Curiosity After Hours
Hyperfocus can feel like a superpower and a trap. In Curiosity After Hours, I reflect on how giving my focus boundaries and space transformed my nights and weekends from burnout recovery time into a rhythm for creativity, curiosity, and real rest.
What Hyperfocus Is Teaching Me About My Nights and Weekends
This week I (finally) released the Hyperfocus lyric video. It’s a song about that edge between control and surrender, between using your fire and getting burned by it.
It’s also my ode to the old MTV music videos I grew up on (farewell, MTV) and the low-budget karaoke clips I (not-so-secretly) love. I almost felt it was too cringe to put out there. Almost. 😎
Hyperfocus lyric video on YouTube.
At the same time, Indie Boulevard Magazine ran a feature on my debut EP Neuroemergent, calling it “a beautiful uprising against the algorithm of productivity.” With that kind of praise, I had to hit play, right???
I love their take on the album, and I’d love to hear yours.
Gabriel Rivera
Click to read the full article on Indie Boulevard Magazine.
Learning to Listen to My Own Mind
For me, Hyperfocus is a confessional. It’s a realization of how my wild mind works and a waking up to both its power and its pension for detour. My old pattern was to use my nights and weekends to catch up on all the work I couldn’t pack into my week chasing deadlines, deliverables, and new ideas. I treated rest like my student loans, a debt repayment instead of a vital part of my workflow.
Now I’m experimenting with something different. I’m giving my hyperfocus both boundaries and space, for my day job and my creative work. It sounds counterproductive, yet it’s changing everything. When I protect certain hours for curiosity, not output or content but pure play, I show up sharper everywhere else.
When Curiosity Becomes Currency
As I’ve found a rhythm with my hyperfocus, I’ve noticed something interesting. Curiosity isn’t punished in our culture; it’s celebrated when it’s monetized. Every spark gets weighed down by the question, Can I sell this? Will learning this make me more useful at work? At home? In music?
I started using my hyperfocus for the ideas with the most potential. But human curiosity doesn’t work that way for long, especially for those of us who are neuroemergent. Curiosity craves novelty and direction, not just deliverables.
So now I try to balance curiosity between consumption and creation, learning by listening and learning by doing. It’s easier, safer, and more socially rewarded to scroll, sign up for another class, or watch one more video. But when I only consume curiosity, I leave the best lessons unlearned.
Shaping a Living Legacy
I’m leaning into a creator-heavy balance, challenging myself to hone curiosity that serves creativity in my music, my work, and my family life. For everything I consume, I aim to create twofold. That means giving myself permission to fail, experiment, and get lost long enough to learn something new. The trick is giving curiosity room to roam without the burden of turning it into a full blown side-quest each time.
In the end, nothing I deliver or any role I play will stand the test of time. The direction I’m walking toward, that’s my legacy.
That’s what Hyperfocus is teaching me. The song started as a late-night experiment and became a reminder that attention, like creativity, needs constraints to bloom.
Watch the new lyric video on YouTube and tell me how you’re shaping your own nights and weekends in the comments.
