Last post I introduced the idea of an attention budget. Every day has about a thousand waking minutes of attention. And every day, we spend all thousand.
This post we’ll think about how spending adds up over time or is lost over time, depending on how we invest our attention.
Remember, attention is scarce. Everything and everyone clamors for our attention. And we only have so much of it. So every time we invest attention in one area we take attention from another. We’re in a constant bidding war. Attention decides who wins the bid.
This means our investments of attention have a dramatic long-term impact on our lives. Dominant thought patterns get lots of investment and push out competing investments. If we spend attention on television and video games there’s little left for post-graduate education. When we spend attention obsessing over those who wrong us, there’s little left for those who haven’t. Over time, we make massive investments in some areas and very little in others.
When bad crowds out good, or when good crowds out great, we make bad investments with our attention budget. We throw attention dollars down the drain. We fund our demise.
And vice versa. When good crowds out bad and great beats good, we make valuable investments of attention budget. We build a wealth of skills, relationships, emotional strength, and solid thinking over time.
Eventually, our attention investments build up. Day after day we invest, and investments trigger decisions and actions. Eventually, they accumulate into the outcome of our lives. In this sense the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was write to say, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
This puts distractions and low-priority thoughts in perspective. Poor thinking pickpockets our thought-wallets, embezzles our investment accounts, steals our precious focus and by so doing, the potential of our lives.
Thankfully, we have the power to focus despite the distraction. We have what neurologist Bernard Baars calls “ability to pay long-term, purposeful attention over months or years to a remotely apprehended purpose, to control what we are conscious of in pursuit of long-term goals.”1
In the Age of Distraction, thought-thieves abound. We foil their plans by investing our attention budget well.
1Bernard J. Baars, In the Theater of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 33-4.
