The original meaning of strategy was from the battlefield; it meant “the art of the leader”—back then, generals. Strategy was how you deployed your resources; tactics were how battles were fought. Today, leaders need to generate strategies that make sense in whatever larger systems they operate in—a task for outer focus.

This optimal brain state for getting work done well is marked by greater neural harmony—a rich, well-timed interconnection among diverse brain areas.

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.

I just watched my four grandchildren, one by one, play the beta version of a game for the iPad called Tenacity. The game offers you a leisurely journey through any of a half dozen scenes, from a barren desert to a fantasy staircase spiraling heavenward. The challenge: Every time you exhale, you tap the iPad screen with one finger. And for every

An ingenious method for remedying this bottom-up skew is so subtle that people have no idea that their attention patterns are being rewired (just as they had no idea that wiring was going on as they acquired it in the first place). Called “cognitive bias modification,” or CBM, this invisible therapy has those suffering from severe social anxiety

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

Life today seems ruled to a troubling degree by impulse; a flood of ads drives us, bottom-up, to desire a sea of goods and spend today without regard to how we will pay tomorrow. The reign of impulse for many goes beyond overspending and overborrowing to overeating and other addictive habits, from bingeing on Twizzlers to spending countless hours

“First the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then it’s a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.”

Our mind holds endless ideas, memories, and potential associations waiting to be made. But the likelihood of the right idea connecting with the right memory within the right context—and all that coming into the spotlight of attention—diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the