Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

by Daniel Goleman

At the height of the Cold War, I remember visiting a researcher who had been commissioned by the Pentagon to study vigilance levels during sleep deprivation lasting three to five days—about how long it estimated the military officers deep in some bunker would need to stay awake during World War III. Fortunately his experiment never had to be tested against hard reality, although his encouraging finding was that even after three or more sleepless nights people could pay keen attention if their motivation was high enough (but if they didn’t care, they would nod off immediately).

Our very nimbleness in life depends on this subtle faculty. While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.

This supple tool embeds within countless mental operations. A short list of some basics includes comprehension, memory, learning, sensing how we feel and why, reading emotions in other people, and interacting smoothly. Surfacing this invisible factor in effectiveness lets us better see the benefits of improving this mental faculty, and better understand just how to do that.

Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention in all its varieties represents a little-noticed and underrated mental asset. My goal here is to spotlight this elusive and under-appreciated mental faculty in the mind’s operations and its role in living a fulfilling life.

Cognitive science studies a wide array, including concentration, selective attention, and open awareness, as well as how the mind deploys attention inwardly to oversee mental operations.

Vital abilities build on such basic mechanics of our mental life. For one, there’s self-awareness, which fosters self-management. Then there’s empathy, the basis for skill in relationship. These are fundamentals of emotional intelligence. As we’ll see, weakness here can sabotage

life or career, while strengths increase fulfillm...

All that can be boiled down to a threesome: inner, other, and outer focus. A well-lived life demands we be nimble in each.

The good news on attention comes from neuroscience labs and school classrooms, where the findings point to ways we can strengthen this vital muscle of the mind. Attention works much like a muscle—use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows. We’ll see how smart practice can further develop and refine the muscle of our attention, even rehab focus-starved brains.

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. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be ...

Each of the three varieties of attention can help us find a balance where we can be both happy and productive.

The indifference of that mother and the silence among the sisters are symptoms of how technology captures our attention and disrupts our connections.

They’re totally unaware of what’s happening around them and clueless about how to interact with someone for any length of time.”

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. That’s troubling for several reasons. For one, 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. These interactions mold brain circuitry; the fewer hours spent with people—and the more spent staring at a digitized screen—portends deficits.

He notes that his classmates are losing their ability for conversation, let alone the soul-searching discussions that can enrich the college years. And, he says, “no birthday, concert, hangout session, or party can be enjoyed without taking the time to distance yourself from what you are doing” to make sure that those in your digital world know instantly how much fun you are having.

In some ways, as we’ll see, the endless hours young people spend staring at electronic gadgets may help them acquire specific cognitive skills. But there are concerns and questions about how those same hours may lead to deficits in core mental skills.

“A few years ago you could make a five-minute video for your presentation at an ad agency. Today you have to keep it to a minute and a half. If you don’t grab them by then, everyone starts checking for messages.”

But, he finds, “I can’t read more than two pages at a stretch. I get this overwhelming urge to go online and see if I have a new email. I think I’m losing my ability to sustain concentration on anything serious.”

The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an “away,” a gesture that tells another person “I’m not interested” in what’s going on here and now.

They were away, in a state, as one participant put it, of “continuous partial attention,” a mental blurriness induced by an overload of information inputs from the speakers, the other people in the room, and what they were doing on their laptops.8 To battle such partial focus today, some Silicon Valley work places have banned laptops, mobile phones, and other digital tools during meetings.

After not checking her mobile for a while, a publishing executive confesses she gets “a jangly feeling. You miss that hit you get when there’s a text. You know it’s not right to check your phone when you’re with someone, but it’s addictive.” So she and her husband have a pact: “When we get home from work we put our phones in a drawer. If it’s in front of me I get anxious; I’ve just got to check it. But now we try to be more present for each other. We talk.”

Our focus continually fights distractions, both inner and outer. The question is, What are our distractors costing us? An executive at a financial firm tells me, “When I notice that my mind has been somewhere else during a meetin...

“We get people to become more aware of

how they use attention—which is always poorly. Attention is now the number-one issue on the minds of our clients.”

That focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention, the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a staggering

sea of incoming stimuli, each one a potential focus in itself. This is what 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.”

More daunting is the second variety of lures: emotionally loaded signals. While you might find it easy to concentrate on answering your email in the hubbub of your local coffee shop, if you should overhear someone mention your name (potent emotional bait, that) it’s almost impossible to tune out the voice that carries it—your attention reflexively alerts to hear what’s being said about you. Forget that email.

The biggest challenge for even the most focused, though, comes from the emotional turmoil of our lives, like a recent blowup in a close relationship that keeps intruding into your thoughts. Such thoughts barge in for a good reason: to get us to think through what to do about what’s upsetting us. 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.

The more our focus gets disrupted, th...

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).

Since focus demands we tune out our emotional distractions, our neural wiring for selective attention includes that for inhibiting emotion. 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.

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.

The stronger our selective attention, the more powerfully we can stay absorbed in what we’ve chosen to do: get swept away by a moving scene in a film or find a powerful poetry passage exhilarating. Strong focus lets people lose themselves in YouTube or their homework to the point of being oblivious to whatever tumult might be nearby—or their parents calling them to come eat dinner.

You can spot the focused folks at a party: they are able to immerse themselves in a conversation, their eye...

The unfocused, in contrast, are in continual play, their eyes gravitating to whatever might grab them, their attention adrift.

The better your focus, the stronger your neural lock-in. But if instead of concentration there’s a jumble of thoughts, synchrony vanishes.6 Just such a drop in synchrony marks people with attention deficit disorder.

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.

When our mind wanders off, our brain activates a host of brain circuits that chatter about things that have nothing to do with what we’re trying to learn. Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we’re learning.

If you can’t recall the answers, you may have been zoning out from time to time while you read. And you’re not alone.

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

As we read a book, a blog, or any narrative, our mind constructs a mental model that lets us make sense of what we are reading and connects it to the universe of such models we already hold that bear on the same topic. This expanding web of understanding lies at the heart of learning. The more we zone out while building that web, and the sooner the lapse after we begin reading, the more holes.

Way back in the 1950s the philosopher Martin Heidegger warned against a looming “tide of technological revolution” that might “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be … the only way of thinking.”10 That would come at the loss of “meditative thinking,” a mode of reflection he saw as the essence of our humanity.

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. Heidegger, were he alive today, would be horrified if asked to tweet.

“Working memory hasn’t shrunk,” said Justin Halberda, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s not the case that TV has made our working memory smaller”—that in the 1950s we all had an upper limit of seven plus or minus two bits of information, and now we have only four.

Then there’s what many people think of as “splitting” attention in multitasking, which cognitive science tells us is a fiction, too. Rather than having a stretchable balloon of attention to deploy in tandem, we have a narrow, fixed pipeline to allot. 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 The solution they propose to this human bottleneck hinges on minimizing distractions:

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.

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.

DO YOU LOVE WHAT YOU DO? The big question: When you get up in the morning, are you happy about getting to work, school, or whatever it is that occupies your day?