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Your Focus Is Priceless. Stop Giving It Away.
This is the eyeball economy, and your eyeballs are for sale
Do you want a single takeaway from the 21st century so far? Here it is: To the focused go the spoils.
Have I already lost your attention? No wonder. You’re being pulled in a bunch of directions at high speed.
Remember the medieval execution routine of tying someone to four horses, each slapped on the backside to run in a different direction, yanking the poor soul to pieces? This is now happening to your focus. Your own personal horses might well be any of the following: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, your spouse, your partner, Grubhub, Fortnite, this essay, and so forth. Your focus is the person in the middle, being flung to bits.
What do you do about it? How do you maintain focus? How do you get those spoils?
But first, let’s tackle another question: What do I mean by focus?
The cocktail party effect
Much of what we know about the fragility of focus comes from the Battle of Britain. In the aftermath of World War II —as I learned while interviewing cognitive neuroscientists for my book on attention science, A Deadly Wandering — British scientists were trying to understand why Royal Air Force…
