Convergence and Divergence of Focus

At any moment, we are either in a divergent phase of life, or in a convergent phase. During a divergent period, we’re usually focused on broadening our inputs. We go to school, take on internships, travel, try a career switch, and so on, exploring new paths. During a convergent time, we take what we’ve learned thus far to double down on just a handful of goals on which we can spend our energy – we become more focused. We grow fastest not by converging constantly onto some single point s...

 The Dojo Extends Beyond its Walls

If the translation of Do predicates the meaning of one's Truth, what we call home for the purpose of such training is Dojo. Jo (translated as the place, or the Hall) is the center of total focus, where all venerable learning is to take place through myriads of human struggles and energetic interactions. It is therefore stated cogently that the place called "Dojo" must be designated as the place of being enlightened by all things. It is the place where one's purest form of existence must be fo...

 Types of Do

Japanese term, written in Kanji (Chinese character) Do (ppronounced as Doo) is translated semantically as the Way, the Path, the Truth, the Art, Tao and many scholars had implied the diverse epistemological meanings with reference to one's interpretive subjectivism of Do concepts associated with human pursuits. We strive to achieve highest human potentials physically, mentally and spiritually through artistic endeavors, and through its process we find deep meaning of self-worth, reason for ex...

 How Social Media Annexes Your Cognitive Landscape

In my 2016 book, Deep Work, I proposed a strictly binary approach to social media: you should perform an honest cost/benefit analysis on the social media platforms in your life, and quit all services that don’t provide substantially more benefits than costs with respect to things you truly value. The issue with this idea, as I discovered, is that many people could identify a small number of important benefits provided to them by particular social media platforms that couldn’t be easily r...

 Having Kids Makes One Cognizant of the Brevity of Life

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter ...

 Focus on Producing Information, Not Consuming

The production of information is critical to a healthy information diet. It's the thing that makes it so that your information consumption has purpose. I cannot think of more important advice to give anyone: start your day with a producer mindset, not a consumer mindset. If you begin your day checking the news, checking your email, and checking your notifications, you've launched yourself into a day of grazing a mindless consumption. [...] But there's something else that being a producer do...

 Our Life is What We Pay Attention To

When our attention is lured, herded, and commandeered in such a way, our full human potential is profoundly subverted. “Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and “breaking news” about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all...

 Negative Attention is Better Than No Attention at All

To give and receive attention is a fundamental human need. In the 13th century, King Frederick II of Sicily wanted to find out what language children would naturally grow up to speak if they were never spoken to. He took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were strictly forbidden to either speak to or touch them. The babies, as it turned out, didn’t grow up to speak any language, as they all died of attention deprivation within a fortnight of the sta...

 Children's Attention Spans are Short, and Education Deman...

The 2016 paper, “Off-task behavior in elementary school children,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Instruction, and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Department of Education. The researchers also kept track of how the teachers were instructing students during these observations. Not surprisingly, students went off task more frequently during whole-group instruction than during small group or individual work. Length of lesson matters...

 The Attention Arms Race

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google have produced amazing products that have benefited the world enormously. But these companies are also caught in a zero-sum race for our finite attention, which they need to make money. Constantly forced to outperform their competitors, they must use increasingly persuasive techniques to keep us glued. They point AI-driven news feeds, content, and notifications at our minds, continually learning how to hook us more deeply—from our own behavior. Unfortuna...