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186 6 SECRETS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

havior was extremely uncharacteristic, and when Mark directly shared
his concerns, he learned that his colleague was on the verge of burning
out. “He said he had hit a wall, to the point where he hadn’t wanted
to look at another line of code,” Mark said. “We encouraged him to
take more personal downtime and he began to work his way back into
a groove.” Interestingly, Mark Williams himself, one of the most
steadily energetic founders I’ve ever known, someone who could work
for months on end with as little as four to five hours of sleep each
night, seems to hit his own wall every six months or so, going down
for days at a time with a severe intestinal bug or a high-fever strain of
the flu.

Another form of this physical and emotional rebellion comes in
the form of weak focus, wandering attention, and unclear thinking. It
has become fashionable among entrepreneurs to claim to suffer from
some version of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, and no doubt some
of us do, but most of us are victims of an unrelenting overload of sen-
sory stimulation and emotional strain. Too many founders allow their
focus to be diluted and washed away by incessant interruptions and
distractions, whether they are by emails, advertisements, or random
insignificant tasks.

Two books have recently contributed to the growing body of ev-
idence that cultural and technological forces are shrinking our atten-
tion spans and diminishing our productivity and effectiveness. In The
Myth of Multitasking, author and consultant Dave Crenshaw explains
how the modern tendency to wear many hats and juggle tasks leads
to huge drains on productivity and efficiency.13 And in The Shallows:
What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, journalist Nicholas Carr offers
the well-formulated thesis that our 24/7 information age is robbing
us of nothing less than our ability to think deeply.14

The solution is to prioritize and focus the largest chunks of your
time on opportunities and problems that require deep attention and
effort. Go for depth over breadth. Devote your best thinking and ac-
tion to a few essential challenges each week, or even each month, to
avoid being pulled by the tide of a hundred superficial distractions,
drifting like a boat without a sail. Determine what initiatives are most
essential to propel your venture forward over a given period of time,

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