Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

The recent generations raised on games and otherwise glued to video screens, one neuroscientist told me, amount to an unprecedented experiment: “a massive difference in how their brains are plastically engaged in life” compared with previous generations. The long-term question is what such games will do to their neural wiring, and so to the social

“It takes a panoramic attention to appreciate system-level interactions,” says Richard Davidson. “You need to be attentionally flexible, so you can expand and contract your focus, like a zoom lens, to see elements big and small.” Why not teach children these basic skills in reading systems?

Mindlessness, in the form of mind wandering, may be the single biggest waster of attention in the workplace. Focus on our experience in the here and now—like the task at hand, the conversation we’re having, or the building of consensus in a meeting—demands that we tune down the all-about-myself murmurs of mind stuff irrelevant to what’s going on ri

Open awareness creates a mental platform for creative breakthroughs and unexpected insights. In open awareness we have no devil’s advocate, no cynicism or judgment—just utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind. But once we’ve hit upon a great creative insight, we need to capture the prize by switching to a keen focus on how to apply it. S

An organization that focuses inwardly may execute superbly. But if it has not attuned to the larger world in which it operates, that execution may end up in the service of a failed strategy.

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

The nonstop onslaught of email, texts, bills to pay—life’s “full catastrophe”—throws us into a brain state antithetical to the open focus where serendipitous discoveries thrive. In the tumult of our daily distractions and to-do lists, innovation dead-ends; in open times it flourishes. That’s why the annals of discovery are rife with tales of a bril

An older dichotomy in psychology between “cognitive” and “noncognitive” abilities would put academic skills in a separate category from social and emotional ones. But given how the neural scaffolding for executive control underlies both academic and social/emotional skills, that separation seems as antiquated as the Cartesian split between mind and

It’s not just that we’ve developed habits of attention that make us less effective, but that the weight of messages leaves us too little time simply to reflect on what they really mean.

This is bottom-up preselected attention; such capture from below is automatic, an involuntary choice. We’re most prone to emotions driving focus this way when our minds are wandering, when we are distracted, or when we’re overwhelmed by information—or all three.