Truth Bomb Tuesday: You’ve got to start putting up a fight.
I was reading one of Professor Scott Galloway’s posts the other day. He noted that the wealthy people he knew all had one thing in common.
They REALLY wanted to be wealthy.
Wealth was a focus and they had focus in spades.
Wealthy people, as a group, have the same distribution of lucky people and unlucky people as the general population, he reckons. The same distribution of talented and untalented.
What sets them apart is focus.
But think about that for a second. What is focus?
Well, I’d say a pretty good definition is that focus is the ability to control and direct our attention for long periods of time.
Focus is about controlling where our attention goes.
But this sets up a bit of a funny problem.
Because we live in an attention economy. There is an epic war for our attention going on right now.
I mean, I literally have someone in my team calibrating the subject headings of these emails to increase the odds that you’ll actually open them and give me a precious slice of your attention.
I’m not trying to trick you or anything. I’m not trying to deceive you into opening up something that’s not going to have any value for you.
It’s more that I do believe I have some useful insights to offer, and if I don’t put a bit of thought into catching your attention, I will lose the war, and some other email will win. I mean, Bunnings has a two for one offer on garden plants this weekend. I can’t compete with that.
It’s an arms race in a sense. A very competitive arms race.
And now you might sit back and think that’s nice. “All of these entities out there warring for my attention, like I’m a strategically important piece of Normandy or something. I’m special.”
But you’re not a bystander in this process.
Because you know who else needs your attention?
You do.
Or your future self does.
If you want to change your story, you’re going to need to learn new things, expose yourself to new ideas, inoculate yourself with new belief systems.
All of that requires attention.
And that leaves you out on the battlefield with your little water-pistol, staring down the panzer divisions of Facebook and Youtube and Coke and the Office of the Road Safety Commission and whoever it is that is buying ad space this week trying to get in your head.
It’s a hell of a battle.
But most people don’t even realise that they’re in this war. They’re happy to let their attention be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
And in the process, they end up selling out their future, all for the sake of a few beans of dopamine.
It’s a terrible story.
No. You need to know that your attention is precious.
You need to be able to clearly articulate what it is your attention is going to this week and why.
And you need to follow through. You need to actively make sure that your attention flows where you want it to flow, and that it doesn’t get hijacked by Facebook’s snipers.
This is a new human skill. We’ve never had to face this problem before.
But it’s the skill that in the coming years, is going to separate life’s winners from life’s losers.
Get. Focused.
DB.