To put it simply, you will know when something is worth your time because it will be engaging to you and focusing on those moments should feel almost effortless. If you are looking for challenging work or leisure that will help you maintain and even improve your ability to focus, I think Hobbs puts it best when he says the secret of fulfillment is, “to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.” A good chunk of that post echoes the statements that Gallagher makes above. This is how we get better. Back in early May, I wrote a post about how Kyle Bass feels freediving enables better decision making. If you are an avid reader this should sound familiar. If it’s too hard, you become anxious, overwhelmed, and unable to concentrate. In a variation on James’s recipe for interesting experience – the familiar leavened by the novel – Hobb’s ‘art of choosing difficulties’ requires selecting projects that are ‘just manageable.’ If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. What does, ‘by any enjoyable means’ actually mean? The more I try to be aware of how my focus ebbs and flows, the more I realize it’s intrinsically tied into the activities I’m participating in.Īccording to the under-appreciated mid-twentieth-century psychologist Nicholas Hobbs, the way to ensure this calm but heightened attention to the matter at hand is to choose activities that push you so close to the edge of your competence that they demand your absolute focus. Practise directing and mastering your attention by any enjoyable means. Stay focused on the moment, (Csikszentmihalyi says), even when you’re engaged in routine tasks or social encounters. This made it easier to work on awareness, that is, staying in the moment, or as Gallagher, paraphrasing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, puts it: One thing that really helped was to identify and systematically remove distractions from my life. Being in this moment - not the past and not the future - is something I’ve learned through yoga and philosophy. It seems, the more we practice and the more we try to become aware of when our focus slips away, the better and more productive we become. I’ve been exploring my ability to focus lately. Unless you can concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s hard to accomplish anything, period.” - Winifred Gallagher in Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life There’s one insight into both productivity and satisfaction that they inevitably share, however: the importance of laser like attention to your goal, be it building a better mousetrap or raising cattle. Their tips range from philosophical (learn from your failures) to the practical (never handle the same piece of paper twice). “The American dream is no longer just to get rich quick, but also to enjoy doing it, the new captains of industry offer various best-selling decalogue for achieving this goal.
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