Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

by Daniel Goleman

Attention works much like a muscle—use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.

For leaders to get results they need all 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.

how we deploy our attention determines what we see.4 Or as Yoda says, “Your focus is your reality.”

Today’s children are growing up in a new reality, one where they are attuning more to machines and less to people than has ever been true in human history.

the social and emotional circuitry of a child’s brain learns from contact and conversation with everyone it encounters over the course of a day.

the fewer hours spent with people—and the more spent staring at a digitized s...

Digital engagement comes at a cost in face time with real people—the medium where we l...

What are our distractors costing us?

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.

a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”9

Herbert simon

William James, a founder of modern psychology, meant when he 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.”

two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.

The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain’s prefrontal regions. Specialized circuitry in this area boosts the strength of incoming signals we want to concentrate on (that email) and dampens down those we choose to ignore (those people chattering away at the next table).

Failure to drop one focus and move on to others can, for example, leave the mind lost in repeating loops of chronic anxiety.

The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.

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.

A reader’s mind typically wanders anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time while perusing a text. The cost for students, not surprisingly, is that the more wandering, the worse their comprehension.8

The bombardment of texts, videos, images, and miscellaneous of messages we get online seems the enemy of the more full understanding that comes from what Nicholas Carr calls “deep reading,” which requires sustained concentration and immersion in a topic rather than hopscotching from one to another, nabbing disconnected factoids.9

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.

Then there’s what many people think of as “splitting” attention in multitasking, which cognitive science tells us is a fiction, too.

Instead of splitting it, we actually switch rapidly. Continual switching saps attention from full, concentrated engagement.

“The most precious resource in a computer system is no longer its processor, memory, disk or network, but rather human attention,” a research group at Carnegie Mellon University notes.14

“What’s trending now” indexes how we are allotting our collective attention.

Most of us have a handful of strong ties—close, trusted friends—but we can have hundreds of so-called weak ties (for example, our Facebook “friends”). Weak ties have high value as multipliers of our attention capacity, and as a source of tips for good shopping deals, job possibilities, and dating partners.16

This collective intelligence, the sum total of what everyone in a distributed group can contribute, promises maximal focus, the summation of what multiple eyes can notice.

The MIT group’s basic question: “How can we connect people and computers so that collectively we act with more intelligence than any one person or group?” Or, as the Japanese say, “All of us are smarter than any one of us.”

Sampling people’s moods at random reveals that most of the time people are either stressed or bored, with only occasional periods of flow;

No matter how you get there, a keen focus jump-starts flow.

When our brains are in this zone we are more likely to perform at our personal best whatever our pursuit.

Voluntary attention, willpower, and intentional choice are top-down; reflexive attention, impulse, and rote habit are bottom-up

When we choose to tune in to the beauty of a sunset, concentrate on what we’re reading, or have a deep talk with someone, it’s a top-down shift.

The bottom-up system multitasks, scanning a profusion of inputs in parallel, including features of our surroundings that have not yet come into full focus;

The brain’s more ancient bottom-up systems apparently worked well for basic survival during most of human prehistory—but their design makes for some troubles today.

The bottom/top systems distribute mental tasks between them so we can make minimal effort and get optimal results. As familiarity makes a routine easier, it gets passed off from the top to the bottom.

If we haven’t practiced enough, all of these will take deliberate focus.

when she began to think about the details of her technique, instead of just leaving the job to the motor circuits that had practiced these moves to mastery, Jones had shifted from relying on her bottom-up system to interference from the top.

A full mind is an empty bat

Brain studies find that having a champion athlete start pondering technique during a performance offers a sure recipe for a screwup.

Life today seems ruled to a troubling degree by impulse; a flood of ads drives us, bottom-up, to desire a sea of goods and spend today without regard to how we will pay tomorrow.

the downside of a life lived bottom-up, on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what’s going on.

We might revise our own thinking about a “wandering mind,” by considering that rather than wandering away from what counts, we may well be wandering toward something of value.2

While mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on some task at hand, some portion of the time it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our lives.

people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5

Chance, as Louis Pasteur put it, favors a prepared mind. Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

Adults with ADD, relative to those without, also show higher levels of original creative thinking and more actual creative achievements.8

In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.

the likelihood of the right idea connecting with the right memory within the right context—and all that coming into the spotlight of attention—diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the insight.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

We need free time where we can sustain an open awareness.

The nonstop onslaught of email, texts, bills to pay—life’s “full catastrophe”—throws us into a brain state antithetical to the open focus where serendipitous discoveries thrive.

Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedom in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time—enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.