The Power of Focused Attention in Helping You Achieve Your Goals
Your life can be transformed in an instant.
Winifred Gallagher’s did.
She was diagnosed with cancer; but while it was an unexpected shock, it also led her onto an unexpected journey of purposeful work.
As she explains in her book, Rapt, she walked away from the hospital after a cancer diagnosis realizing something powerful: “This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as much as possible, I would focus on my life instead.”
Her cancer treatments were draining and exhausting, but she refused to concede her attention to what the disease had taken away from her. Instead, she launched herself into a more challenging state of mind—she committed herself to focus less on the worry and more on the good.
She would consciously reclaim her attention, relentlessly redirecting it toward things that mattered most to her in life: “big ones like family and friends, spiritual life and work, and smaller ones like movies, walks, and a 6:30 pm martini.”
This newly-drawn perspective on life painted a brighter outlook on her life.
So Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention (what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore) plays in shaping the quality of our life. After five years of behavioral science research and experimentation, this was her conclusion:
“Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioural economics to family counselling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.”
The management of your attention is the condition of improving every aspect of your experience in life.
In other words, what you focus on expands.
If you focus on cancer diagnosis and allow your attention to wander across all the worries, fears, and uncertainties that come with it, your life will be consumed with darkness and unhappiness. But if you choose to focus on the bigger and more important things (family and friends or meaningful work) and the little things (the pleasure of an evening martini), your life becomes more pleasant because your thoughts are creating a more enjoyable experience for you.
“Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love — is the sum of what you focus on. Life is the sum total of what you focus on.”—Winifred Gallagher
This phenomenon of ‘what you think, you become’ has been explained by ancient philosophers and science researchers alike, and it contradicts what the average human thinks.
We tend to place so much emphasis on our circumstances—in our external world—as a measure of happiness. Under such light, what happens or fails to happen to us will then determine how we feel. But as discovered by Gallagher, and as I’ve explored myself, our experience in life is sharped by what we pay attention to.
Life experience is an inward-outward experience, not the other way around.
All this is truly fascinating, but there’s one takeaway that resonated with me most from Winifred Gallagher’s work, and it’s this:
“Unless you can concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s hard to accomplish anything, period.”
The Role ‘Focused Attention’ Plays in Achieving Our Goals
As we’ve learned, what you choose to pay attention to grows into what you experience in life. So, if you were to focus all your attention on one specific goal, and purposefully exert your effort to work toward it, while consciously suppressing all the worries, uncertainties and worries that cling onto the active pursuit of it, shouldn’t you be able to achieve that goal?
The answer is yes.
And the reason is this:
You’re engaging in focused attention.
As visualized in the photo above—and assuming each arrow represents one measurement of your attention span—if your attention is distracted and fragmented, you won’t be able to achieve your goal. But if your attention is focused, aligned, and compounded, the singular measurements amount to a consistent force that will propel you forward.
I’ve experienced this myself.
Since January 2020, I’ve committed to two hours of focused writing, four days a week.
Here’s what my focused attention has allowed me to achieve in six months:
I’ve published 87 articles (this is #87).
My Medium following has grown from 365 followers to 4,400.
My newsletter has grown from 0 subscribers to 1,000+.
This is the power of focused attention in helping you achieve your goals in life.
As Gallagher explained, “unless you can concentrate on what you want to do and suppress distractions, it’s hard to accomplish anything, period.”
Fragmented attention is rooted in distraction and worry.
Focused attention is what you need to accomplish your goals.
Focused attention is your ultimate currency.
And you’re the sole controller of it.
Use it wisely.
Consume it consciously.
Align it in one direction.
Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, wrote:
“[In our new knowledge economy] if you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.”
And in order to produce, you must learn how to cultivate focused attention.
How?
Build systems that facilitate the doing of the work.
The first trains your attention-muscle. The second ensures that you do the work. The third creates a structure and designs an environment that makes it easier to do the work.
What Matters to You: Start Living The Focused Life
In her 2009 book, Rapt, Winifred Gallagher writes: “Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.”
Over a century ago, psychologist William James wrote: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another… My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”
The message is simple:
What you give constant attention to grows into your life experience.
As you work toward a goal, you always have a choice: You can give attention to the worries or to the possibilities. You can give attention to what you don’t want or to what you do want. You can give attention to what isn’t going well or to the progress that you’re making.
You can fragment your attention.
Or you can focus it.
I’ve chosen to focus it and it’s made a world of difference in my life. Similar to Gallagher, “I'll live the focused life because it's the best kind there is.”