Technology & the Ability to Focus

There are two schools of thought on attention. The first argues that we haven’t lost our ability to focus, it has been wrested, even “stolen”, from us by technology. In this view we’re little more than lab rats lured by notifications and algorithms, pings and dings in a large-scale social experiment. We may develop strategies for resisting those dopamine dispensers, such as blocking software or switching to a “brick phone”. But the game is rigged against us.

Those in the second camp may scoff at this: they maintain that most of our struggles with focus are more to do with self-control. There is no notification that can distract us unless we are on some level willing to be distracted. Even the notion of a “shorter attention span” may provoke skepticism.

Instead, could it be that you’re just not that motivated? Whichever worldview you subscribe to – that our attention has been hijacked by our devices, or by our lack of self-discipline – they share an element of fatalism: there is either little you can do, or you’re just not doing enough. 

Elle Hunt writing in The Guardian

Lincoln the Failure

Think of Abraham Lincoln, who was elected president of the United States in 1860. he grew up on an isolated farm and had only one year of formal education. In those early years he was exposed to barely half a dozen books. In 1832 he lost his job and was defeated in the race for the Illinois legislature. In 1833 he failed in business. In 1834 he was elected to the state legislature, but in 1835 his sweetheart died and in 1836 he had a nervous breakdown. In 1838 he was defeated for nomination for Congress. In 1846 he was elected to Congress but in 1848 lost the renomination. In 1849 he was rejected for a federal land appointment, and in 1854 he was defeated for the Senate. In 1856 he was defeated for the nomination of vice president, and in 1858 he was again defeated for the Senate.

Many people, both at home and abroad, consider Lincoln to be the greatest president of all time. Yet it should be remembered how many failures and defeats marked his life and how humble and unpromising his early beginnings were.

Ted Engstrom, The Pursuit of Excellence

The boy with the bread sandwich

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as “resilience.”

If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?

Resilient children (have) what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the orchestrators of their own fates. In fact, on a scale that measured locus of control, they scored more than two standard deviations away from the standardization group. 

One of the central elements of resilience is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow?

Maria Konnikova writing in The New Yorker