The Power of Focus: Why Attention Shapes Your Life

On a sunny day, hold a magnifying glass over a piece of paper. If you move it around, not much happens. The light feels warm and that's all. Hold it still over one spot, though, and the paper starts to smoke.

The sunlight didn't get any stronger. It just stopped moving.

About a hundred years ago two writers used this exact image. Charles Haanel, in The Master Key System, and Robert Collier, in The Secret of the Ages, both said the mind works the same way. Scattered, your attention warms things a little. Held on one spot, it starts something.

This essay points that lens in three directions: inward, at the voice in your own head; onto the things you want and the things you worry about; and back, at the way you react when life bumps into you. Then it ends with three simple practices that nearly all of these authors agree on. First, though, it's worth asking why scattered light does so little.

Scattered light

Collier had a plain definition of concentration. It means getting so interested in one thing that you pay no attention to anything else. When you really want something, he said, your thoughts gather on it like bees on honey. Most days they don't.

William Walker Atkinson called the problem mental leaks: a mind pulled off course by every passing fancy. He described people with plenty of energy who spend all of it on trifles, so that by evening they're worn out and nothing has been done.

Griff, the griffin who carries the video's examples, knows this one well. On a Tuesday morning he's making pancakes, answering a call and checking a list, all at once. He feels busy, and busy feels productive. Then the pancake burns, he can't remember what his friend just said, and the list is exactly as long as it was.

Gary Keller, author of The ONE Thing, calls multitasking a lie. You can walk and talk at the same time, he says, but you can't put your focus on two things at once. What you really do is switch back and forth, and every switch has a cost. One researcher he quotes found that switching can add a quarter to the time a simple task takes. On a complicated task it can more than double it.

A Stanford study of 262 students found something similar. The heavy multitaskers weren't better at juggling. The researchers found them worse at nearly everything, and easily pulled toward whatever didn't matter.

Neville Goddard put the idea in one line: "Attention is forceful in proportion to the narrowness of its focus." Spread thin, focus barely does anything. Gathered in one place, it's the strongest tool you have.

Focus in: the voice in your head

The first direction is inward, and it's the strangest of the three.

Eckhart Tolle starts with something most of us never notice. There's a voice in your head, and it almost never stops. It comments, it rehearses arguments, and it replays old conversations. Tolle says that when he tells people about the voice, some of them ask, "What voice?" That question, he points out, is the voice.

Michael Singer, in The Untethered Soul, compares it to a roommate you can't move out. Then he asks a better question: who is it that hears the voice? If you can listen to it, you aren't only the voice. You're also the one listening.

Griff decides to try this. He sits down on the rug, closes his eyes and waits for calm. The thoughts arrive instead. Did I lock the door? What's for dinner? That awkward thing I said at school, fifteen years ago. His first instinct is to push them away, which only makes them louder.

So he tries Tolle's way and just watches them. There's a thought about dinner, and there it goes. For a second or two, there's nothing at all.

Tolle calls that a gap of no-mind. The gaps are short at first, he says, a few seconds perhaps, and they get longer with practice. The teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj gave similar advice: look between the thoughts rather than at them. Lao Tzu asked the same thing more than two thousand years ago: "Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?"

The trained mind

Does sitting still like this change anything?

Haanel thought it was the foundation of everything else, and the first exercise in his course isn't about thought at all. You choose a room where you won't be disturbed. You sit up straight and comfortable, without slumping. Your thoughts can go wherever they like, but your body stays perfectly still, for fifteen minutes to half an hour, every day, for a week. Only after that does he ask you to quiet the thoughts as well. He expected the mind to wander a dozen times at first and told students not to be discouraged.

A century later, neuroscience started measuring what that kind of training does. At the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson put sensors on the heads of Tibetan monks, some of whom had meditated for tens of thousands of hours. Their brains produced a pattern of fast, organised activity that researchers had rarely seen. Davidson's summary was blunt: the trained mind is physically different from the untrained one.

A study at Harvard found something similar in ordinary people. Those who meditated around forty minutes a day had thicker tissue in areas linked to attention.

Both studies were small, and monks with that much practice are hardly typical. Still, the direction of the findings has held up. Training your attention changes the brain that does the attending. Joe Dispenza puts it plainly: the brain only rewires around what you pay attention to. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who brought mindfulness into hospitals, used the lens image too. He called mindfulness a lens that gathers the scattered energy of the mind into one place.

Focus on: what you feed grows

The second direction is outward, onto the things you hold in mind, and here the authors make their biggest claim.

