Any person who has responsibilities has to be able to invest sufficient attention to seeing that their responsibilities are fulfilled. In order to take care of our responsibilities we have to wrestle our attention away from other interesting and fulfilling past times and invest it in the task that is required of us. This is a simple truth; in order to take care of our responsibilities we need to have the capacity to focus on the task at hand, even if it is unpleasant.
The capacity to focus is essential to achieving the things that we must achieve in order to have a successful life. Focus involves cutting out distracting thoughts and feelings in order to give undivided attention to the task at hand. Those who do not have the ability to focus will spend their productive time daydreaming about things they would rather be doing or worrying about things that might happen and how they can be avoided. These distracting thoughts will drastically increase the time it takes to accomplish tasks and also severely impact how well the task is done.
The most ideal state to function from is a state of complete focus. In this talk Mihaly Csiksczentmihaly called this state of complete focus “flow” and argues that flow enables true excellence in the accomplishment of tasks as well as produces a real sense of fulfillment and happiness. If we achieve very high levels of focus we will be able to achieve exceptional things as well as live a meaningful life. Focus is the key to unlocking our human potential.
Focus is about attention
As human beings we only have a very limited cognitive capacity. There is only so much information our brains can process at a given time and it is only ever this information that we are consciously aware of. Our attention then is limited by the amount of information our brains can process. In order for us to be aware of something or give something attention we have to invest some of our limited processing power to it.
So we see that because of our limited cognitive capacities our attention is limited, we can only give attention to or be aware of a limited number of things and the more things we give attention to the less we are able to truly grasp and engage with any of them. Focus involves giving something one’s undivided attention. This is not an easy thing to achieve but as we saw, it is well worth it.
What we need to do in order to achieve focus is to systematically remove irrelevant things from our attention. To focus we have to systematically restrict the number of things we are giving attention to.When focusing on a task I need to recapture the little amount of attention I am giving to the argument I had with my spouse, I need to let go of the concern about whether I will be able to support my current lifestyle in the future, etc. Focusing is about purifying our limited attention by removing irrelevant distractions from it.
Learn to Trust
So focus requires that we purify our attention. We need to prevent our attention from dispersing itself to numerous things. But what do we need to do in order to prevent our attention from being dispersed? There is no single answer to this question because controlling our consciousness is not an easy thing to accomplish. Having said this there is one thing that will substantially increase our capacity to focus, and that is trust.
One of the biggest distractions that we all naturally suffer from are worries and concerns. There are general worries about the future such as whether I will manage to continue supporting myself and my loved one’s, will the country stay stable enough for me to continue living in it, etc.
There are also more immediate and task-related concerns. When writing a blog post I could worry about whether the final product of my labor will be worth reading. When delivering a speech I could worry about whether the audience think I am articulate. When playing a football match I could worry about whether I am actually good enough to be on the team. As human beings there are copious amounts of worries and concerns that we will subject ourselves to.
All these worries and concerns prevent us from being able to focus. If we are worried about something it is inevitable that it is going to occupy some of our attention. No matter what we do we will not be able o focus because some of our precious attention will be devoted to the worry. Worries are like programs running on a computer which slow the whole machine down and make it less efficient. If you have a slow computer, the easiest way to increase it speed and performance is to close unnecessary programs to free up its processing power. Our attention is no different. If you want to be more focused and more efficient on your task you need to stop worrying!
Now at the root of all worries is a lack of trust. The only reason why a person would worry about anything at all is because they are convinced that it might all go wrong. They do not trust that things will work out. Trust is a conviction that things are fine and will continue to be fine. A person that trusts does not worry about whether catastrophe is looming, a person who trusts just assumes everything is going to be fine.
Because trust defuses our worries it allows us to drop them and no longer invest any attention into them. If we learn to trust completely all of the worries that occupy our attention and impede focus will fall away. If you trust you will not waste cognitive resources on worrying about things that are most probably completely out of your control. You will be more free to focus on the task which is in front of you and hence to better actualize your human potential.
I know that many people believe that is a mistake to trust. Some people feel that worrying is a good thing because it means that you aware of potential dangers and can be sure to avoid them. We must recognize however that these worries get in the way of achieving our full potential. If you think it is a bad thing to trust then you must be comfortable with the idea of never being able to fully realize your potential by focusing your attention because you wont be able to let go of your worries.