Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman.
An important work on attention and its value in our digital world.
Daniel Goleman is the bestselling author of Social Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, and eleven other books and is psychologist and a former science journalist for The New York Times. For more than two decades, he has been on the cutting edge of the human sciences.
Do you have trouble remembering what someone said to you a few minutes ago? Not tasting your food while eating? Paying more attention to your phone rather than the person you are speaking with.....Are you skim reading this book review?
In Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman investigates the science behind focus, demonstrating why high performers in any area – leadership, education, arts, sports – need to apply this mental muscle. Over seven sections, Goleman describes three types of focus: inner, other, and outer. Inner focus is about paying attention to our intuition and guiding values. Other focus allows us to connect with the people in our lives. Outer focus enables us to navigate the larger world. The benefits of using all three kinds of attention are evident for people of all ages, in all walks of life, Goleman believes, allowing people to be both productive and happy. One of the most important skills is the ability to focus on one task and not divert our attention or deplete our energy on other tasks.
But such attention is declining in today's world. Youth are spending more time with machines than with people. At work, men and women spend a lot of time zoning out and amusing themselves with a thousand and one diversions or distractions. For example, research has proven that a reader's mind wanders anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time while perusing a text.
One of the survival values that has great potential for the future is emotional empathy — the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. This art and spiritual practice depends on the muscle of attention. Compassion builds on empathy as does a genuine concern for the welfare and flourishing of others. Goleman wants us all to go further: "The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay — and the more attention you pay, the more you care. Attention interweaves with love."
Goleman also points to research that shows the wealthier people and those higher up in organisations are less aware of emotional cues from other people then those who are poorer or lower in the hierarchy.
This book was written in 2013, and if modern day phone usage is anything to go by, attention deficit must be close to pandemic proportions now. And whilst screen time is only one source of diverting our focus, it would seem to be the most potent. Of course, the other pandemic, COVID, has increased our connection with technology and arguably decreased our powers of focus even further.
According to the research around 8% of US gamers under the age of 18 seem to meet psychiatry's criteria for addiction. Studies of their brain chemistry were found to be similar to alcoholics and drug abusers.
However it's not all a diagnostic of doom. Focus, as the book goes on to explain in remarkable detail, can be trained and it results in many benefits.
· Developing immunity to emotional turbulence
· More able to stay unflappable in a crisis
· Greater self-awareness
· Increased productivity
The book also explores how improved focus is helpful for individuals, organisations and society overall.
The book introduces the concept of 'Switching' . This idea that once you are in flow with a task or piece of work, a single distraction like a text message, can switch you out of your current focus, taking several minutes to ramp back up again to full concentration.
Goleman also has impressive things to say about flow, mindfulness-based emotional intelligence and meditation, addressing systemic problems, fast and slow brain function, and the well-focused leader.
Goleman's points out that, for children, executive control is the most important mental skill for life success. “Kids who can ignore impulse, filter out what's irrelevant, and stay focused on a goal fare best in life,” he says. Social-emotional learning is, according to Goleman, key to acquiring this skill. He explores a wide range of techniques for young people, from emotional-intelligence lessons to cognitive skill-enhancing gaming to mindfulness and similar attention-training methods.
The author explains that attention span can be compared with a “mental muscle that we can strengthen by a workout,” with memorization and concentration being the forms of exercise that work the “muscle.” Showing how much time is spent in day-dreaming and mind wandering—up to 40 percent of the day, according to some estimates—Goleman identifies the changes in psychological and mental habits and activities that he believes will contribute to effectively addressing important contemporary issues like climate change and global warming. Quick, default reactions, which focus on the short term and “favor now in decisions of all kinds,” prevent concentration on the long-term objectives that such issues demand.
Goleman also believes that such a transformation will require new methods of leadership working through new kinds of institutions. The success of future leaders will depend on their ability to maintain focus on long-term goals and improvements for the widest circles their influence can reach. The author supports his arguments with a psychological framework drawn from the contemporary field of neuroscience. He refers to a Nature magazine study on the ambiguous effects of playing computer games—from “Minesweeper” to poker—and stresses that “face-to-face interactions…pick up a multitude of signals which help us connect well, and wire together the neurons involved.” Unfortunately, “during thousands of hours spent online,” he writes, “the wiring of the social brain gets virtually no exercise.”
Overall, 'Focus' is an absorbing read even though it is a little heavy on neuroscience, but it is all explained very neatly and provides much of the factual basis for many of Goleman’s claims. It does a great job of describing the numerous problems that can unfold and provides practical ways we as individuals and in organisations can improve our focus.