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Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
The Power of Focus In An Attention Deficit World
Welcome back!
“It’s not that I’m smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”
Albert Einstein
I once took an evening Learning Annex class with Richard I’Anson, an Australian travel photographer. He was wonderfully engaging and informative. I loved his photos and bought his Travel Photography book at the end of the evening. Of all that he said that evening, two comments have stayed with me.
His first memorable comment was, “The difference between a professional and an amateur photographer is about one hundred thousand photographs.”
The second was his comment about the slides he reviewed for a stock photo library. He said he reviewed 30,000 slides submitted by thousands of amateur photographers, and the biggest problem he saw was that almost all of those 30,000 slides “were not sharp enough.” He said he thought the problem was that people were taking pictures with telephoto lenses without using a tripod.
Taken together, these two comments capture the essence of excellence: sharp focus and enough disciplined effort applied over a long enough period of time to develop expertise.
These are the two qualities implied in Einstein’s statement, “It’s not that I’m smart, it’s just that I stay with the problems longer.”
You might not be interested in photography, but photography holds many valuable lessons for our attention deficit world.
A tripod is the overlooked secret of success in photography. A sharp lens and fast shutter speed are not enough if you can’t keep the camera steady. If your shutter is fast enough, you can handhold the camera and the pictures will be sharp enough. But for a longer exposure, you need a stable foundation. This is what the tripod will do for a photographer. No matter how long you keep the shutter open, your camera will stay stable.
Compare this kind of long and unshakable focus with the epidemic identified by Linda Stone as “continuous partial attention.”
“The recent emerging Technology Conference in San Diego-a lively gathering of geeks and entrepreneurs building companies and tools for the Web-took “The Attention Economy” as its theme. Naturally, several speakers emphasized ways that companies could prosper in the scrum of technologies targeting our minds, eyeballs and wallets. But one of the most interesting talks came from a former Apple and Microsoft executive named Linda Stone. Her emphasis was less economic than social. It was a plea to consider an epidemic she identified as continuous partial attention.”
Steven Levy
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11899893/site/newsweek/
“Continuous partial attention” is the opposite of Einstein’s long focused attention on a problem. Continuous partial attention is also the opposite of I’Anson’s claim that you have to take a whole lot of photographs to learn your craft. Any skill requires similar focused discipline over time to achieve mastery. The problem is that we live in a frantic society, and more and more of us are constantly wired to make sure that we don’t miss anything. The result is that we miss what is most important.
“If you’ve lost focus, just sit down and be still. Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Yesterday, was one of those days when I could not keep my attention focused on writing a simple article long enough to get it done on time. I had just returned from several days out of town, and was attempting to catch up after being away. I felt like a bumblebee gathering nectar, flitting from task to task and unable to finish anything. In other words, I had a day of continuous partial attention-a busy day with no discernible accomplishments.
And to make the point even clearer, the area where I live had a swarm of small earthquakes yesterday. In this area, earthquakes are a fact of life, and small temblors occur fairly often. It was just a reminder of how unsettling it is to feel the earth shake beneath you, no matter how many times you have experienced earthquakes before.
Continuous partial attention keeps all of us hopping from activity to activity, never settling long enough to develop mastery and never being fully present wherever we are. With BlackBerries and iPods, laptops and cell phones, with email and instant messaging, we have reduced our attention spans to nanoseconds and our ideas to soundbites.
“Stone first noticed the syndrome a decade ago when she was creating a product for Microsoft that let people interact in a “virtual world.” She found that her test users wanted to fade in and out while conducting other activities. This turns out to be the way most of us work-and live-today. With an open communications channel the e-mail keeps flowing, the instant messages keep interrupting and the Web feeds keep coming. CPA stems from our desire, Stone says, to be “a live node on the network.”
Steven Levy
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11899893/site/newsweek/
On days when I am distracted, I often think of what I have learned from photography. Rule number one is: You need a clear focus to get a good picture. This means you need to hold the camera still. And at longer exposures, you need a firm foundation. In other words, you need the equivalent of a sharp lens and a stable tripod.
“It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”
David Bailey
I also remember another perceptive comment by another photography teacher. The teacher said, “If you can’t find anything interesting to photograph, simply look at something for a full minute. If you still can’t see anything interesting, look at the same object for five more minutes. Keep your attention focused in one direction, and something will catch your eye that you will not see in the quick glance.”
This is part of the wisdom of Einstein’s approach. You will see more when you stay focused on a problem. The longer you look, the more likely you will be to see something you did not see before.
“One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.”
Edward de Bono
Whatever you are attempting to accomplish in your life, the secret of success is a clear focus, a stable foundation, and long enough attention to achieve mastery.
This article was originally published March 21, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-03-21.htm.
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What You Really Need To Retire
“The only real security is not insurance or money or a job, not a house and furniture paid for, or a retirement fund, and never is it another person. It is the skill and humor and courage within, the ability to build your own fires and find your own peace.”
Audrey Sutherland
Did you read the two money articles in Parade Magazine on Sunday? The first article is their annual cover story about what people earn. The second article makes the bold assertion: “What You’ll Really Need To Retire.” The point of the article is that retirement costs much more than people realize, and most people are not saving enough money.
“Most people save too little for retirement, partly because they don’t realize how much it will cost. Well, brace yourself. It’s a lot more than you think. Here’s why:
Your retirement savings must last 20-30 years. That’s how long a healthy 65-year-old is now likely to live.
The cost of living will more than double during those years, even if inflation averages a modest 3% a year.
To make sure your money lasts as long as you do, experts say, you can’t afford to withdraw more than 4% to 5% of your life savings every year, adjusted annually for the rise in the cost of living.”
Lynn Brenner
Parade Magazine
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2006/edition_03-12-2006/wpe_lede_story_retirement?prnt=1
After reading many such articles, I have come to the conclusion that most of the financial advice addressed to consumers is bad advice. From the perspective of conventional wisdom, the advice makes sense. The problem is that conventional wisdom is not very wise because it is based on a limited understanding of money.
So what is wrong with this article? It rounds up the usual suspects of retirement planning and lists them as reasons to be afraid that you don’t have enough money to retire:
“ Most people have not saved enough money.
“ Prices will go up and up.
“ You will probably need more for medical expenses as you age.
“ And worst of all, you might live 20-30 years after retirement at age 65 and will probably outlive your money.
The article then goes on to explain all the ways you can calculate how much money you will need, what costs will go up and what costs might go down. (It assumes that you will pay off your mortgage.) It also assumes that your own sources of money will be retirement funds, pensions, and Social Security. It even includes a handy chart telling you how much of your nest egg you can safely withdraw each year to avoid running out of money. The unexamined assumptions of the article create fear in the minds of people.
“People are very insecure. It’s a common thread. All of these people have security questions in some way, whether it’s Social Security, retirement security. People feel that gaping holes are being cut out in their safety nets.”
James Clyburn
The whole article demonstrates what I call “money limits.” I could write a book about the money limits contained in this one article. (Maybe I will!) This article will not teach anyone the single most important skill required to live those 20-30 years beyond retirement age in abundance: how to make money.
Every single one of these money fears is based on a single assumption. After you retire from your job, you won’t earn any more money. This is one of the biggest money limitations imaginable.
You must anticipate an uncertain future in which the money available to you is limited by the amount of money you amassed in your earning years. The article wants you to imagine living 20-30 years without making any new money, completely dependent upon what you earned in your working life.
“The main purpose of Social Security is to redistribute wealth, to make an increasingly large number of Americans dependent on government for their basic needs in their retirement years.”
Neal Boortz
The article also depends on another assumption, which is never stated explicitly. The related assumption is that the amount of money you have available to you in retirement also depends on the decisions of other people. Other people will decide whether or not you still have a pension, whether or not you still have Social Security payments, the amount of interest you earn on your “safe” savings accounts and CDs, and the returns on your mutual funds.
No wonder the article is based on fear. Your only security is to amass as much money as you can while you are still earning an income, and then use it very carefully before it is all gone. You really can’t depend on these other sources of additional income. In other words, you are essentially powerless to increase your wealth after you retire from your job.
There is another way to approach retirement planning based on a different assumption. The fact that you retire from a job does not mean that you retire from the capacity to make money. The fundamental difference is that you continue to make money in retirement and that you take an active role in creating new money.
Compare the idea that you must stockpile enough money to last 20-30 years with breathing. What good would it do to tell yourself that you need to store up enough oxygen to last you 20-30 years?
Or how about food? Imagine storing 20-30 years worth of food in your house, because you can’t accumulate any more. You have to be careful to use only a certain amount of the food every day, always worrying that you will use too much. When your stockpile is gone, you are doomed to go hungry.
Both examples are ridiculous. You can’t save the air to breathe later. And unless you are living in a bomb shelter somewhere, no one suggests that you need to stockpile enough food to last 20-30 years.
But when it comes to money, the conventional wisdom paradigm changes. Instead of being something that flows, money becomes fixed. And whatever you amass during your “earning years” determines how you will live the remaining years of your life, if you are actually so “unlucky” that you last 20-30 more years.
Fundamentally, it comes down to the difference between earning money and making money. It is no accident that the retirement article follows the cover story, “What People Earn.”
The retirement article simply repeats the conventional wisdom of so many articles addressed to consumers. It treats money as a commodity you can use up or save, but it doesn’t mention a single word about how you can create more money in your retirement years.
“Retirement, we understand, is great if you are busy, rich, and healthy. But then, under those circumstances, work is great too.”
William E Bill Vaughan
“Making money” is not the same as “earning money.” Making money is a skill that very few of us ever learned as wage and salary earners. When you “make money,” you increase the amount of money available by selling something at a profit, not because you get more in your pension or Social Security or from the pitiful interest that the bank might pay you on your savings or CDs.
The two articles in Parade Magazine assume a consumer mindset. Consumers “consume” money. They don’t “make” it. As a consumer, you “earn” money from wages and salaries and “earn” interest on investments, but you have not “created” more money.
The article describes a consumer’s future, when you are retired from your job. You have earned all the money you will ever earn, tucked away in some sort of “safe” investment, or you depend on a pension or Social Security. The article does absolutely nothing to suggest that a retired person might find ways to “make” more money.
