attention

March 2022

Attention is an overlooked resource. We must spend it wisely.

I use the word “spend” intentionally. One of my foundational beliefs is that we’re all investors in every aspect of our lives. Not just financially. We all have a finite amount of time and mental bandwidth to allocate every day. Where we choose can either generate a positive or negative return on investment.

We can’t expect to make sound financial investments by burying our heads in the sand and not being thoughtful about where we deploy capital. In the same way, we can’t expect a positive return on our attention unless we’re intentional about where we put it. That we’re not taught this in school seems bonkers to me. Being deliberate and allocating our attention to worthwhile places creates a wonderful flywheel: the subject of our attention enriches our life. Being passive or careless about where we put our attention leads to shallow dopamine hits and mental recession. I don’t think that’s overdramatic. 

We’re all familiar with the trope “you are what you eat.” Food diet impacts how we look and feel. If we eat ready meals every night and carrot cake is the closest we get to a vegetable, our body and self-image will suffer. Information diet is no different. We’re a product of what we consume. Garbage in, garbage out. Our brains are mental operating systems. After we leave formal schooling, the state of that mental operating system is determined by what we feed it. If it gets nothing but social media and cigar butt journalism, it’ll stagnate. We’ll be aged 40 running on Windows 95. The only way to upgrade our mental operating system is to feed it quality inputs. What constitutes quality will differ for everyone. Although, there are some fundamental commonalities. Ultimately, our information diet should support who we want to become.

Our brains are malleable. Beyond our base level of intelligence, we become smarter by learning and applying knowledge that enables better decision making. Inversely, we become dumber by taking in things that hamstring our ability to make good decisions. There’s no neutral here. We’re either growing or receding. Hypertrophy or atrophy. No in-between. We either consume information that makes us smarter every day. Or we’re getting dumber. That’s a terrifying thought.

Taking control of our attention has become even more essential in the last decade with the explosion of internet media. The internet has commoditised a lot of content supply and made marginal distribution free. Companies are fighting for our attention, and they have an arsenal of dirty tricks to snaffle it. They want this attention so they can monetise it. More eyeballs, for longer, leads to more revenue. But this leaves us open to exploitation. The companies looking for this attention aren’t benevolent public servants. They have their agendas. This isn’t a moral judgement. I’m a capitalist. It’s just the way it is.

Not having control of our attention and being enraptured by whatever these corporate algorithms spit out leaves us open to being spoon-fed beliefs without any critical thinking on our end to filter them. If we don’t control our attention and just passively consume, we become mindless drones regurgitating what these companies and media providers throw at us.

As we all know, these companies’ products aren’t designed for truth-seeking and accuracy. They’re optimised for provocation and sensationalism. By playing to our emotions, algorithms manipulate our attention, sucking us into bottomless pits of vacuous content masquerading as “news” or “entertainment.”

In the words of Yuval Harari (Sapiens author): “If you aren’t careful, technology will start dictating your aims and enslaving you to its agenda… if you want to stay in the game, you have to run faster than Google.” The answer is old wisdom: “know thyself.” Then act accordingly.

I haven’t read or watched the news in about six years. This is one of my highest returning habits. Modern news (with very few exceptions that I’m unaware of ) is mental junk food. If being stimulated is our goal, the news suffices. But if we want to learn, we should avoid the news at all costs. Stripping things down to basics, the media model is completely perverse. Journalists and television commentators have to get up every day and talk about something. The “news” is just whatever they can muster up. No personal slights intended, but most journalists are armchair critics. They heckle from the sidelines. Most have never stepped into the arena and built something of value. I’m a rational optimist. And the news is a cycle of pessimism. The business model rewards it.

As the old saying goes: “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.” The bulk of what gets reported one day is irrelevant the next. Stepping back from the cacophony of headlines, we realise most of it is manufactured noise. Not only does consuming the news kill brain cells, but there’s a huge opportunity cost. Spending our days on the news leaves no time for taking in evergreen content that will augment our lives. I want to focus on things that are slow to change. Fundamentals. Big themes and core principles. Not ephemeral “stories” designed to rile emotions. Cutting out the noise creates more time for finding the signal. For me, this means reading Lindy books and trusted publications. Just in time, not just in case, information.

