Stolen Focus
Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
How’s YOUR focus? If you’re like most human beings on the planet these days, my hunch is you feel like you’ve lost your ability to pay attention. This book is a sobering look at what Johann Hari believes to be the twelve causes of our inability to focus and a guide on “How to Think Deeply Again.” I highly recommend it.
Big Ideas
- The 12 Causes of Stolen FocusOf Stolen Focus.
- Flow vs. FragmentationChoose wisely.
- Read a BookThink deeply.
- Sleep for Heroic FocusFor Heroic focus.
- Creating the World in Which We Want to LiveIn which we want to live.
“I found strong evidence that our collapsing ability to pay attention is not primarily a personal feeling on my part, or your part, or your kid’s part. This is being done to us all. It is being done by very powerful forces. Those forces include Big Tech, but they also go way beyond them. This is a systemic problem. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns. I realized, when I learned all this, that there was a hole in all the existing books I had read about how to improve your focus. It was huge. They have, on the whole, neglected to talk about the actual causes of our attention crisis—which lie mainly in these larger forces. Based on what I learned, I have concluded that there are twelve deep forces at work that are damaging our attention. I came to believe we can only solve this problem in the long term if we understand them—and then, together, we stop them from continuing to do this to us.
There are real steps you can take as an isolated individual to reduce this problem for yourself, and throughout this book you’ll learn how to carry them out. I am strongly in favor of you seizing personal responsibility in this way. But I have to be honest with you, in a way I fear previous books on this topic were not. Those changes will only get you so far. They will solve a slice of the problem. They are valuable. I do them myself. But unless you are very lucky, they won’t allow you to escape the attention crisis. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. We have to take individual responsibility for this problem, for sure, but at the same time, together, we have to take collective responsibility for dealing with these deeper factors. There is a real solution—one that will actually make it possible for us to start to heal our attention. It requires us to radically reframe the problem, and then to take action. I believe I have figured out how we might start to do that.”
~ Johann Hari from Stolen Focus
How’s YOUR focus?
If you’re like most human beings on the planet these days, my hunch is you feel like you’ve lost your ability to pay attention. This book is a sobering look at what Johann Hari believes to be the twelve causes of our inability to focus and a guide on “How to Think Deeply Again.”
I highly recommend it. (Get the book here.)
As per his bio in the book, Johann Hari is a British writer who has authored two New York Times bestselling books, which have been translated into thirty-seven languages and praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky, from Elton John to Naomi Klein. He’s written for some of the world’s leading newspapers and he’s appeared on countless shows while his TED Talks have been viewed over 75 million times.
The book is packed with Big Ideas. Let’s take a quick look at some of my favorites!
P.S. We’ve covered a range of other great books on the subject, including: Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (check out his Digital Minimalism 101 class as well!), The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, Irresistible by Adam Alter, and The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley.
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Get the BookThe 12 Causes of Stolen Focus
“It felt like our civilization had been covered with itching powder, and we spent our time twitching and twerking our minds, unable to simply give attention to things that matter. Activities that require longer forms of focus—like reading a book—have been in free fall for years. … I read the work of the leading scientific specialist on willpower in the world, a man named Professor Roy Baumeister, who is based at the University of Queensland in Australia, and then I went to interview him. He had been studying the science of willpower and self-discipline for more than thirty years, and he is responsible for some of the most famous experiments ever carried out in the social sciences. As I sat down opposite the sixty-six year old, I explained I was thinking of writing a book about why we seem to have lost our sense of focus, and how we can get it back. I looked to him hopefully.
It was curious, he said, that I should bring up this topic with him. ‘I’m feeling like my control over my attention is weaker than it used to be,’ he said. He used to be able to sit for hours, reading and writing, but now ‘it seems like my mind jumps around a lot more.’ He explained that he had realized recently that ‘when I start to feel bad, I’d play a video game on my phone, and then that got to be fun.’ I pictured him turning away from the enormous body of scientific achievement to play Candy Crush Saga. He said: ‘I can see that I am not sustaining concentration in perhaps the way I used to.’ He added: ‘I’m just sort of giving in to it, and will start to feel bad.’
Roy Baumeister is literally the author of a book named Willpower, and he has studied the subject more than anyone else alive. If even he is losing some of his ability to focus, I thought, who isn’t it happening to?”
That’s from the introduction.
Imagine flying from London to Australia to interview the guy who LITERALLY (!) wrote the book on Willpower (check out our Notes on it!) and hearing him share that story.
Then imagine Professor Baumeister, the guy who has studied the science of willpower MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE ALIVE (!) unable to sustain his focus on his ENORMOUS body of scientific research to play Candy Crush Saga and then telling you that he just can’t seem to focus his attention the way he used to and the way he thinks he should.
If that doesn’t make you feel a deep sense of common humanity AND a deep sense of the fact that we have a SERIOUS challenge on our hands, then I don’t know what can.
