Photos
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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