How to Manage Your Most Important Resource
You’re sitting in a restaurant, your eyes scanning the menu. The choice is between a set “menu dégustation surprise” or the à la carte selection. You soon see that every individual combination of appetizers and mains comes out more expensive than the tasting menu, which also includes wine—so that’s what you order. “Good choice,” smiles the waiter. “Most people order that.”
One course after the next is dished up—amuse-bouches, four types of foie gras, pickled trout with asparagus, chocolate savarin with strawberries, roebuck, a cheese board with fig mustard, wild-garlic ricotta ravioli, a lemon sorbet to cleanse the palate, then duck breast, aubergine gnocchi and sweetbreads; all sorts of things, in an endless stream. Then the various wines, in an equally random sequence. After about twenty courses, you ask for the bill. You’ve never been so stuffed, never eaten such a melee of different things, and you’ve never felt so sick.
Cut to a dinner that actually took place. More on the traditional side, culinarily speaking, but highly exclusive when it came to the guests—billionaires, every last one, including Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Gates asked the group what they felt was the most important factor in their success. Buffett said: “Focus.” Gates agreed. Evidently focus is vital, but equally crucial is where you direct it. What’s remarkable, then, is that instead of choosing our objects of focus “à la carte” we stuff our faces morning to night with an “informational tasting menu” that others have selected for us. E-mails, Facebook updates, texts, tweets, alerts, news items from across the world, document hyperlinks, video clips on websites, and screens as far as the eye can see, in airports, train stations and trams—all of them vying for our attention. We’re ceaselessly entertained with sometimes banal, sometimes thrilling stories. We’re flattered, wooed and offered suggestions. And so we feel a little like kings, when in reality we should feel like spoon-fed slaves.
All these offerings are thefts not gifts, losses not wins, debits not credits. An Instagram post, no matter how beautifully designed, is a debit. Breaking news is a debit. An e-mail is (in most cases) a debit. The moment we read it, we pay—in focus, time or even money.
Focus, time and money are our three most important resources. The latter two are most familiar. There’s even a science devoted to time and money—referred to in that context as “work” and “capital.” Focus, however, is little understood, although today it’s the most valuable of these three resources, the most crucial to our success and our wellbeing. Unfortunately, when it comes to focus we tend to commit systematic errors. Here are several key ways you can avoid them.
One: don’t confuse what’s new with what’s relevant. Every novelty—product, opinion, news item—wants an audience. The louder the world, the louder the novelty must shout in order to be heard. Don’t take this noise too seriously. Most of what’s hailed as revolutionary is irrelevant.
Two: avoid content or technology that’s “free.” They’re the definition of focus traps, because they’re financed by advertising. Why would you voluntarily walk into a trap?
Three: give everything “multimedia” a wide berth. Images, moving images and—in the future—virtual reality accelerate your emotions above a safe speed, markedly worsening the quality of your decision-making. Information is best absorbed in written form, from documents with the fewest possible hyperlinks—books, ideally.
Four: be aware that focus cannot be divided. It’s not like time and money. The attention you’re giving your Facebook stream on your mobile phone is attention you’re taking away from the person sitting opposite.
Five: act from a position of strength, not weakness. When people bring things to your attention unasked, you’re automatically in a position of weakness. Why should an advertiser, a journalist or a Facebook friend decide where you direct your focus? That Porsche advert, article about the latest Trump tweet or video clip of hilariously adorable puppies is probably not something that’s going to make you happy or move you forwards. Even without an Instagram account, the philosopher Epictetus came to a similar conclusion two thousand years ago: ‘If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?’
Unfortunately, our brains are evolutionarily predisposed to respond straight away to the minutest of changes: a spider here, a snake there. This sensitivity was once critical to survival, but today it makes withstanding the crossfire of modern stimuli a formidable task. Dealing correctly with contemporary media isn’t an innate skill, nor is it one you learn by simply hanging about on the internet. Hence, according to the technology journalist Kevin Kelly, why we’ve got to deliberately learn how to handle it. How did you learn to read and do arithmetic? By hanging out with people who could read and do arithmetic? No. You spent years deliberately practicing those skills. Now you need similarly intensive training in how to manage information, the internet and the news. Focus must be learned.
Another aspect: focus and happiness. What does focus have to do with happiness? Everything. “Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention,” wrote Paul Dolan. The same life events (positive or negative) can influence your happiness strongly, weakly or not at all—depending on how much attention you give them.
Essentially, you always live where your focus is directed, no matter where the atoms of your body are located. Each moment comes only once. If you deliberately focus your attention, you’ll get more out of life. Be critical, strict and careful when it comes to your intake of information—no less critical, strict and careful than you are with your food or medication.