I know saying this will ruffle feathers. Some people have a sense of pride about “keeping up” with the news and a bizarre snobbery towards those who don’t. This is very strange. It’s all based on nonsense convention. When we think about it, there’s no good reason to drink all day from a constant firehouse of fleeting, overhyped content. Being “informed” is understanding how the world works - bottom-up. Not being able to parrot lurid headlines. Consuming news drills reactivity and anxiety. We want to instil equanimity and an internal locus of control.

Rant over.

There’s a paucity of good information out there. Not everything is deserving of our attention. Far from. We can spend our lives constantly trying to cram in new information. This has its place. But it’s not very efficient, and ultimately can be counterproductive. Seeking out more novelty just increases the likelihood of running into second-rate content. Living a good life and being successful comes down to deeply understanding (and embodying) a few simple things. Rather than always trying to chomp down new information, our time and attention are better spent continually reinvesting in the basics.

I got a new appreciation for repetition over the last few months. I’ve spent more time rereading and relistening to super impactful pieces. Along the way, I stumbled across an old Zig Ziglar line: “repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” It’s pretty remarkable. Each time we finish a great book or podcast, it’s easy to come away thinking “yep, I got that… on to the next one.” But on rereading and relistening to that same piece, we realise how much we missed the first time around. Anything really good, we should want to internalise. Deeply. And the best way to do that is through repetition. There’s no upper bound. I’ve listened to some podcasts at least half a dozen times. As the old Heraclitus line goes: “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Each reread or relisten is compounding and gives us something different. Focusing on the volume of information consumed (like books read) is a vanity exercise. Quality wins.

Managing our environment is crucial. Humans often default to the path of least resistance. If we want to stop distraction, we need to create our environment to insure against it. We want to control when and how we receive inputs. Ringfence the time and places in which information can enter our brains. For me, this looks like keeping my phone at a distance, silencing notifications, and curating social media. I always keep my phone out of sight. Studies have shown that just being able to see our phone (even in peripheral vision) degrades focus. As long as I’m in work mode, my phone is in my bedside drawer or my rucksack in the office. When I do look at it, I’m not bombarded with notifications. I have to enter applications to see the inbound. I do this when I want to. I started abstaining from social media long ago. I exited Facebook before it was cool. I still have LinkedIn, but I rarely make visits to the land of humblebrag. Recently, I got Twitter and it’s awesome. I’m trying to be disciplined about how I spend time there - not always successfully. If we want to do anything productive or creative (not that these two things are mutually exclusive), we need to focus. Deep work (à la Carl Newport) is the only way. We can’t do our best work with split attention. Short term, we might want the distraction. But long term, we’re all craving fulfilment, meaningfulness, and mastery. This only comes through depth. Depth only comes from focused attention.

The beautiful thing about becoming more selective with our attention is we earn back an abundance of time. We tend to want to fill every second with something. Action bias is good, but sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Much better than just doing anything. There’s magic in boredom. So, as we become more judicious with our attention and curate our information flows, we shouldn’t just funnel it into something else. It's vital to keep some attention back for nothing in particular. This is a note to self as much as to anyone else. I’ve come a long way on this in the last few years by guarding against constant stimulation. I’ve still got a heck of a way to go.

Most important, as Josh Waitzkin says, is to “cultivate empty space.” To live effectively and make good decisions, we need to have the mental latitude to think. That means not being “on” 24/7. So creating our information diets needs to include reserving space for nothing. Time to think, to let the mind relax, and see what happens. It’s in these quiet moments that inspiration comes. When our minds have time to turn over ideas (consciously or subconsciously), breakthroughs happen. We’re not going to get this while consuming. Even if we’re only consuming quality, we still need time to reflect and digest.

Our lives are shaped by where we put our attention. It’s a choice. We can give up our agency and absorb what society makes so easy - shallow news and social media. Or, we can consciously and deliberately take control of our information diet and invest our attention in high return places. We’re constantly becoming. Whether we like it or not. What we become is informed by the information we consume. Taking back control of our attention is hugely rewarding. It puts us in the driver’s seat again. We’re no longer passive consumers. We’re creating our future.