Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

the power of seasonal singularity (single focus)

the ritual

I started this year the same way I start every year: sitting at my dining room table with my Cultivate What Matters planner, a pile of stickers, my Micron 01 ultra fine point pen, and enough highlighters to light up Minneapolis. This is my thing; my end-of-year winter ritual. I lay it all out like I’m running some vital operation. It’s just me, though, trying to wrangle my life with colored dots and stickers. I listed every single dream, every project, every wild idea for 2025, and yes, I talked myself into believing I’d somehow nail every single one. Like I do every damn year.

when everything fell apart

And then life did what life does. It walked in like it owned the place and threw everything off my table. Surgery, recovery: all the garbage nobody puts on a vision board. They tried to warn me, the doctors did, but nothing on this earth prepares you for the actual reality of it. I was wiped out in ways I didn’t want to admit. I don’t even how to articulate some of them, even now. Time blurred. Everything in my life slowed down except my frustration of course. And when I finally crawled out of the medicine fog, I thought I’d pick up where I left off. I thought I’d open my laptop, and the fire would be right there waiting for me.

Except it wasn’t.

the creative blackout

Every time I opened Forged by Grace, my brain just stared back at me like, Girl, no. I’d put months into that manuscript, and I felt horrified that I didnt feel like working on it. I tried ScaleForward. Nothing. Weightless. Nothing. It didn’t matter which project I tried to pick up; there was just… nothing. And it scared me. I wondered if something in me really had shifted in surgery, like the creative part of my brain had gotten lost in the shuffle.

the garage breakdown

One night, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went out to the garage, my little gym sanctuary, and had a full-on meltdown. My hoodie sleeves were getting soaked as I paced in frantic circles, talking to God the way you only speak to Him when you’re at your limit. I told Him everything: how confused and angry I was, how stuck I felt, and how much I strongly disliked feeling useless. But the worst part… I told Him the truth: I was terrified I’d lost my spark. That the creative part of my brain had just packed up, thrown its hands up, and checked out.

the spark returns

I let it all out, whispered amen, went inside, and tried to distract myself with Instagram. I’m scrolling mindlessly when this guy pops up ranting about no-code app builders and how everything breaks because people treat these platforms like they can read minds. And suddenly I remembered how frustrated I’d been when I tried building something with one of them. The more he talked, the more something clicked. Of course, these things don’t work. You can’t assume the system knows what you want. You have to spell out every tiny detail, or the whole thing falls apart. It needs clarity and absolute specificity. You need a PRD.

And the second that thought hit me? Something just short-circuited and lit up my brain for the first time in months. That was the missing piece; not just for that silly app, but for absolutely everything I’d been avoiding. So I grabbed my notepad and, just like that, I fell back into what I do best. I built the PRD, detailing every click, every rule, and every wild thing a user might try. The outside world completely vanished. Eight hours just disappeared. Then I opened Firebase and started building the actual bones of the thing. And suddenly it’s sixteen hours later, and I’m still glued to my chair, locked in and fully alive in a way I hadn’t felt in forever.

And then it worked. I stared at my screen like, holy shit, I actually built this. And it actually works. I stayed in that high-focus flow for days. I was exhausted, yeah, but the good kind: the kind where you practically collapse into bed knowing you did something that made you feel totally alive and capable. It was the first time I thought: maybe I haven’t lost myself after all.

the real operating system: single focus

That was the moment everything made sense. My brain doesn’t do juggling. It never has. I am wired for single focus. I can do extraordinary work when I am all in, but I can’t split myself between ten different meaningful projects at once. This is coming from a woman who can’t read in a moving car, just like I can’t study with music playing. My brain doesn’t work that way, and it never has.

And when I looked back, the evidence was everywhere. Lifting the Wait got done because it had a season. The seminar got built because it had a season. Forged by Grace progressed because I gave it a season. Every meaningful thing in my life has succeeded because it had my full attention at the right time.

No wonder I was drowning.

the shift

The surgery didn’t take anything from me. I was the one burying myself under ten impossible expectations. Once I saw that, everything shifted. I hadn’t lost passion for any of it, I was just suffocating under the pressure to carry all of it at the same time. I don’t need to choose which dream to keep, I just need to decide which dream gets fed right now. The rest will wait their turn. They aren’t going anywhere. God didn’t give me these ideas to abandon them. He gave them to me to build them, one season at a time.

I can do it all. I just can’t do it all today.

When I finally made peace with this and decided just to honor the natural way my brain works, the anxiety lifted like someone just opened a window.

the takeaway

When I look back, it feels obvious in the way truth always does once it finally smacks you in the head. Everything I’ve ever built came alive when it had its own season. Not a deadline. Not a color-coded fantasy plan where everything magically lines up. A season, a stretch of time where one thing gets my full attention instead of fighting ten other priorities like siblings arguing in the back seat. And honestly, once I saw that pattern in my own life, I couldn’t unsee it. This is what I wish someone had told me years ago. You do not need to build all your goals at once. You need to create a life where things get their moment. Everything doesn’t need urgency. Everything doesn’t deserve equal attention.

That is the power of seasonal singularity or being able to just single focus. It gives your dreams some air again and gives your heart a chance to pour itself into something instead of spreading your energy so thin you can barely feel alive in any of it.

If there is anything I can pass along from my meltdown-in-the-garage moment, it’s this. Choose your season on purpose. Give something the gift of your full attention instead of forcing things into impossible competition.

Watch what happens when you finally stop trying to be everywhere and let yourself be great somewhere.

FAQ