As I read that, I was reminded of a chat I had years ago with Tony Schwartz—who wrote The Power of Full Engagement and is one of the world’s leading authorities on energy management. He told me that his attention had also become splintered and that he had a difficult time reading books. I’ll never forget that moment as I committed to protecting my attention to make sure I never lost the ability to go DEEP. It always humbles me when it takes me a day or two to regain my ability to REALLY focus after I’ve been driving hard in CEO mode and using my phone a ton.
Note: One of THE MAIN things Alexandra and I committed to doing for our kids was to preserve their ability to focus their attention. We’ve done that, in part, by radically limiting their screen time.I felt a deep sense of “winning” the attention/focus game when I LOST a game of chess to Emerson the other day. He beat me blindfolded.
In the book, Johann walks us through what he believes are the TWELVE causes of our inability to sustain our focus at the levels we’d like. Each gets its own chapter. Here’s the quick look...
Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States
Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion
Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading
Cause Five: The Disruption of Mind-Wandering
Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You (Part One)
Cause Seven: The Rise of Cruel Optimism
Cause Eight: The Surge In Stress and How It Triggers Vigilance
Causes Nine and Ten: Our Deteriorating Diets and Rising Pollution
Cause Eleven: The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It
Cause Twelve: The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically
A study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.
Flow vs. Fragmentation
“Mihaly [Csikszentmihalyi]’s studies identified many aspects of flow, but it seemed to me that if you want to get there, what you need to know boils down to three core components. The first thing you need to do is to choose a clearly defined goal. I want to paint this canvas; I want to run up this hill; I want to teach my child how to swim. You have to resolve to pursue it, and to set aside other goals while you do. Flow can only come when you are monotasking—when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing. Mihaly found that distraction and multitasking kill flow, and nobody will reach flow if they are trying to do two or more things at the same time. Flow requires all of your brainpower, deployed toward one mission.
Second, you have to be doing something that is meaningful to you. This is part of a basic truth about attention: we evolved to pay attention to things that are meaningful for us. … In any situation, it will be easier to pay attention to things that are meaningful to you, and harder to pay attention to things that seem meaningless. When you are trying to make yourself do something that lacks meaning, your attention will often slip and slide off it.
Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either. Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she’s not going to get into flow because it’s too easy. If she’s suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won’t get into flow either because she’ll freak out. What she needs is a hill or mountain that is, ideally, slightly higher and harder than the one she did last time.
So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.”
That’s from chapter #2: “Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States.”
That’s also one of THE best possible descriptions/summaries of flow and how to consistently get into it that we’re ever going to read. I repeat: “To find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.”
Stated slightly differently... Know what you want: set ONE, specific, high and hard target. Know WHY you want it. Focus all your energy on doing your best to hit it. Enter: Flow. Repeat. All day. Every day. Especially TODAY.
Personal question time: What’s YOUR #1 Heroic Target right now? Are you clear on what it is and why you want it? Are you stretching yourself *just* the right amount? Awesome. Now eliminate distractions and GO HIT IT. And enjoy the flow that ensues.
P.S. I was thinking of our Soul Force equation as I typed that passage. If we want to get into flow (in our Energy, Work, and Love!), we need to get our Energy FOCUSED on What’s Important Now. Consistently. Heroic superpowers activated.
P.P.S. Check out our Notes on Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow AND Steven Kotler’s book The Rise of Superman for a deeper dive into how to get into flow consistently.
P.P.P.S. Here are the very last words of the chapter on flow: “When you are approaching death, I thought, you won’t think about your reinforcements—the likes and retweets—you’ll think about your moments of flow. I felt in that moment that we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentations shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself: Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly’s painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?”
So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.
The study found that ‘technological distraction’—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s the same knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
Read a Book
“The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey—which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans—found that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure has fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.”
That’s from the chapter on “Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading.”
Shortly after that passage, Johann says: “Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience—you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall.”
As I read that, I thought of a recent +1 I created regarding a text interaction with Cal Newport. As you know if you’ve been following along, I’m a BIG fan of Cal and his BIG brain. We have Notes on a number of his great books, including: Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and How to Become a Straight-A Student.
Not too long ago, he was featured in The Economist alongside James Clear. I took a picture of the article in my print magazine and sent him a text. He replied. We joked about it. Awesome. Then I went back to reading the article. Only... I didn’t go back to reading it in my magazine on my desk, I zoomed in on the picture of it I had taken and sent to Cal.
I got goosebumps typing that as I remember how CRAZY that felt to me at the time and how easily I violated my own rule of ALWAYS going analog instead of digital when given the option—which, for the record, is why I NEVER read a book on a Kindle or other digital device. I ALWAYS (but only ALWAYS!!!) read the hardcover/paperback of the book. I want to REDUCE SCREEN TIME every.single.chance I get. Johann talks about one of the reasons that’s a good idea as well.
