There is a cognitive bias called the Focusing Illusion made famous by Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman, it can be summarized as: "Nothing in life is as important as it seems to be at the time when you're focused on it." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984

The Focusing Illusion is super common, and it creates a trap that people who are passionate and dedicated fall into, to their detriment. It creates a profound and problematic cognitive dissonance where the thing they are *sure* is the most important thing is simply not.

For five years at npm I spent so much time thinking about JavaScript that I began to believe – genuinely, deeply believe – that JavaScript is the most important language in the world. I got up in front of thousands of people at conferences and said this with total conviction.

It feels like some kind of fever dream now. JavaScript? Super popular language. Very important if you are a web developer. Web development? *Extremely* important to the modern economy. The most important programming language in the *world*? Nonsense. There's no such thing. Wild.

Now I see the focusing illusion everywhere. A big, entrenched company will believe that its competitors are insignificant, not worth learning about, because they spend so much time thinking about themselves and their own technology and customers.

Likewise, startups and new technology enthusiasts spend a lot of time thinking about their brand new thing and get completely carried away by how big it is, how great it is, and how much it can realistically accomplish. The same effect affects both sides.

And tonight I saw a DevRel yelling at the Internet about how the thing that is their job to evangelize is SO IMPORTANT and devs don't care and they're SO STUPID for not caring and this too is the focusing illusion.

If you find yourself in a situation where there's a thing you find important, but despite all your best efforts nobody seems to care, it's probably not because you are much smarter than everybody else. It's probably because that thing is just not as important as you believe.

If you find yourself in that situation, try your best to step back, pull yourself out of your shoes, look at the world from a wider perspective. Is there some way you can accomplish your goals without having to get the whole world to realign around your core belief?

If you can, excellent. If you can't... maybe it's time to pick some other focus. Otherwise the stress of passionately, honestly, earnestly believing a thing that the universe keeps telling you isn't true will slowly grind your brain down to a nub.