t write this essay, but I’ve conditioned myself to believe there’s a probability they will. So for the last 3 years I’ve never missed writing an essay since my first daughter was born.

Your survival is deeply motivating. It helps your priorities transcend your own existence. And when a priority is about more than just you, it’s easier to focus.

Tell yourself you’ll ruin your life if this single priority doesn’t work out.

A guide to using a phone that’ll leave you screaming “F you, Tim Denning”

This essay isn’t a place for comfort. It’s a place for breakthroughs.

The way I use my phone is so radical, I guarantee you won’t like it. But we live in desperate times when everyone is a zombie looking at a phone and not living in the present. The current solutions to fix this problem aren’t working.

I currently have less than 10 mins of screen time a day on my iPhone. Read that again.

Here are my extreme phone rules:

• Phone must be permanently in do-not-disturb mode (only family can get through)

• No social media apps installed on the phone

• No looking at emails on a phone

• No phones around family

• No phones at meal time

• No phone notifications

• No phone scrolling

I feel like a total outcast sharing these rules with you. It’s almost as if I’m a 1980s guy who came to 2026 in a time machine. I don’t think you’ll find a single human who has less than 10 minutes of phone time a day.

I don’t share this to brag. I share it because I genuinely think it’s the antidote to the huge focus problem. What might surprise you is I do have a lot of screen and internet time. But I only allow myself to do it on my desktop computer.

This allows me to schedule and set boundaries around when I do or don’t scroll. When I’m in my office using my desktop, it’s work time. When I’m not in my office, it’s time to be present. That physical boundary makes it 10x easier to focus.

My iPhone is only for phone calls. If flip phones had great cameras, I’d switch overnight. Smartphones are what made us dumb.

Stop dabbling like an amateur

One reason it’s hard to set priorities is you don’t know the outcome of every goal or task you choose to take on.

This seems harmless but it’s not. If you become obsessed with knowing how things will turn out, given it’s impossible to predict, you’ll find yourself dabbling. You’ll hedge your bets, dabble, and not invest enough time to reach the outcome.

Dangerously focused people don’t dabble.

They assume things will work out. They go all in. They know the only way to find out is to dedicate themselves to the mission and be okay if it ends in failure.

When you go all in, that simultaneously means you’re committing to one project, putting all your energy into it, and choosing obsession instead of lukewarm passion.

You must go all in to become dangerously focused.

Break the concept of flow states until you wake Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from the dead

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote the bible on flow states called “flow.”

It’s one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. It explains how to enter a flow state. You remove distractions, focus on one task, make the work slightly beyond your capabilities, drink coffee, and ensure the work you do gives you energy. The result is that an hour in flow will feel like 5 minutes. You’ve 100% experienced this.

Flow states are helpful, but to become dangerously focused, you must go to the next level. Flow states typically last an hour or two for most people. I’ve been able to extend them to 4-8 hours. My longest-ever flow state lasted 16 hours straight.

Longer flow states are more potent.

They’re so powerful you can achieve extreme goals when you use them. And it’s those achievements that’ll make you dangerous in the modern world.

First, you need to know it’s possible. Second, you need to set up your day so it can be done. It requires a distraction-free environment and a free calendar.

Those two requirements aren’t easy for most people – but they are possible. Then you simply apply the normal flow state protocol, but with the intent of staying in flow for a much longer time period.

Weaponize the hours of the day

There’s this concept called “Make then manage.”

I hate concepts like this but I found this one helpful. I always start my day with creation, imagination, and making stuff.

I push all the reactive stuff to the end of the day when I’m tired. This simple shift allows you to have the right levels of energy appropriate for the right task.

Let some crazy bastards into your life

It’s easy to become unfocused because the bar is so low around you.

Most people can’t focus for 30 seconds. So when you focus for 30 minutes, they compliment you and call you dedicated or hardworking.

This does more harm than good.

I found it more helpful to get around other highly focused people who’d hold me to a much higher level. I learned this from Olympic swimmer Kieren Perkins. I asked him how he trained so hard to win more Olympic gold medals than most people in history.

Answer: “It’s hard to skip a 4 AM training session when you’ve got three other Olympic gold medalist teammates to drag you out of bed if you dare try to skip a session.”

Most people surround themselves with friends, advisors, and mentors who tell them what they want to hear. Then they wonder why they’re distracted and can’t get the results they know they’re capable of.

The solution is to get around bastards who swear at you, tell you to keep going, and hold you ruthlessly accountable for what you say you want in life.

You lie to yourself when you only hear your own voice. Outside voices wake you the hell up from being in love with yourself and thinking you’re focused.

Cultivate a psychopathic sense of urgency

A lack of focus needs consequences.

Most people don’t have this. If they’re a lazy ass, nothing bad happens. That’s why you must hardwire your brain to take your priorities in life and make them urgent.

“I’ll start in 3 months” is ruining your life. No, you won’t. Circumstances won’t be better. Waiting for the chaos to subside is mental ma$turbation. There will always be chaos. You work around the chaos. Or, if you’re a psycho like me, you learn to love the chaos and thrive in it.

But trying to avoid chaos is a loser move. Impossible.

There has to be a reason why now is the right time. You must craft the story in your head and make sure it’s evidence-based.

Whenever I try to delay priorities I tell myself “Timbo, you had a near-miss with cancer in 2015. What the hell makes you think you have the extreme privilege of being alive in three months to start this goal then?”

Without fail this thinking always makes me move faster. Believing you’ll be alive beyond today is sheer arrogance. It’s ego. And it’s bloody disgusting. How dare you. You could be dead tomorrow. So do it today or shut up and stop complaining.

A psychopathic sense of urgency is a pattern interrupt. Use it.

Bringing it all together

Being dangerously focused can change your life.

But it requires an extreme approach because the focus problem is more extreme than people are willing to admit. You’ll never achieve anything worthwhile in life unless you develop the simple skill of being able to focus. It’s simple but it’s not easy.

Unless there’s a reason for extreme focus, you’ll default to a distracted state which produces low states of consciousness and piss-poor results.

We’re at war. Guard your focus, or face the deep regrets that come with not getting what you want out of life when you know you could have made it happen.

Focused people are dangerous because they have no competition. It’s life on easy mode, and it’s the best cheat code I know.

Be honest — are you actually focused, or just busy?

---

PS: Only 8 hours to register for my new workshop — How to Win on LinkedIn in 2026.

If you want to land connections, leads, customers, or clients every single day from LinkedIn, don’t miss this.

No late entry.

Click here to grab your seat to today’s workshop