Focus

About the Author

Daniel Goleman, a former science journalist for The New York Times, is renowned for his pioneering work in the field of emotional intelligence. He is the author of 13 books, and he frequently lectures to professional groups, business audiences, and college campuses. Goleman co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Center, which is now at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He resides in Massachusetts.

Main Idea

In Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman delves into the science of attention, presenting it as an essential yet underrated mental asset. He compares attention to a muscle that can either atrophy from disuse or strengthen with practice. In our era of constant distractions, Goleman argues that sharpening our focus is crucial for thriving in a complex world. He emphasizes that those who excel rely on "smart practice," which includes mindfulness meditation, focused preparation, recovery from setbacks, continued attention to the learning curve, and fostering positive emotions and connections.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Subtle Faculty
2. The Anatomy of Attention
3. Attention Top and Bottom
4. The Value of a Mind Adrift
5. The Architecture of Serendipity
6. Finding Balance and Restoring Attention
7. Self-Awareness
8. The Brain's Map of the Body
9. A Recipe for Self-Control
10. Reading Others
11. The Bigger Context
12. Smart Practice
13. In the Mental Gym
14. Accentuate the Positive
15. Cutting Through the Hodgepodge
16. Mindfulness at Work
17. Seeing the Bigger Picture
18. The Well-Focused Leader
19. Think Different
20. The Well-Focused Team
21. Leading for the Long Future

Introduction: The Subtle Faculty

Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention represents a little-noticed and underrated mental asset. The good news on attention comes from neuroscience labs and school classrooms, where the findings point to ways we can strengthen this vital muscle of the mind.

For leaders to get results, they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate the larger world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.

And it's not just leaders who benefit from a balance in this triple focus. All of us live in daunting environments, rife with the tensions and competing goals and lures of modern life. Each of the three varieties of attention can help us find a balance where we can be both happy and productive. Attention connects us with the world, shaping and defining our experience. As Anne Treisman, a dean of this research area, notes, "how we deploy our attention determines what we see." Or as Yoda says, "Your focus is your reality."

The Anatomy of Attention

The ability to focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention — the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a sea of incoming stimuli. There are two main varieties of distractions:

• Sensory: Notice the feeling of your tongue against your upper palate. It's just one of an endless wave of incoming stimuli your brain weeds out from the continuous wash of background sounds, shapes and colors, tastes, smells, sensations, and on and on.
• Emotional: These loaded signals are more daunting. While you might find it easy to concentrate on answering your email in the hubbub of a coffee shop, if you overhear someone mention your name, it's almost impossible to tune out the voice that carries it. Your attention reflexively alerts to hear what's being said about you.

The biggest challenge for even the most focused comes from the emotional turmoil of our lives, like a recent blowup in a close relationship that keeps intruding into your thoughts. Such thoughts barge in for a good reason: to get us through what to do about what's upsetting us. The dividing line between fruitless rumination and productive reflection lies in whether or not we come up with some tentative solution or insight and then can let those distressing thoughts go — or if we just keep obsessing over the same loop of worry. The more our focus gets disrupted, the worse we do.

Attention Top and Bottom

Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems. One has massive computing power and operates constantly, purring away in quiet to solve our problems, surprising us with a sudden solution to complex pondering. This back-of-the-mind attention typically comes to the center of focus when the unexpected happens. You're talking on your cell phone while driving (the driving part is back-of-the-mind), and suddenly a horn honk makes you realize the light is now green.

"Bottom-up" has become the phrase of choice in cognitive science for such workings of this lower-brain neural machinery, whereas "top-down" refers to mental activity that can monitor and impose goals on the subcortical machinery. It's as though there were two minds at work:

• The bottom-up mind is faster in brain time, involuntary and automatic (always on), intuitive, operating through networks of association, executor of our habitual routines and guide for our actions, manager for our mental models of the world.
• The top-down mind is slower, voluntary, effortful, the seat of self-control, which can (sometimes) overpower automatic routines and mute emotionally driven impulses, able to learn new models, make new plans, and take charge of our automatic repertoire, to an extent.

Top-down wiring adds talents like self-awareness and reflection, deliberation, and planning to our mind's repertoire. Intentional, top-down focus offers the mind a lever to manage our brain. As we shift our attention from one task, plan, sensation, or the like to another, the related brain circuitry lights up.

A surprising factor constantly tips the balance toward bottom-up: the brain economizes on energy. The bottom/top systems distribute mental tasks between them so we can make minimal effort and get optimal results. As familiarity makes a routine easier, it gets passed off from the top to the bottom. The way we experience this neural transfer is that we need to pay less attention — and finally none — as it becomes automatic.

The Value of a Mind Adrift

The easy assumption that attention need be in the service of solving problems or achieving goals downplays the fruitfulness of the mind's tendency to drift whenever left to its own devices. The inner tug to drift away from effortful focus is so strong that cognitive scientists see a wandering mind as the brain's "default" mode — where it goes when it's not working on some mental task. However, while mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on a task, some portion of the time, it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our lives. Also, a mind adrift lets our creative juices flow.

While our minds wander, we become better at anything that depends on a flash of insight, from wordplay to inventions and original thinking. In fact, people who are adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory — like solving complex math problems — can struggle with creative insights if they can't fully switch off their concentrated focus.

Among other positive functions of mind wandering are: