On clutter

When your environment is cluttered, the chaos restricts your ability to focus. The clutter also limits your brain’s ability to process information. Clutter makes you distracted and unable to process information as well as you do in an uncluttered, organized, and serene environment.

ADHD individuals have a high variance of focus abilities, not a complete inability to focus on something.  They can be some of the world’s best focusers, under the right circumstances

I’ve always thought this, but am happy to read it has some validity.Very related to James Franco’s hyperproductivity.

James Franco is a rather productive fellow. He’s an actor, writer, student, and artist. Wonder how he manages to get this all done?

Franco has an unusually high metabolism for productivity. He seems to suffer, or to benefit, from the opposite of ADHD: a superhuman ability to focus that allows him to shuttle quickly between projects and to read happily in the midst of chaos. He hates wasting time a category that includes, for him, sleeping. (He’ll get a few hours a night, then survive on catnaps, which he can fall into at any second, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation.) He doesn’t drink or smoke or despite his convincingness in Pineapple Express do drugs. He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art. When I asked people if Franco actually does all of his own homework, some of them literally laughed right out loud at me, because apparently homework is all James Franco ever really wants to do. The photo of him sleeping in class, according to his assistant, wasn’t even from one of his classes: It was an extra lecture he was sitting in on, after a full day of work and school, because he wanted to hear the speaker.

Jonah Lehrer has a great piece in Outside Magazine on Clay Marzo who has Asperger’s syndrome’ a form of high-functioning autism. The article details how “at one” Marzo is in the water and explains some of the difficulties he faces when not in the water (where he’d rather not be). Throughout the whole article there’s an emphasis on the focus (or obsession) he has with surfing.

Once he’s on a wave, he’s not thinking about anything but the wave. He’s letting go, and you can feel that release when you watch him. I don’t want to do anything that takes away from that, because that purity is damn rare.

Roger Federer is one of the few athletes I’m routinely amazed by. I’ve been watching him throughout the US Open and have been wondering about his training regimen. I found this article about him conserving his focus for select moments during a match. I’ve lifted some blurbs that are great demonstrations for how he mentally plays the game.

he chooses to focus selectively, and focuses intensely once he does.

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Clearly, Federer was not too stressed about losing the first set, which demonstrates that he has gotten to a special mental state: acceptance of what has happened combined with confidence about what will happen.

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It’s not about the other guy, it’s about what you know you will summon from yourself at times of need.  I suppose winning as much as those two guys have builds something more than confidence, something like faith.

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he uses his mind to make sure he’s ready to concentrate at those crucial moments he is so good at identifying, and once there, doing what comes to him.  That’s what I think he meant when he said, after Isner, “it’s all in the mind and it’s all in the moment.”