Paying Attention

Hi, I’m David and my mission in life is to prepare people for the future of work.?

In this week’s edition of the newsletter the theme revolves around paying attention. Today, we continually fight distractions. From watching YouTube during supper, to the onslaught of incoming data from text messages, emails, and phone/ Zoom calls. It feels like we’re going through life in a state of continuous partial attention. We are there but not really there. Unaware of where we place our attention. Unconscious about how we go through the day. Our inability to resist checking email or social media rather than focus on the here and now leads to what Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman calls “away” or a sort of real-life out-of-office. However, being present and seizing the day is what brings meaning to our lives. As English author Jeanette Winterson said, "It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment." Below are some insights and thoughts that will help you pay attention and be more present.

Timeless Insight

"Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life." – James Clear

Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource that is your free time. Your experience in life largely depends on the material objects (i.e. things) and mental subjects (i.e. people) that you choose to pay attention to or ignore. This is not some sort of an imaginative notion, but a physiological fact. When you focus on a stop sign or a song, your brain registers that “target”, which enables it to affect your behaviour. In contrast, the things that you don’t attend to in a sense don’t exist, at least not in your reality. How we deploy attention shapes what we see. Or as Yoda says, “Your focus is your reality." Every day you are selectively paying attention to something from the variety of things you see, hear, and feel, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process and make it work in your favour. Your ability to pay attention to this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being. In the words of one of the greatest music teachers and conductors of the 20th century, Nadia Boulanger, who trained many of the leading composers and musicians of the time on the power of attention, “Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his precious life. I'd go so far as to say life is denied by lack of attention.”

Food for Thought

Attention is commonly understood as “the concentration of the mental powers” or “the direction or application of the mind to any object of sense or thought." However, in recent times a convergence of insights from both neuroscience and psychology suggests that the skilful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience on Earth, from mood to productivity to relationships.

If you could look backward at your existence thus far, you’d see that your life has been fashioned from what you’ve paid attention to and what you haven’t. You’d observe that of the many sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that you could have focused on, you selected a few, which became what you’ve called “reality.” You’d also be struck by the fact that if you had paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different.

What should you not pay attention to?

Deciding what to pay attention to is hard, but what’s often overlooked, even though it might be equally if not even more important, is deciding on what you should not pay attention to.

Albert Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and seminal to his work, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones. Therefore, be choosy about what you let into your attic. Be willing to read anything that looks even a little interesting, but abandon it quickly and without mercy if it’s not working for you.

When reading an article, book, or report, ask yourself, “Will I still care about this in a year?” Five years? Ten? Most of the time you’ll realise you won’t care about whatever you’re reading in a week. It’s a trending topic, maybe it’s interesting, but it has an expiration date. Too many readers get too bogged down in details they’re never going to remember anyways, when they could have pulled a few memorable lines out of a book and moved onto the next.

Memorise stories, highlight facts, skip the fluff. People don’t remember books or articles. They remember sentences. More specifically, they remember stories. Even in the best book you’ve ever read, what do you remember? A couple of sentences, perhaps a few stories. Those sentences and stories might change your life, but they’re all you’ll take away from it. There is no need to devour every word. If you can remember a few great stories, it’s a win.

There are two types of knowledge: expiring and permanent. Expiring knowledge is things like quarterly earnings, election polls, market information, and politics. Permanent knowledge tends to be principles and frameworks that help you make sense of expiring information. Asking how long you’ll care about the information you read pushes you to focus on perennial things and care less about temporary things, which is a great mindset for long-term thinking.

What should you pay attention to?

In a nutshell, the positive. Paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it, a fact with important implications for your life.?

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” is a proverbial phrase used to encourage optimism and a positive can-do attitude in the face of adversity or misfortune, which proves the idea of restoring emotional equilibrium by refocusing on a problem in a different way. Looking at the bright side, even in tough situations, is a powerful predictor of a longer, happier, healthier life, which is what most of us aspire to have and hope for our children.?

Research on the so-called cognitive appraisal of emotions, pioneered by the psychologists Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus, confirms that what happens to you, from a blizzard to a pregnancy to a job transfer, is less important to your well-being than how you respond to it. Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson says that if you want to get over a bad feeling, focusing on something positive seems to be the quickest way to usher out the unwanted emotion.

That’s not to say that when something upsetting happens, you immediately try to force yourself to be happy. First, says Barbara Fredrickson, you examine the seed of emotion, or how you honestly feel about what occurred. Then, you direct your attention to some element of the situation that frames things in a more helpful light. For example, after a big argument, you might focus on the fact that at least a festering conflict has finally been expressed.?

How you react to life is more important than what happens. Those are the words that legendary psychiatrist and Auschwitz-survivor, Viktor Frankl, so aptly found out the hard way. In his fascinating memoir, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, which I highly recommend reading, he wrote: "Everything can be taken from man except one thing: the last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

Article of the Week?

Too Busy to Pay Attention

Caricature of the Week

Source: Condé Nast

Thank you for reading and keep on growing!

David

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