Julie is 23, an orphan, and handicapped; she has just one working foot. Her family members were engaged in a fatal car accident at 8; she lost them all, surviving by grace. Julie grew up with her blind grandmother who was diagnosed with diabetes; she doesn't eat the common, easy-to-find, cheap starchy food consumed by the local inhabitants of Ikot Utoh, a slump somewhere in ... continue reading
It doesn’t disappear all at once; that’s the part nobody tells you. Focus doesn’t leave in a dramatic moment where you slam your laptop shut and declare, “I can’t concentrate anymore.” It leaks. Quietly. Between notifications. Between tabs. Between the urge to check “just one thing.” You wake up already tired. You sit down to work already distracted. You promise yourself you’ll start in five minutes. Five minutes becomes twenty. Twenty becomes guilt. Guilt becomes scrolling. And somewhere in that loop, your attention span shrinks again. This isn’t a personal failure. It’s not laziness. It’s not lack of ambition. It’s conditioning. We trained our brains to live in fragments, then got angry when they stopped behaving like deep thinkers. And here’s the uncomfortable truth most productivity advice avoids: You don’t need more discipline. You don’t need a new system. You don’t need a perfect morning routine that starts at 5 a.m. You need ten minutes. Not once. Every day. Because focus isn’t ...