Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

by Daniel Goleman

Our “gut feelings” are messages from the insula and other bottom-up circuits that simplify life decisions for us by guiding our attention toward smarter options. The better we are at reading these messages, the better our

intuition.

“more perfect more of the time—you’re never perfect all of the time.”

And how do the performers know when they’re nearing perfection? “It’s the feeling. You know it in your joints before you know it in your head.”

All too often when we “lose it” and fall back on a less desirable way of acting, we’re oblivious to what we do. And if no one tells us, we stay that way.

Our sense of self, in this view, dawns in our social interactions; others are our mirrors, reflecting us back to ourselves. The idea has been summed up as “I am what I think you think I am.”

domineering and uncaring.

The acoustics of our skull case render our voice as it sounds to us very different from what others hear. But our tone of voice matters immensely to the impact of what we say: research has found that when people receive negative performance feedback in a warm, supportive tone of voice, they leave feeling positive—despite the negative feedback. But when they get positive performance reviews in a cold and distant tone of voice, they end up feeling bad despite the good news.

When this tendency to ignore evidence to the contrary spreads into a shared self-deception, it becomes groupthink.

We know everything we need to

“I have no doubt that the implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before.”

It takes effort to shift it back into our collective focus.

It takes meta-cognition—in this case, awareness of our lack of awareness—to bring to light what the group has buried in a grave of indifference or suppression. Clarity begins with realizing what we do not notice—and don’t notice that we don’t notice. Smart risks are based on wide and voracious data-gathering checked against a gut sense; dumb decisions are built from too narrow a base of inputs. Candid feedback from those you trust and respect creates a source of self-awareness, one that can help guard against skewed information inputs or questionable assumptions. Another antidote to groupthink: expand your

circle of connection beyond your comfort zone and inoculate against in-group isolation by building an ample circle of no-BS confidants who keep you honest.

Willpower emerged as a completely independent force in life success—in fact, for financial success, self-control in childhood proved a stronger predictor than either IQ or social class of the family of origin.

Don’t underestimate the value of practicing the guitar or keeping that promise to feed the guinea pig and clean its cage.

Another bottom line: Anything we can do to increase children’s capacity for cognitive control will help them throughout life.

on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings. This cognitive control represents a “cool” mental system that makes an effort to pursue our goals in the face of our “hot” emotional reactions—quick, impulsive, and automatic.

You (or your four-year-old) can activate this system by thinking about, for example, the shape of the marshmallow, or its color, or how it’s made. This switch in focus lowers the energy charge to grab for it.

Such cognitive control of impulse bodes well in life. As Mischel puts it, “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the SAT instead of watching television. And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about the marshmallow.”

“I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand anybody that

I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, and what didn’t work.”

The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes.

John Sterman,

“It’s easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal,”

It’s the same with our health or our retirement savings. When we eat some very rich dessert, we don’t get a signal telling us, ‘If you keep this up, you’ll die three years earlier.’ And when you buy that spunky second car, nothing tells you, ‘You will regret this when you are old and destitute.’

“You can plan for a hundred years, but you don’t know what will happen the next moment.”

Back in the 1980s, in her prophetic work In the Age of the Smart Machine, Shoshona Zuboff saw that the advent of computers was flattening the hierarchy in organizations. Where once knowledge was power, and so the most powerful hoarded their information, new tech systems were opening the gates to data for everyone.

“Trial and error, reverse-engineering stuff in your mind—all the ways kids interact with games—that’s the kind of thinking schools should be teaching. As the world becomes more

complex,” Wright adds, “games are better at preparing you.”

“You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”

“You have to tweak the system by pushing,” he adds, “allowing for more errors at first as you increase your

lim...

Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is “deliberate practice,” where an expert coach (essentially what Susan Butcher was for her dogs) takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.

Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practicing

makes a crucial difference. For instance, in his much-cited study of violinists—the one that showed the top tier had practiced more than 10,000 hours—Ericsson found the experts did so with full concentration on improving a particular...

Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognize errors and correct them—which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye—and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you

don’t get to the top ranks.

The feedback matters and the concentration does, too—n...

The anxiety associated with being punished actually hampers the child’s prefrontal cortex while he is trying to concentrate and learn, creating further impediment to improvement.

Whether we’re trying to hone a skill in sports or music, enhance our memory power, or listen better, the core elements of smart practice are the same: ideally, a potent combination of joy, smart tactics, and full focus.

Cates earned that remarkable sum by “grinding” (as in grinding away), playing not just game after game, but multiple simultaneous games, with all comers,

Being able to name your feelings and put that together with your memories and associations turns out to be crucial for self-control. Learning to speak, developmental psychologists have found, lets children call on their inner don’t to replace the voice of their parents’ in managing unruly impulses.

But why wait until grade school? These inhibitory circuits start to develop from birth. Walter Mischel taught four-year-olds how to resist those luscious marshmallows by seeing them differently—for example, focusing on their color. And Mischel is the first to say that even a four-year-old who just can’t wait and grabs the marshmallow right off the bat can still learn to delay gratification—impulsivity is not necessarily something he’s stuck with for life.

And for good reason: one conclusion by economists involved in the Dunedin study was that teaching all kids these skills could shift an entire nation’s income up a few notches, with added gains in their health and a lower crime rate.

One of the bigger benefits for students is in understanding. Wandering minds punch holes in comprehension. The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12

Higher vagal tone, which can result from mindfulness and other meditations, leads to greater flexibility in many ways.14 People are better able to manage both their attention and their emotions. In the social realm they can more easily create positive relationships and have effective interactions.

“Our patients typically come in because they’re overwhelmed by stress or pain. But there’s something about paying attention to your own inner states, and seeing what needs to change in your life. People on their own stop smoking or change the way they eat and start losing weight, though as a rule we never say anything directly about these.”

Enhanced executive function widens the gap between impulse and action, in part by building meta-awareness, the capacity to observe our mental processes rather than just be swept away by them. This creates decision points we did not have before: we can squelch troublesome impulses that we usually would act on.

Signs of what might be called organizational “attention deficit disorder” include making flawed decisions because of missing data, no time for reflection, trouble getting attention in the marketplace,