Stop Chasing Many Rabbits
Years ago, when Tesla was struggling to meet its production targets, Elon Musk did something extreme even by his own standards: he moved his desk onto the factory floor.
Not in a meeting room. Not in an office above the plant. Onto the floor itself.
He slept there.
He worked there.
He lived there — sometimes sleeping only two or three hours a night — until the numbers shifted.
And they did.
In early 2018, Tesla was producing just 2,000 Model 3s a week. A few months later — after Musk’s shift to living inside the factory — Tesla hit its long-shot goal of 5,000 Model 3s per week by the end of June.
Production in Q4 2018 reached over 61,000 Model 3s.
The numbers alone tell the story: maniacal focus works.
Musk wasn’t performing magic. He wasn’t motivated by brilliance. He simply locked onto one thing and refused to look away until the result matched the vision.
And that’s the part that always gets me — because it reveals something uncomfortable and straightforward:
Success is mostly a matter of holding your attention on one thing for far longer than anyone else is willing to.
This is exactly what Gary Keller argues in The One Thing. He opens with a brutal proverb:
“If you chase two rabbits, you’ll catch none.”
Keller studied high achievers — CEOs, athletes, creators — and found one shared discipline: they narrow their field of vision.
They eliminate noise. They don’t scatter their energy. They sequence their life.
His core idea is sharp:
Extraordinary results come from narrowing your focus until only the essential remains.
Not ten things. Not five.
One.
Success, Keller says, is sequential, not simultaneous. You lay bricks in one direction until momentum takes over.
Why Sustained Focus Feels Good (The Neuroscience)
Deep focus isn’t just productive — it’s neurochemically rewarding.
Dopamine rises (and doesn’t drop) through effort-driven engagement — the slow, steady dopamine of mastery and progress, not the cheap spikes from scrolling. It teaches the brain that staying with a task feels good.
Serotonin rises through long-term direction.
It stabilises mood, reduces anxiety, and creates inner groundedness. When you commit to one path for months or years, the brain relaxes because it knows where it’s going.
That blend — progress + meaning — is why people who focus deeply often look calmer, clearer, and more alive.
My Own Lesson in Perseverance
During the COVID pandemic, on one Sunday, July 14th, I sat under a palm tree — my so-called Bodhi tree — for hours of reflection. The sky was turning gold. A soft breeze moved through the leaves. I felt like the last person alive. And the peace I felt didn’t come from thinking — it came from stopping.
Something loosened that day.
I let go of resentment, judgment, regret — the belief that I had wasted my potential. I saw clearly that I’d been operating at 40% of who I could be. And for the first time, I told myself it was okay. Those fifty-plus years weren’t mistakes — they were preparation.
An image kept appearing: a spiritual warrior.
Not a monk. Not a samurai.
A version of me — calm, strong, smiling.
A mix of Rumi, Gibran, Hemingway, and Alan Watts.
That day became my new starting point.
I realised I would no longer explain my philosophy — I would embody it.
And that meant discipline, action, and the long, hard road of self-mastery. The three Ps — pain, patience, perseverance — the ones I had avoided most of my life — became non-negotiable.
I narrowed my focus, cut out the unnecessary aspects of my life.
I began with my body.
My body has always been my doorway inward. When I work out or play padel, I come alive. When I eat poorly, everything dulls. But I had never pushed past the pain barrier into true transformation.
I always stopped short.
So I set a challenge: build the body of a spiritual warrior in my mid-fifties — strong, resilient, focused — not for aesthetics, but to prove I could finish something difficult.
It required months of diet changes, strength training, stretching, cardio, and restarting after injuries. It was slow. It was frustrating. Many days, I wanted to quit.
But I didn’t.
And that perseverance spread.
It flowed into my writing, where months of blank screens eventually became my memoir. Then came the battle to publish it — a failed publisher, delays, wasted money — until it finally came out in November 2024.
It flowed into my business, where I’ve been slowly turning around a company anchored in old habits and bad culture — still the most challenging journey of my life, but finally moving in the right direction.
It flowed into my inner life, where I returned to reading, journalling, and the practices that make me feel alive.
One act of sustained focus bleeds into the next.
The long road builds a different kind of person.
The Real Point of All This
Looking back, the truth is clear:
My life has only changed when I picked one direction and stayed with it long enough for it to shape me.
Not when I scattered my energy.
Not when I jumped between ideas.
Not when I chased inspiration.
But when I chose one thing and stayed with it through pain, boredom, frustration — and time.
Gary Keller, the neuroscientists, and Musk sleeping on a factory floor are all pointing at the same truth:
Depth comes from devotion.
Devotion comes from repetition.
Repetition becomes identity.
The Conclusion I Can’t Ignore
If I want to build my next chapter — in my body, my writing, my business — the question is brutally simple:
What is the one thing that deserves my sustained, unwavering focus?
Because once I choose it, everything else becomes noise.
And the life I want — the life of the spiritual warrior I saw under that palm tree — becomes inevitable.