Archive for the ‘Focus Areas’ tag
Focus: How Rapt Attention Changes Who We Are
I’ve recently started reading Rapt by Winifred Gallagher (book number fifteen on my annual goal list of eighteen relevant books). While the book has a set of good and bad reviews on Amazon, I found the description and the Kindle Sample interesting enough to buy and read it. It’s no secret I’m interested in learning as much as I can about attention and focus, so anything that could help improve my understanding of the area even a little bit is worth the $10 investment.
So far, I’ve been quite pleased. The introduction section of this book has one of the most accurate descriptions of focus and attention I’ve read to-date – and given Refocuser’s subject matter, I thought it would be fun to relay what I found to be the key takeaway from Rapt’s introduction: the grand unified theory of positive psychology.
In physics, the notion of a “grand unification theory” or “grand unified theory” is the holy grail of research, and has been for many years. The idea is to merge all disparate theories into a single theory that describes everything in the universe – gravity, quantum mechanics, relativity, and so on. It’s clean and simple, and scientists like structure and order. When it comes to positive psychology, you could say that a similar unifying theory would help crystallize things into something more approachable for everyday people. There are thousands of interesting studies to draw upon, and thousands more sources to pull from, but because of this explosion of information, it’s hard to grasp onto it. People speak often of the many of things you can do to increase the quality of your life, but maybe there is actually a single statement or line of thinking that wraps everything up with a bow; something that everything else hangs off of. This proposal from Rapt is as close as I’ve found:
Your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.
It is pretty simple, isn’t it? But it has broad implications. It suggests that your internal experience is entirely forged by your external experience, specifically the things which you choose to apply your attention to. And that you have control over it. You can create your experience by learning how to focus your attention on the things that matter the most to you. Maybe it’s not easy or natural right away, but it’s possible. I love that thought.
Pick Your Top 3 Focus Areas… and Drop Everything Else
Focusing on what matters most to you is the only way you can make material progress towards your goals. Typically when you talk to people who are so stressed out they can’t see straight, they complain that they simply have too much to do and feel overwhelmed. When you dig a little deeper, you almost always discover that they’re trying to do too much to begin with and are trying to be too many things to too many people. They don’t have a North Star to keep them moving towards their goals and may not even know what’s actually important to them. They just feel like they’re failing at everything and need help.
A while back I was at a conference with a senior executive of one of the most successful companies in the world. An audience member asked him how he got to where he is, expecting an answer along the lines of “I work all the time”, “This company is my life”, or “I’m on email at midnight and then again at 5am”. His answer was simple. He said, “I realized early on that I couldn’t do everything if I wanted to be good at anything. So I thought about the three things that were most important to me and pretty much eliminated the rest. This means I can excel in those three areas without any guilt since I know these are the most important to me. And I don’t spend time regretting what I’m not doing because it’s a choice I made.”
He called it ruthless focus. He probably used the word ruthless because it was as much about the things he wasn’t going to do as it was about the things he was doing. Some of the other things he wanted to do just weren’t going to get his attention if he were going to buckle down and focus on his top three things. And he had come to terms with that.
