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#170 – The Federer Formula & Concentration
Quote, Podcast, Mental Model, Observation, X.
Dimitri Gremos
November 04, 2026
Good morning everyone,
Hope you’re having a great week!
Welcome to the November edition of Five to Thrive.
Here are 5 things to make your morning a little more interesting.
Let’s jump in.
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#170 – The Rundown:
Quote: The important stuff is never ‘finished’.
Podcast: Tools to improve your focus and concentration.
Mental Model: The Federer Formula.
Observation: There are two very different economies.
X: A practical alternative to ‘follow your passion’.
Quote:
The Important Stuff Is Never ‘Finished’
“Work is endless. Exercise is endless. Parenting is endless. Same with marriage, writing, investing, creating, and more. You get to choose the parts of your life, but many of the important things in life cannot be "finished."
Do not approach an endless game with a finite mindset. The objective is not to be done, but to settle into a daily lifestyle you can sustain and that allows you to make daily progress on the areas that matter.
Embrace the fact that life is continual and look for ways to enjoy the daily practice.”
C’est exactement ça.
More on this in the Mental Model below.
{h/t James Clear}
Podcast:
Tools to Improve Your Focus & Concentration
I think it would be fairly safe to say that true focus has never been harder to achieve.
Here are some crazy stats I’ve shared before:
Teens spend an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes on screens per day.
The average Instagram user watches over 350+ reels per day.
The average person will receive 121 emails per day.
There are more than 500 million tweets sent each day around the world.
As I enter my final exam period at university, I found some genuinely useful tools to help improve concentration and focus in this ‘Huberman Lab Essentials’ episode.
I found this podcast coupled with a clip of Andrew Huberman’s recent appearance on Modern Wisdom where he discussed the avoidance of burnout to be a great supplementary source of info.
A few protocols that I am actively implementing during this exam block:
1) Sunlight exposure first thing in the morning and exercise within the first 3 hours of the day to raise cortisol as early as possible.
2) Cold shower (30 seconds to 3 minutes) immediately before work sessions.
3) Optimal caffeine consumption before work periods, but no later than 8 hours before sleep.
4) Visual focus on one thing for 30 seconds to 3 minutes before starting bouts of cognitive work (e.g. staring at a dot on the wall).
5) Periodically looking away from a screen to something far off in the distance during study sessions to mitigate eye strain.
6) Lower cortisol in the last hour of the day (phone off, red light exposure, warm shower, block-out curtains).
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
[Duration: 37 minutes]
P.S. I made a Spotify playlist with every podcast I’ve ever recommended. I hope they bring you as much value as they’ve brought me.
Mental Model:
The Federer Formula
If I had to pick a single thread that runs, in some way shape or form, through all 170 newsletters I’ve written over the past three-and-a-half years, it would be the importance of sustainable victories.
In one line: it’s not just important that you win, but how you win.
A video I came across of legendary NBA coach Steve Kerr speaking on a panel I think serves as an apt illustration of this concept.
It challenged me to think about the fact that how you win might actually be the reason you ever win at all…
“So, I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer.
We were playing in China with the [Golden State] Warriors in 2017, I think, during the exhibition season. We were training over there and played two games. Roger Federer was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come and speak to the team.
Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’
And everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ or talk about willpower and determination, and all the usual clichés, right?
But Roger Federer said:
‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school. I drop them off, and then I go and practise tennis for about two hours.
I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can still get all the work in that I need.
Then I go and have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together, and the kids are all home from school. We ask them about their day, and there’s so much joy in the house.
Then we put them to bed, and when I put my head on the pillow at night, I think, “Man, that was just a great day.”
And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’
And it was like, yes! That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success.
He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life.
So it’s not about outworking everybody, banging your head against the wall, or constantly thinking, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’
It’s about allowing your natural talent to shine through, combined with a strong work ethic, a great family life, perspective, peace, and a sense of mindfulness.
It’s about waking up and thinking, ‘Man, I’m so lucky to do what I do.’
And all of us here are in the top one per cent of the luckiest people on the planet. We know that, right? All we have to do is look at the suffering that exists out there.
So it’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness.
It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky.
And ultimately, getting the most out of ourselves comes down to our daily rituals, our experiences, and the love and joy we find in everyday life.”
And thinking back to the quote from James Clear I shared earlier, “the objective is … to settle into a daily lifestyle you can sustain and that allows you to make daily progress on the areas that matter.”
And there probably aren’t too many high performers in the public eye who encapsulate this approach to life more so than Roger Federer.
Observation:
There Are Two Very Different Economies
There are two very different economies currently playing out in the US today.
On one side, the AI infrastructure boom is rolling on full steam ahead, with spending on data centre construction soaring.
On the other, construction spending across the rest of the private sector is actually declining quite spectacularly.
As Kevin O’Leary would say, it’s importance to distinguish the signal from the noise…
{h/t Charlie Bilello}
X:
A Practical Alternative To ‘Follow Your Passion’
A good post, but here’s the part I found most interesting:
“2) You don't need passion, you need energy.
I still have no idea what it means to follow your passion.
You don't have to be passionate about your professional pursuits, you just need to find energy in them. You just need to feel a pull towards them. You just need to feel that spark of curiosity in them.
Passion is usually a byproduct of energy.
When you have energy for something, you'll give it your deep attention to learn more.
You’ll ask the right questions. You’ll figure it out. You’ll win.
Follow your energy. Pursue interesting puzzles. Solve them.”
I think this captures a concept most people, either knowingly or unknowingly, live their lives by.
To find one’s passion often feels less like a north star and more like a mirage.
An ineffable destination which you discover too late in life, if ever.
But following what gives you energy feels like a far more pragmatic and surprisingly tangible criteria.
Some questions I’m contemplating in light of this:
1) What is giving me energy at the moment?
2) What are the things which have given me energy in the past?
3) What are the things which I think might give me energy that would be worth dedicating some time to?
Food for thought.
{h/t Sahil Bloom}
Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.
In case you missed it, last month’s newsletter covered how to learn anything faster, finding opportunities inside opportunities, 3 rules to live by & more.
If you enjoyed this edition, it would mean the world if you could forward it to a friend or send them my website.
This goes a long way to helping me reach more people :)
See you in December,
Dimi