The Deliberate Owl

We live in an attention deficient era. Adults and teens often cannot read a book because they can't focus on reading more than a couple pages at a time. One explanation is that people's use of technology, phones, and social media has decreased people's ability to attend, as well as leading to deficits in social behavior and social connection.

How do you tune back in? How can you train your attention and deal with distractions?

(Read: Four Reasons Why Boredom is Better For You Than You Think)

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman (2013, Harper) explains why attention matters for everything. Attention mediates our interaction with the world. We attend constantly, but not always to the right things. To what we attend, how well, and for how long, are questions Goleman explores,.with an eye for improving our focus on what matters.

Goleman examines focus (attention, awareness) at three levels. First, the level of you, an individual. Here, he discusses general awareness, open spacious awareness, and self-awareness. He draws on neuroscience to explain how focus and attention work in the brain, including your subconscious versus top-down attention. He questions whether mind wandering is the mind's default mode, and examines the role mind wandering has in creativity. Goleman discusses how immersion in our senses, following mindfulness meditation techniques, can quiet the mind's chatter. We stop thinking so much about ourselves, our worries, our self narrative, and stay instead in the here and now. We stay present. It takes training or practice to get good at it, to really be in a mindful state, with the mind quieter than usual.

(Read: How Reading Books Can Help You Reclaim Your Attention)

Then, Goleman zooms out. How can you use your focus to accomplish things? He talks about flow, willpower, sustained attention, and self-control. Flow is the feeling of optimal focus when you're working at the right level of challenge, not so easy you're bored and not so hard youre stressed or overwhelmed. He explains biases in our thinking that come from the bottom-up attention system. Regarding self-control, one interesting point was that attention regulates emotion. Selective attention on something can distract and calm an agitated amygdala (the emotion center of the brain). This can work especially well with toddlers.

At the third level, he zooms out further to examine your focus on other people, awareness of others, empathy, and their behavior. Goleman describes how cognitive empathy (such as theory of mind and perspective taking) shares neural pathways with executive attention. Rapport with others can be important for learning. Goleman also discusses organizations and systems, including how people are often bad at systems level thinking, and how improving your systems awareness can improve leadership and strategy. For instance, Goleman writes that winning strategies either exploit (i.e. do one thing really well) or explore (i.e., try out new innovations in new domains). If you can do both, you'll do even better.

Goleman talks about the role of gut feelings in decision making. He argues that in general it's good to trust your gut, since it's a subconscious process using information your mind has gathered up. But Adam Grant, in his book Originals, argued that gut feelings are only useful if you're an expert in the area—otherwise, what is your intuition actually based on?

Finally, Goleman talks about leadership. The big thing for great leaders, he says, is long term focus—decades or longer. Part of the reason for that is that when looking long term, leaders are more likely to make decisions based on the long term health of the company, their employees, the supply chain, and the environment. It's not just about maximizing profit—it's recognition of the company as part of a larger system, and the health of the broader system matters to the company.

Inner, outer, other focus

At first, I thought it was odd which kinds of focus Goleman picked to discuss, but for any nonfiction book like this, you need to cover enough aspects to make it a book, and I guess the grouping of "inner, outer, and other focus" reasonably covers all the stuff he wanted to talk about. He also uses the terms focus, attention, and awareness pretty interchangeably.

Overall, Focus is a well-researched book packed with information. Of the fields and information I was already familiar with (such as the psychology of attention, flow, and empathy), I didn't think there was anything overlooked.

Read this book if you're interested in psychology, business psychology, how people work, optimizing your attention, or understanding yourself and developing self-awareness. If you've enjoyed books such as Quiet by Susan Cain, The Expectation Effect by David Robson, or The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, try Focus!