After referencing Nicholas Carr’s GREAT book The Shallows (check out the Notes!), he references a researcher on literacy named Anne Mangen and says: that “she explained to me that in two decades of researching this subject, she has proved something crucial. Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another. ‘We’re more likely to scan and skim’ when we read on screens, her studies have found—we run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need. But after a while, if we do this long enough, she told me, ‘this scanning and skimming bleeds over. It also starts to color or influence how we read on paper. … That behavior becomes our default, more or less.’”
Note: That “manic skip and jump from one thing to another” isn’t restricted to reading on screens. It bleeds over into EVERY aspect of our lives such that we (AND OUR KIDS!) can’t seem to focus on ANYTHING or ANYONE with any intensity for any extended period of time.
I look at reading books as a sort of strength training for my Focus—almost like a form of mental training like meditation. In sum: Books. They do a Hero good. Read one. TODAY.
Sleep for Heroic Focus
“But as the days and nights went on, Charles [Czeisler] couldn’t help by notice something. When people are kept awake, ‘one of the first things to go is the ability to focus our attention,’ he told me in a teaching room at Harvard. He had been giving his test subjects really basic tasks, but with each hour that passed, they were losing their ability to carry them out. They couldn’t remember things he’d just told them or focus enough to play very simple card games. He told me: ‘I was just stunned by how performance would deteriorate. It’s one thing to say that the average performance on a memory task would be twenty percent worse, or thirty percent worse. But it’s another thing to say that your brain is so sluggish that it takes ten times longer for your brain to reply to something.’ As people stayed awake, it seemed their ability to focus fell off a cliff. In fact, if you stay awake for nineteen hours straight, you become as cognitively impaired—as unable to focus and think clearly—as if you had gotten drunk. He found that when they were kept awake for one whole night and continued walking about the next day, instead of taking a quarter of a second to respond to a prompt, the participants in his experiment were taking four, five, or six seconds. ‘It’s kind of amazing,’ he said. ...
He came to believe that, as a society, we are currently getting sleep all wrong—and it is ruining our focus. With each passing year, he warned, this has become more urgent. Today 40 percent of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived, getting less than the necessary minimum of seven hours a night. In Britain, an incredible 23 percent are getting less than five hours a night. Only 15 percent of us wake up from our sleep feeling refreshed. This is new. Since 1942, the average amount of time a person sleeps has been slashed by an hour a night. Over the past century, the average child has lost eighty-five minutes of sleep every night. There’s a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.”
That’s from the chapter on “Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion.”
We talk about this ALL the time, but I will repeat... If you aren’t getting the recommended 7-8 hours of sleep, adding just ONE more hour to your sleep will CHANGE YOUR LIFE. I guarantee it. Don’t believe me? Test it.
And... It’s not just about getting by. It’s about peak performance. Got a big performance you’re preparing for? Whether that’s a Ryder Cup or a Super Bowl or a big talk to the team at work? Pro Tip: PRIORITIZE YOUR SLEEP like your performance depends on it. Because it does.
P.S. Check out Sleep 101 and our Notes on Why We Sleep, The Sleep Revolution, and Sleep Smarter for more. (And check out this +1 on Baseline Resetting (vAttia) for more.)
So we aren’t just facing a crisis of lost spotlight focus—we are facing a crisis of lost mind-wandering. Together they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.
Creating the World in Which We Want to Live
“When Tristan [Harris] and Aza [Raskin] started to speak out, they were ridiculed as wildly over-the-top Cassandras. But then, all over Silicon Valley, people who had built the world we now live in were beginning to declare in public that they had similar feelings. For example, Sean Parker, one of the earliest investors in Facebook, told a public audience that the creators of the site had asked themselves from the start: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ The techniques they used were ‘exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. … The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.’ He added: ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.’ Chamath Palihapitiya, who had been Facebook’s vice president of growth, explained in a speech that the effects are so negative that his own kids ‘aren’t allowed to use that shit.’ Tony Fadell, who co-invented the iPhone, said: ‘I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world?’ He worried that he had helped create ‘a nuclear bomb’ that can ‘blow up people’s brains and reprogram them.’
Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: ‘Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.’
One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: ‘How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?’ There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”
That’s from “Cause Six: The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You.”
Have you seen the documentary Tristan Harris produced called The Social Dilemma? It’s all about, as one of Facebook’s early investors who has since become one of its biggest critics puts it in his book Zucked: “the unintended catastrophic consequences of attention economics.”
If you haven’t watched it yet, I HIGHLY (!!!) recommend you do. Immediately. ESPECIALLY if you have kids and/or grand kids you love and who you want to see flourish and live Heroic lives.
Check out our Notes on Adam Alter’s Irresistible where he talks about how Steve Jobs (like so many of the other Silicon Valley exec mentioned above) didn’t let his own kids use his products.
For now... It’s time for us to play our roles humbly yet HEROICALLY well so we can help create a world in which we want to live--along with our kids and the generations to follow. We have a lot of work to do, my friend. LET’S DO IT.
I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.
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