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Focus Is a Privilege
And not all of us have it
From the beginning of Assata Richards’ time at the University of Houston in the early 1990s, she struggled to stay focused.
In addition to her schoolwork, Richards — who had just graduated in the top 10% of her high-school class — had a number of other urgent demands on her attention: She was working a low-wage part-time job, had bills to pay, food to get on the table, and a toddler son, Jamal, who needed care while she attended classes. It all became too much: She ended up on academic probation, and dropped out her sophomore year, feeling frustrated that she had failed at something she really wanted.
“If you have a paper to write, you need the space to think about ideas, to do that high-level thinking,” says Richards, now 45, who later returned to university, went on to complete a PhD in sociology, and become a professor. “It requires that you can think about one thing and not let anything else come into your mind. But for me, I was always thinking, ‘How will what I have today be able to be stretched and managed, to do what I need to do?’ It’s hard to quiet those thoughts.”
In his 2016 book Deep Work, computer scientist Cal Newport calls the ability to truly focus “a superpower in our increasingly competitive 21st-century economy.” Indeed, in today’s attention-fraying world, focus has…
