The lost art

# Chapter 179

Focus is a lost art. It has so much competition in the screen obsessed world we live in. Heck we can’t even control our attention much less our focus. And attention precedes focus. Attention is easier to manage than focus and that is not to say that attention is easy at all with every ding, ping and vibration to let me know something or someone is clamoring for my attention! We haven’t reached for focus yet, just trying to reign in our attention. One of my best friends runs an intense business, you should listen to us have a conversation on the phone; talk for 30 seconds to 2 minutes and his business phone rings interrupting our call which we then pause until the customer is taken care of, usually 4-6 minutes, then we continue our conversation, and over the course of an hour or so, we get in a 20 minute conversation finally. We are so accustomed to this fractured way of talking and attention-switching that we think of it as normal. It is not normal.

Normal would be a phone call or a face to face conversation that goes deeper and deeper and deeper until we reach a focused state, where we gather all our concentration into this one thing, not allowing any intrusions into this conversation. But this normal is a far distant past normal for Westerners. One of the street dives that I enjoy in Asia has a sign up, “put your phone down because we don’t have wifi. Pretend that it is 1995 and talk to the person across from you.”

What we have received in the trade-off from technology are better profit margins, but less depth to our relationships. Not sure at all that this is a real improvement or even an advantage. Focus is a lost art.