This week's book: "Hyperfocus" by Chris Bailey.
"My experience is what I agree to attend to."
William James
What did you pay attention to today?
Not what you did. What actually got your attention. The emails, the news, the phone in your pocket buzzing for the fortieth time, the worry you couldn't put down. Most of us can't really answer that question, and this week's book says that's a problem, because that answer is writing our life’s story.
Chris Bailey's whole argument rests on a simple, almost startling idea, one the psychologist William James named more than a century ago: your experience is what you agree to attend to. The things you notice are the things that shape you. Everything else may as well not have happened. As Bailey puts it in his own words, we are what we pay attention to.
Think about that for a second. Not “we are what we do” but “we are what we pay attention to.” Your attention, over a lifetime, is what builds your life.
And this might make you uncomfortable: Bailey cites research that our minds wander from what we're doing 47 percent of the time. Almost half our waking life, spent somewhere other than where we are supposed to be. Add in a world engineered to hijack our focus… phones, texts, emails, notifications, an endless set of distractions designed by very smart people to keep us hooked. Our attention is under assault, and most of us don’t stop to defend it.
Bailey lays out two ways to take it back, and we'll dig into each this week.
“Hyperfocus” is deliberately pouring all your attention into one important thing, void of distractions.
“Scatterfocus” is the opposite, intentionally letting your mind wander so it can make connections and solve problems.
One gets things done. The other figures out what's worth doing. We need both.
But it starts with a single very important question. Where is your attention actually going, and is that where you choose to send it?
One thing to try today
Just for today, notice where your attention goes, without judging it. Every time you catch yourself reaching for your phone, or drifting off mid-task, simply notice it. Don't fix it yet. Bailey calls this meta-awareness, becoming aware of what you're paying attention to, and it's the first step to everything else.
Where does your attention go when you're not paying attention (pun intended) to it? Hit reply, I read every one.
I'll go first: my phone, honestly. I'll sit down to write and suddenly I'm deep in some article I never meant to open. Sixty-four years old and still learning to pay attention to my own attention. This week's book came at a good time!
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Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Practical wisdom for the life you're building