We live in an entrepreneurial age. People who have businesses understand that money is not only a commodity to be earned and then used up. Money is also a product you can create.
If you have a business, you already know the difference between earning money as an employee and creating money in business. If you have always been an employee, it might take some getting used to the idea that your future is not limited by the amount of cash you have on hand and the economic decisions of former employers, banks, and governments.
“Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book.”
Geoffrey Fisher
There are so many ways that people retired from their jobs can create more money. They can produce products, invest in real estate, trade Forex currencies, trade in the stock market, write books, and consult, as well as a thousand other methods to make money.
The alternative to finding ways to create money is to live with the vision of your future imagined by the Parade Magazine article. It offers specific steps to retired consumers about prudent ways to save and consume money. It tells you nothing about how to make more money. If you follow this strategy, you face a future shaped by a powerless worry that you will outlive your money.
When you know the difference between making money and earning money, you won’t have to fear a future limited the amount of money you already have in savings accounts, IRAs, and pensions. And you don’t have worry about outliving your money.
It all comes down to knowing how to create money. You will either face a future of money limits or you will understand that you can continue to make money during all of those wonderful 20-30 years you live past your job.
This article was originally published March 14, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-03-14.htm.
FREE EBOOK: Do You Know The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game?
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Author of “No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game That Will Turn Your Money Struggles Into Money Abundance
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/
kalinda@nomoneylimits.com
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There Are No Right Answers To Wrong Questions
“It is the theory that decides what can be observed.”
Albert Einstein
Do you have a problem you can’t solve? Have you looked everywhere for answers? Maybe the reason you cannot solve the problem is that you are looking for answers to the wrong question.
This morning, my husband and I finally solved a problem that has been annoying us for several weeks. We had a chirping alarm in our hallway. We assumed the problem was one of the smoke detectors, but the smoke detectors are hardwired into the electrical system, and so there are no batteries to replace.
It was hard to diagnose the problem because the chirping was so intermittent. It would go off once and then not again for several hours, and so we couldn’t figure out which unit was the problem.
We also have a burglar alarm system. Those alarms run on batteries. So we changed the batteries in the alarm units, even the 12 volt battery in the control panel.
This morning, we lost electrical power for about an hour. With the power off, the chirping occurred every few seconds. In the narrow hallway, we couldn’t figure out what alarm was making the sound. The sound was obviously coming from the hallway, but where?
Did you ever see the episode on “Friends” in which Phoebe tries to silence a smoke alarm? It was something like that. With no electrical power, with all of the units disconnected, with the alarm system disconnected, one of the units kept chirping every few seconds.
“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”
Thomas Berger
Finally, finally, my husband asked a better question. “What else runs on batteries?” As soon as he asked the question, I stopped looking at the smoke and burglar detectors in the ceiling and looked down to see the carbon monoxide unit plugged into an outlet just about the baseboard. We found the chirping culprit.
All the time we were looking at the ceiling for our answers, sure that the problem was with the smoke detectors, the real problem was the carbon monoxide detector a few inches above the floor.
With hindsight, it seems so obvious. Why didn’t we think of the carbon monoxide detector earlier? The answer is simple. We had made up our minds early enough that we knew the source of the problem and so we simply stopped looking elsewhere. We didn’t even consider another option and that is why we couldn’t figure out the source of the problem.
“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.”
Albert Einstein
Contrast our inability to solve this practical problem with the method Albert Einstein used to solve problems.
“Solutions that have been kicked around for years should be temporarily off-limits in defining your problem…You must ignore old answers for now so they don’t mislead you. If they were a real solution to the problem, then your problem would already be solved.”
Scott Thorpe, “How to Think Like Einstein”
The wisdom in this statement speaks volumes. If the problem had been with the smoke detectors, we would have figured it out weeks ago. But while we were trying to solve a problem without seeing the real problem, we never asked the better question. What else could be causing the problem?
In the book I have just completed, I identify a solution to money problems for real estate investors by looking at the Monopoly game. Just as the carbon monoxide detector was obvious, the solution to money problems is obvious in the Monopoly game as soon as you ask another question. We knew the carbon monoxide detector was there, but we didn’t even consider it as the source of the problem because we were certain that the problem was the smoke detectors.
In the same way, the Monopoly game has the answer to money problems, but most players don’t see the solution because they are too busy playing the game according to rules designed to produce more losers than winners. Once you see the solution, you will wonder why you never noticed it before.
“There are no right answers to wrong questions.”
Ursula K. LeGuin
And so my question for you today is this? What unresolved problems are you attempting to solve? They could be big problems or they could be minor annoyances, such as our carbon monoxide detector that needed new batteries. If you have tried to solve the problem, but are getting nowhere, it might be time to stop and ask yourself, “What is a better question?” What are you not seeing because you are looking in the wrong direction? What new question do you need to ask?
FREE EBOOK: Do You Know The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game?
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Author of “No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game That Will Turn Your Money Struggles Into Money Abundance
http://www.nomoneylimits.com/
kalinda@nomoneylimits.com
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