Dispenza writes that wherever you put your thoughts and your awareness becomes your reality. Abraham-Hicks say every thought you give your attention to expands. They're clear that this works the same way for things you don't want. Worry is focus too. It's just pointed the wrong way.

Griff has a small garden and waters it every evening. Lately, though, he's been watering the weeds: a rude comment from a neighbour, a bill he's dreading. He goes over them again and again, and they grow. One evening he notices where the water is going and turns the can toward the seedlings he actually planted. The weeds don't vanish overnight.

James Allen used the same picture in As a Man Thinketh. The mind is a garden, and if you don't plant something useful, weeds fill the space.

So how do you stop feeding the weeds? Not by fighting them, according to Atkinson. Fighting a thought keeps your attention on it. There's only room for one thing at a time in the focus of attention, so you fill that space with something else and the old thought fades. Goddard added a warning: conditions can seem to live on for a while after your attention leaves them.

Some of these authors go further and link all this to quantum physics. Most physicists say those effects don't carry over to everyday life, and Gregg Braden, who makes the argument himself, admits nobody knows whether they do. The part about the mind doesn't need the physics. Whatever you rehearse in your head, you get better at.

Focus back: the story you add

The third direction is the one you use most, whether you mean to or not. It's where your attention goes when something goes wrong.

Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote himself a note about this in what became his Meditations. Suppose someone tells you a person has been speaking badly of you. That much has been reported, he says. That you have been hurt by it has not been reported. That part, you added yourself.

Griff is on his way to work when someone bumps his elbow and his coffee goes all over his shirt. Within about two seconds a story is running. People are so careless. This always happens to me. The whole day is ruined. Then he catches it. He stops and takes one slow breath. What actually happened? Coffee on a shirt. The rest was a story he was adding on top.

Tolle makes the same distinction. Emotion by itself isn't unhappiness, he says. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness. Singer adds a timing tip: let go right when it hits, because it gets harder later. David Hawkins noticed the same thing and wrote that it's resistance that keeps a feeling going.

The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes this in terms of the brain. Part of it works like a smoke detector, quick to sound the alarm. Another part works like a watchtower, looking over the whole scene from above. Mindfulness and slow breathing strengthen the watchtower. When the alarm is loud, as it is after real trauma, the watchtower can go quiet, which is why he starts with the body, with breath and movement, before the thinking.

For spilled coffee, one breath is usually enough. And every time you catch the story, the next one gets a little easier to catch.

Practice one: sit still

So the lens points three ways: inward, onto what you want, and back at your reactions. All three get stronger the same way, which is practice.

The first practice is the one Haanel started with. Once a day, sit still. Ten or fifteen minutes is plenty to begin. Sit upright, close your eyes and follow your breathing, in and out, slowly.

Abraham-Hicks give this same practice and add a line that helps: as your mind wanders, and it will, release the thought and come back to your breath. Wandering off isn't a failure. Dispenza compares the restless mind to an unbroken horse. Each time you notice it has run off, you bring it back to the same spot, and that return is the whole exercise.

Griff peeks, fidgets and wanders off a dozen times. Every time, he comes back. By the second week the gaps are a little longer.

Practice two: one thing at a time

The second practice brings the lens into the rest of your day.

Keller built a whole book around one question: "What's the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?" Once you've answered it, you protect it. Block out the time, close the door and put the phone in another room. When stray tasks pop into your head, and they will, write them on a list and go straight back. The list will hold them for you.

Maxwell Maltz, in Psycho-Cybernetics, used an hourglass to make this point. Only one grain of sand passes through the neck at a time, and trying to push them all through at once only jams it.

Griff tries it with something he's been putting off, a book he has wanted to read for months. Phone in the drawer, a notepad beside him, one chapter. Ten minutes in, the room goes quiet, and it turns into the most restful hour he's had all week. Collier would say that's concentration working the way it should. You're simply too interested to be anywhere else.

Practice three: catch the turn

The third practice is for the moments when life bumps into you, and it has two small steps.

First, notice the feeling: a tight chest, a clenched jaw. Then, with one breath, ask a question. Marcus Aurelius would ask what has really happened. Abraham-Hicks suggest a different one: what is it that I do want? They call this pivoting. You turn your attention, and the feeling starts to turn with it.

You won't catch every moment. Nobody does. But each one you catch is a rep, and the reps add up.

Where you hold the glass

That's the whole idea: three directions and one lens. Point it inward and the noise begins to settle. Point it at what you want and that's what grows. Point it back at your reactions and a spilled coffee stays a spilled coffee.

Sunlight is falling on everything around you, all the time. What changes a life is where you hold the glass, and for how long.

Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way: "What you are now is the result of inattention. What you become will be the fruit of attention."