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.

Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.

To battle such partial focus today, some Silicon Valley workplaces have banned laptops, mobile phones, and other digital tools during meetings.

All of this was foreseen way back in 1977 by the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon. Writing about the coming information-rich world, he warned that what information consumes is “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”9

The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go—or if, on the other hand, we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry.

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).

That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life’s emotional waves.3

You can spot the focused folks at a party: they are able to immerse themselves in a conversation, their eyes locked on the other person as they stay fully absorbed in their words—despite that speaker next to them blaring the Beastie Boys. The unfocused, in contrast, are in continual play, their eyes gravitating to whatever might grab them, their attention adrift.

which requires sustained concentration and immersion in a topic rather than hopscotching from one to another, nabbing disconnected factoids.

The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections; likewise, the shorter our reflections, the more trivial they are likely to be. Heidegger, were he alive today, would be horrified if asked to tweet.

The solution they propose to this human bottleneck hinges on minimizing distractions: Project Aura proposes to do away with bothersome systems glitches so we don’t waste time in hassles.

One key to more flow in life comes when we align what we do with what we enjoy, as is the case with those fortunate folks whose jobs give them great pleasure. High achievers in any field—the lucky ones, anyway—have hit on this combination.

Apart from a career change, there are several doorways to flow. One may open when we tackle a task that challenges our abilities to the maximum—a “just-manageable” demand on our skills. Another entryway can come via doing what we

are passionate about; motivation sometimes drives us into flow. But either way the final common pathway is full focus: these are each ways to ratchet up attention. No matter how you get there, a keen focus jump-starts flow. This optimal brain state for getting work done well is marked by greater neural harmony—a rich, well-timed interconnection among diverse brain areas.20 In this state, ideally, the circuits needed for the task at hand are highly active while those irrelevant are quiescent, with the brain precisely attuned...

To get the disengaged workers any nearer the focused range demands upping their motivation and enthusiasm, evoking a sense of purpose, and adding a dollop of pressure.

Their attention fixates on their worries, not their job. This emotional exhaustion can lead to burnout.

voluntarily directed focus.

Top-down wiring adds talents like self-awareness and reflection,

deliberation, and planning to our mind’s repertoire.

overspending, addictions, and recklessly speeding drivers all count as signs of this system out of whack.

Fast-forward to today’s very different world: we so often need to navigate life top-down despite the constant undertow of bottom-up

whims and drives.

The more we practice a routine, the more the basal ganglia take it over from other parts of the brain.

The way we experience this neural transfer is that we need pay less attention—and finally none—as it becomes automatic.

The more you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble.

But this system has weaknesses, too: our emotions and our motives create skews and biases in our attention that we typically don’t notice, and don’t notice that we don’t notice.

Most of this emotional transaction goes on out of awareness, leading people to avoid situations where they might get anxious.

Just tie sex or prestige to a product to activate these same circuits to prime us to buy

We’re most prone to emotions driving focus this way when our minds are wandering, when we are distracted, or when we’re overwhelmed by information—or all three.

This focused, often goal-oriented attention, inhibits mindless mental habits.

In addition, a mind adrift lets our creative juices flow. While our minds wander we become better at anything that depends on a flash of insight, from coming up with imaginative wordplay to inventions and original thinking. In fact, 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.

Among other positive functions of mind wandering are generating scenarios for the future, self-reflection, navigating a complex social world, incubation of creative ideas, flexibility in focus, pondering what we’re learning, organizing our memories, just mulling life—a...

In that open space Benioff realized the potential uses for cloud computing that led him to quit Oracle, start Salesforce in a rented apartment, and evangelize for what was then a radical concept. Salesforce was a pioneer in what is now a multibillion-dollar industry.

And the naysayer in the brainstorming session, the guy who always shoots down any new idea, throttles innovative insight in its infancy.

But once we’ve hit upon a great creative insight, we need to capture the prize by switching to a keen focus on how to apply it. Serendipity comes with openness to possibility, then homing in on putting it to use.

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

indicating an open awareness that may have served them well in their creative work.10

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. Creative insights entail joining elements in a useful, fresh way.

One day a chance encounter with a nuclear physicist gave them an insight (and eventually, a Nobel Prize).

The insight led them to realize that what they had been interpreting as “noise” was actually a faint signal from the continued reverberations of the big bang.

“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.”12

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. In the tumult of our daily distractions and to-do lists, innovation dead-ends; in open times it flourishes. That’s why the annals of discovery are rife with tales of a brilliant insight during a walk or a bath, on a long ride or vacation. Open time lets the creative spirit flourish; tight schedules kill it.

It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.

“You can’t ruminate about yourself while you’re absorbed in a challenging task.”

This tune-out can be total, as when we get utterly lost in what we’re doing.

It also decreases mind wandering. The goal, he adds, is to be better able to engage in mind wandering when you want to, and not otherwise.

That neural buzz adds tension to the demands of getting something done. Selecting one sharp focus requires inhibiting a multitude of others. The mind has to fight off the pull of everything else, sorting out what’s important from what’s irrelevant. That takes cognitive effort. Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.

A walk through an arboretum led to better focus on return to concentrated tasks than a stroll though downtown.17 Even sitting by a mural of a nature scene—particularly one with water in it—is better than the corner coffee shop.

Not that we need go to such extremes. For William Falk, the remedy was simple: he stopped his work and went to play with his daughter in the waves. “Tumbling and hooting in the pounding surf with my daughter, I was fully present in the moment. Fully alive.”