The Art of Focus and Creativity
David Brooks reminds us we
are not alone in experiencing how challenging it is to learn (and find time and
space) to concentrate and focus.
This is just one reason
to learn to mediate, to exercise regularly, go for long walks with your dog, to
pray…or otherwise carve out time to just be quiet and alone and able to focus
on doing what you are doing at that time and nothing else.
Like the Zen monk whose
response to what is the path to enlightenment was “when I eat my rice, I eat my
rice; when I wash my bowl, I wash my bowl.”
The
Art of Focus
David
Brooks, New York Times, June 3, 2014
Like
everyone else, I am losing the attention war. I toggle over to my emails when I
should be working. I text when I should be paying attention to the people in
front of me. I spend hours looking at mildly diverting stuff on YouTube.
(“Look, there’s a bunch of guys who can play ‘Billie Jean’ on beer bottles!”)
And, like
everyone else, I’ve nodded along with the prohibition sermons imploring me to
limit my information diet. Stop multitasking! Turn off the devices at least
once a week!
And, like
everyone else, these sermons have had no effect. Many of us lead lives of
distraction, unable to focus on what we know we should focus on. According to a
survey reported in an Op-Ed article on Sunday in The Times by Tony Schwartz and
Christine Porath, 66 percent of workers
aren’t able to focus on one thing at a time. Seventy percent of employees don’t have regular time for creative or
strategic thinking while at work.
Since the
prohibition sermons don’t work, I wonder if we might be able to copy some of
the techniques used by the creatures who are phenomenally good at learning
things: children.
I recently
stumbled across an interview in The Paris Review with Adam Phillips, who was a
child psychologist for many years. First, Phillips says, in order to pursue
their intellectual adventures, children need a secure social base:
“There’s
something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence
of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them
needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally
into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel
sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you
against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a
book, say.”
Second,
before they can throw themselves into their obsessions, children are propelled
by desires so powerful that they can be frightening. “One of the things that is
interesting about children is how much appetite they have,” Phillips observes.
“How much appetite they have — but also how conflicted they can be about their
appetites. Anybody who’s got young children ... will remember that children are
incredibly picky about their food. ...
“One of the
things it means is there’s something very frightening about one’s appetite. So
that one is trying to contain a voraciousness in a very specific, limited,
narrowed way. ... .An appetite is
fearful because it connects you with the world in very unpredictable ways. ...
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own alivenesss they can bear and
how much they need to anesthetize themselves.”
Learning to focus and
concentrate is not only challenging because we live in a world designed to
distract us with the trivial (see below—say no to trivial distractions), but
also because learning anything means leaving our comfort zones, rejecting the
familiar safety of our ‘default’ self-centeredness and all-knowingness to be
curious again, to re-open to seeing the world with wonder and experiencing our
own lives directly and with great uncertainty.
Third,
children are not burdened by excessive self-consciousness: “As young children,
we listen to adults talking before we understand what they’re saying. And
that’s, after all, where we start — we start in a position of not getting it.”
Children are used to living an emotional richness that can’t be captured in
words. They don’t worry about trying to
organize their lives into neat little narratives. Their experience of life is more direct because they spend less
time on interfering thoughts about themselves.
The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to
say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that
arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out
everything else.
win the war for attention is an idea worth thinking about.
We know that advertisers
are highlight paid PR experts dedicated to capturing our attention.
Upon reflection we also
know that these same skills are used by candidates and elected officials…as
they also struggle to capture our attention.
So, Brooks’ insight here
about an internal struggle over our own attention can be usefully connected to
external forces also vying for our attention.
Brooks focuses on the
external forces in social media and consumer culture, but we can productively
extend this to include the larger elite struggles to capture our attention…in
order to mobilize us in support of their product, candidate, legislation, or
whatever particular conflict they want us to focus on.
Elites are struggling to
win the war for our attention, because expanding the scope of one conflict
crowds out other conflicts on the public policy agenda and changes the
attentive audiences, publics, constituencies (changes who is paying attention
and what we are paying attention to) and this has a powerful impact on the
outcome of conflicts…on what happens in politics.
David Brooks draws our
attention to the fact that there is also an internal struggle to grab our
attention, a struggle to either
·
concede
control over our attention—over choosing what we will think about—to others, by
unconsciously and unthinkingly accepting ‘what we will think about’ as
determined for us, as not our own choice…
·
OR
we can learn to choose what we want to think about, what we want to pay
attention to, what we want to devote our time and energy to engaging with today
and throughout our lives...
We win this war,
internally and collectively, by saying no to trivial distractions, sometimes
put there on purpose—designed to distract us, designed to dissipate public
energies by focusing us on more trivial concerns, instead of focusing on more
important concerns.
Sometimes because focusing
on these more important concerns will mean paying attention to corruption or
greed or failed leadership among elites…and focusing on the ‘trivial-by-design’
often leads consumes and frustrates non-elites in divisive battles with each
other that merely confirm our power-poor status.
Instead, say yes what we
decide ought to be important, what we can all become passionate about, and let
that scary but wonder-filled passionate adventure ‘crowd out’ the branded
information created to distract us from becoming leaders in our own lives.
The way to
discover a terrifying longing is to liberate yourself from the self-censoring
labels you began to tell yourself over the course of your mis-education. These
formulas are stultifying, Phillips argues: “You can only recover your appetite,
and appetites, if you can allow yourself
to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to
contain one’s anxieties about appetite.”
We need to be able to
suspend our judgment, suspend our beliefs and values, long enough to engage
seriously with alternative perspectives and competing ideas…if we want to
understand both our own and these other ideas…and if we want to learn and
progress and solve problems.
Brooks is coming at this
from an individual level to point out that, as we grow older, our efforts to find
ourselves can turn into obstacles to our own creativity…and for our purposes
here, an obstacle to learning how to focus and concentrate on a scholarly text,
to dig into someone else’s argument so deeply that you can explain it and
defend it as well as the author herself might.
When we learn to do this,
then we are learning and expanding our intellectual tool box…in scholarly
conversations, through conflict as the crucible, by confronting our own and
other’s confusions and the inescapable uncertainty of seriously and
thoughtfully engaging with real world problems.
Thus: Focus on the external objects of
fascination, not on who you think you are. Find people with overlapping
obsessions. Don’t structure your encounters with them the way people do today,
through brainstorming sessions (those don’t work) or through conferences with
projection screens.
Instead look
at the way children learn in groups. They make discoveries alone, but bring
their treasures to the group. Then the group crowds around and hashes it out.
In conversation, conflict, confusion and
uncertainty can be metabolized and digested through somebody else. If the
group sets a specific problem for itself, and then sets a tight deadline to
come up with answers, the free digression of conversation will provide
occasions in which people are surprised by their own minds.
The
information universe tempts you with mildly pleasant but ultimately numbing
diversions. The only way to stay fully alive is to dive down to your obsessions
six fathoms deep. Down there it’s possible to make progress toward fulfilling
your terrifying longing, which is the experience that produces the joy.
To
go this editorial on the New York Times
page:
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