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Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (Daniel Goleman)
- Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.
- Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
- But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.
- I don’t think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.
- One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.
- The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.
- Mindfulness helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt or dissapointment creates endless cascades of rumination
- We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we’re learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know making new neural connections.
- Rapport demands joint attention—mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.
- “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” Albert Einstein once said. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of. Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
- In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation—all signifying a lack of attention.
- In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.
- 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 a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.
- Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what’s distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.
- 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.
- Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient—who bounce back right away—can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.
- In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5
- Martin Luther King Jr. observed that those who failed to offer their aid asked themselves the question: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But the Good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man what will happen to him?
- Whenever you notice your mind wandering, a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, bring your mind back to its point of focus. The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.
- 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.
- It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.
- Tightly focused attention gets fatigued—much like an overworked muscle—when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.
- You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.
- 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 clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
- If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one. No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the 10,000-hour rule of thumb, told me, You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal. 2
- The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There’s an algorithm for this, a data mining method called automated social hierarchy detection, developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person’s emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures.
