Train Your Focus

Over the past month I’ve had a few slip ups. One of these slip ups included me making a mistake by booking a non-refundable plane ticket that I actually do not need. After being told by the airline that there is nothing they will do to refund my ticket or issue a credit, my initial response was to be upset with the airline for not working with me to find a way to avoid the total loss.

However after taking some time to reflect, and ask “where did I go wrong here?” it became clear that had I paid more attention at the time of booking, I wouldn’t have had to experience this situation in the first place. In short, I’m the one who put myself in this position by not being fully present at a time that I needed to be, yet I was ready to put the blame on someone else.

Sure, perhaps the airline could have been a bit more generous. However, the onus is not on a for-profit business to act on behalf of my best interest. They owe me nothing……

This is yet another learning moment for me. Despite how we think other people should act and behave, the fact is that we are not able to control the actions of other people.

However, we do have the ability to control our own actions. This means it is up to us to pay attention to how we move through life, to be diligent with our interactions with others, to preemptively mitigate potential problems, and to react appropriately once problems arise. Essentially, it us up to us to be in the right frame of mind when the time calls for it.

This brings me to the importance of staying focused in a distracted world. With endless stimuli at our fingertips through mobile phones and social media, the constant mark of advertisers inconspicuously inserting their messaging into our daily lives, and the inescapable chaos of our own internal thoughts, it is easy to lose focus and become absent-minded at the most inopportune times.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the safety net of civilization has made it such that a distracted mind in modern times is a forgivable offense. Losing focus hardly results in dire consequences today. However, for our prehistoric ancestors, a distracted mind could have been the difference between nourishment and hunger, injury and health, life and death.

One of the key features in humans that separates us from any other animal is our brain’s pre-frontal cortex. This area of the brain generally serves as the brain’s regulator and helps us to practice self control, discipline, creativity, and concentration among other things. It is essentially the region that is in charge of the higher order brain operations that make us “intelligent”.

If you are like me, you may experience extended periods (weeks or even months) of intense focus, followed by similarly long periods of utter distraction and unproductiveness. It pains me to think of how much life I’m leaving on the table due to being overly preoccupied with my phone, or surfing the net, or binge-watching Netflix. I’m also realizing that now, more than

ever, the ability to be focused, present, and disciplined is a skill that can separate a person from the pack in a good way.

Just like a muscle, focus and concentration are skills that can be trained. And with the right training regimen, the neural networks in the prefrontal cortex can be physically rewired and strengthened to be better at focusing. As someone diagnosed with adult ADHD, I find empowerment in knowing that we do have some level of control over our ability to be present and in the right frame of mind when the time calls for it.

In the digital age which is full of distractions, learning to enter a flow state and focus intently on a task, or developing a skill, or building a business, or chasing a dream stands to pay extraordinary dividends in return. Living in a society in which being distracted is the status quo, in a way, it is now easier than ever to excel, to be outstanding, and to become “uncommon among the uncommon” as David Goggins would put it.