Focus matters enormously for success in life, and yet we seem to give it little attention.
Daniel Goleman's book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, explores the power of attention. "Attention works much like a muscle," he writes, "use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows."
To get the results we want in life, Goleman argues we need three kinds of focus.
Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. A (person) tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
How we deploy attention shapes what we see. Or as Yoda says, "Your focus is your reality."
Goleman argues that, despite the advantages of everything being only a click away, our attention span is suffering.
An eighth-grade teacher tells me that for many years she has had successive classes of students read the same book, Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Her students have loved it - until five years or so ago. "I started to see kids not so excited - even high-achieving groups could not get engaged with it," she told me. "They say the reading is too hard; the sentences are too complicated; it takes a long time to read a page."
She wonders if perhaps her students' ability to read has been somehow compromised by the short, choppy messages they get in texts. One student confessed he'd spent two thousand hours in the last year playing video games. She adds, "It's hard to teach comma rules when you are competing with World of WarCraft."
Here is a telling story. I was in a coffee shop just the other day and I noticed that when two people were having a conversation they couldn't go more than a few minutes without picking up their phone. Our inability to resist checking email, Facebook, and Twitter rather than focus on the here and now leads to a real life out-of-office. Sociologist Erving Goffman, calls this "away," which tells other people "I'm not interested" in you right now. Another example, from later in the day, comes from the post office. I was waiting patiently in line to pick up a parcel. Finally my turn came and the phone rang. The attendant, of course, ran to the phone making me feel less important than the mystery person on the phone.
"While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish."
We continually fight distractions. From televisions on during supper, text messages, emails, phone calls … you get the picture. This is one reason I've changed my media consumption habits in 2014.
It seems like we're going through life in, in the words of one All Things D(igital) conference in 2005, a "continuous partial attention." We're there but not really there. Unaware of where we place our attention.
I once worked with the CEO of a private organization. We often discussed board meetings, agendas, and areas of focus. I sensed a disconnect between what he wanted to happen and what was actually happening so I went back over the last year of board meetings and categorized each scheduled agenda item. It turned out that 'scheduled time' was almost the complete inverse of where he wanted to place attention.
Goleman also points to some of the implications of our modern world.
The onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts, like triaging email by heading, skipping much of voice mails, skimming messages and memos. It's not just that we've developed habits of attention that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too little time simply to reflect on what they really mean.
In 1977, foreseeing what was going to happen, the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon wrote:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
William James, a pioneer of modern psychology, defined attention as "the sudden taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought."
We naturally focus when we're lost. Imagine for a second the last time you were driving in your car without your GPS and you got lost. Think back to the first thing you did in response. I bet you turned off the radio so you could increase your focus.
Goleman, paraphrasing research, argues there are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.
The sensory distractors are easy: as you read these words you're tuning out (our sponsor and all of the text on the right). Or notice for a moment the feeling of your tongue against your upper palate-just one of an endless wave of incoming stimuli your brain weeds out from the continuous wash of background sounds, shapes and colors, tastes, smells, sensations, and on and on.
More daunting is the second variety of lures: emotionally loaded signals. While you might find it easy to concentrate on answering your email in the hubbub of your local coffee shop, if you should overhear someone mention your name (potent emotional bait, that) it's almost impossible to tune out the voice that carries it - your attention reflexively alerts to hear what's being said about you. Forget that email. The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go - or if, on the other hand, we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry.
The more our focus gets disrupted, the worse we do.
To focus we must tune out emotional distractions. But not at all costs. The power to disengage focus is also important.
That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life's emotional waves.
Failure to drop one focus and move on to others can, for example, leave the mind lost in repeating loops of chronic anxiety. At clinical extremes it means being lost in helplessness, hopelessness, and self-pity in depression; or panic and catastrophizing in anxiety disorders; or countless repetitions of ritualistic thoughts or acts (touch the door fifty times before leaving) in obsessive-compulsive disorder. The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.
We've all seen what a strong selective focus looks like. It's the couple in the coffee shop mentioned above, eyes locked, who fail to realize they are not alone.
It should come as no surprise that we learn best with focused attention.
As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections. If you and a small toddler share attention toward something as you name it, the toddler learns that name; if her focus wanders as you say it, she won't.
When our mind wanders off, our brain activates a host of brain circuits that chatter about things that have nothing to do with what we're trying to learn. Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we're learning.
Goleman goes on to discuss how we connect what we read to our mental models, which is the heart of learning.
As we read a book, a blog, or any narrative, our mind constructs a mental model that lets us make sense of what we are reading and connects it to the universe of such models we already hold that bear on the same topic.
If we can't focus we'll have more holes in our understanding. (To find holes in your understanding, try the Feynman Technique, which was actually an invention of George Eliot's but I'll save that for another day.)
When we read a book, our brain constructs a network of pathways that embodies that set of ideas and experiences. Contrast that deep comprehension with the interruptions and distractions that typify the ever-seductive Internet.
The continuous onslaught of texts, meetings, videos, music, email, Twitter, Facebook, and more is the enemy of understanding. The key to understanding, argues Nicolas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, is "deep reading." And the internet is making this nearly impossible.
There is, however, perhaps no skill better than deep and focused thought. "The more information that's out there," says Tyler Cowen, author of Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation, "the greater the returns to just being willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn't what's scarce; it's the willingness to do something with it." Deep thought must be learned. In order to do that, however, we must tune out most of the distractions and focus.
Goleman reminds us that some of this too was foreseen.
Way back in the 1950s the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned against a looming "tide of technological revolution" that might "so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be … the only way of thinking." That would come at the loss of "meditative thinking," a mode of reflection he saw as the essence of our humanity.
I hear Heidegger's warning in terms of the erosion of an ability at the core of reflection, the capacity to sustain attention to an ongoing narrative. Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections; likewise, the shorter our reflections, the more trivial they are likely to be. Heidegger, were he alive today, would be horrified if asked to tweet.
The rest of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence goes on to narrow in on "the elusive and under-appreciated mental faculty in the mind's operations" known as attention and its role in living "a fulfilling life."