Focused simplicity

Right now you’re reading a tree. I don’t mean reading about a tree. You’re reading the tree. The only reason this tree is special, amongst the many possible trees, is that it is the one I’ve chosen to chop down. This newsletter is the tree.

I have had this analogy about chopping down a tree in mind for a couple of months. It’s a classic metaphor about focus and consistency. Hitting a tree in the same spot is more effective than hitting it all over. 100 hits in the same spot and the tree falls. 1,000 hits in 1,000 different spots just makes a lot of wood chip. 

I expanded the scope of the analogy for it to include decision making. The sifting and selection process. The importance of finding the right tree, and being rigorous about that.

Problems I‘ve been facing, which you also might be faced with:

The condensed story since 31st January 2026: The search for one tree

I was burned out. I had two jobs. Coffee House Manager and Fire Fighter. I left them both. Then after getting no traction in the job market I made the decision to stop applying and go all-in being self-employed. Work on my own projects. 

First, I wrote 19 articles on Medium but didn’t want to be held back by gatekeepers after they declined my application to their Partner Program. So I stopped writing there. 

Then I launched a local “What’s On” website for events. It ultimately wasn’t coherent with the vision I had.

The next significant idea I had was to create a one day in-person AI Masterclass event for business owners. No tickets sold. 

This process opened up networking events to me, which I wasn’t thinking of before. I started AI consulting. I’d been developing for 10+ years and had started writing about AI in 2021. This was slow. Too much time and energy spent going out into the world. Too much of a lag between efforts and results. Finding clients, waiting on clients.

I felt the real pull of wanting to build an audience, products, assets, and systems that have stand alone value. Something that isn’t just another form of exchanging time for money.

Knowing what I want: Psycho-Cybernetics, speed, and scale

At the start of April I was ready to start my next non-fiction book. The obvious choice was Psycho-Cybernetics.

Picking a goal for your subconscious mind to steer you towards. Holding the self-image that matches your goal. This is Psycho-Cybernetics in a nutshell. 

The idea that came to mind was to publish posts about Psycho-Cybernetics. This would match my criteria. It was simple and it wasn’t something I would pivot away from. It just clearly wasn’t a full project. The book would end. I needed something to anchor everything.

It became more clear. I knew what I wanted. I wanted a vertically integrated, adaptive, compounding system. Meaning something that would always be relevant and hold value. 

A situation where I could set my own routine and all of the work I did added to the overall value. 

I wanted speed and scale. This immediately filtered out a focus on consulting in-person. I also wanted something that was on-going. I found after I had put the energy into building the agenda for the AI event and after publishing it my focus and energy for it dropped off a cliff.

I wanted a system of action. I wanted to emulate the success I had been having with my daily anchors, the four daily non-negotiable habits. An adaptive, compounding system of consistency, which is what

was about. The anchor system started through simplicity.

I decided I wasn’t going to let another week drift by without having something concrete locked in. Although I was doing a lot of work, and being productive, it felt like it wasn’t yet all directed into one simple idea. 

Finding the tree

On Sunday 12th April I had to draw a line in the sand. At that point I worked out there were 4,224 wakeful hours left in 2026. I wanted to convert as many of those into meaningful hours as I could. To create as much value as I could, as soon as I could, to achieve the compounding effect. 

I was still looking for the one tree. The one tree, to hit with one axe, in one spot, repeatedly, over and over, until it fell.

I had two things in particular that was going well for me:

Something that I had floating in my mind was how much I’d been enjoying Park Run, and how well my running training had been going.

I was wondering what the underlying mechanics were. What was I enjoying so much? One aspect was the target of 9am every Saturday morning. The regular cadence. A propelling rhythm. Something to build training around. A ritual to enact on Saturday morning. 

The regular cadence of this being every week meant I was straight back into the process of training to improve my time for the next one. 

I had published the first issue of the newsletter on Friday, two days earlier. I had decided I would publish one every Friday. 

Then it became obvious.

A small shift in perspective.

The newsletter can be the tree.

It provided a natural cadence. Publishing once a week. All efforts could go towards that. I could build towards it.

The idea of creating the newsletter had been around since late February. It was always going to be a piece of the puzzle, but now I see it as the engine. Not the ultimate destination, but the driving force. The forcing function. 

The system I decided on was ‘Stones’. Using a building analogy. Like an ancient architect, constructing a pyramid. Three ‘Stones’, daily. Write, build, distribute. All related to the newsletter. The same tracking, reviewing, and compounding process as the anchors.

What I’ve learned from this process

I’d be interested to hear how you figured out what to work on.

Let me know on X @daniel__clayton

Thanks for reading,

Daniel.