Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Smart risks are based on wide and voracious data-gathering checked against a gut sense; dumb decisions are built from too narrow a base of inputs. Candid feedback from those you trust and respect creates a source of self-awareness, one that can help guard against skewed information inputs or questionable assumptions.

Whether we’re trying to hone a skill in sports or music, enhance our memory power, or listen better, the core elements of smart practice are the same: ideally, a potent combination of joy, smart tactics, and full focus.

That focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention, the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a staggering sea of incoming stimuli, each one a potential focus in itself. This is what William James, a founder of modern psychology, meant when he defined attention as “the sudden taking possession by the mind, in clea

a scientist too determined to confirm his hypothesis risks ignoring findings that don’t fit his expectations—dismissing them as noise or error, not a doorway to new discoveries—and so misses what might become more fruitful theories. And the naysayer in the brainstorming session, the guy who always shoots down any new idea, throttles innovative insi

Building executive control helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt, or disappointment creates endless cascades of rumination. Mindfulness lets us break the stream of thoughts that might otherwise lead to wallowing in misery, by changing our relationship to thought itself. Instead of being swept away by that stream we can pause

The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go—or if, on the other hand, we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry.

Failure to drop one focus and move on to others can, for example, leave the mind lost in repeating loops of chronic anxiety. At clinical extremes it means being lost in helplessness, hopelessness, and self-pity in depression; or panic and catastrophizing in anxiety disorders; or countless repetitions of ritualistic thoughts or acts (touch the door

Through what amounts to an optical illusion of the mind, we take what’s within our awareness to equal the whole of the mind’s operations. But in fact the vast majority of mental operations occur in the mind’s backstage, amid the purr of bottom-up systems.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”