If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention - the art of seeing, the art of listening. You needn’t trouble about memory, that will take care of itself; but you must learn to live in the true sense. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention; and, bear in mind most of all, that your spiritual nature is but a higher faculty of seeing and listening - a finer, nobler way of paying attention. Thus must you learn to live in the fullest sense.
Human eyes are selective, too, though magnitudes more complex than those of the frog. We think we can see “everything,” until we remember that bees make out patterns written in ultraviolet light on flowers, and owls see in the dark. The senses of every species are fine-tuned to perceive information critical to their survival - dogs hear sounds above our range of hearing, insects pick up molecular traces emitted from potential mates acres away.
We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the fact that we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories.
The senses do not give us a picture of the world directly; rather they provide evidence for the checking of hypotheses about what lies before us.
Efficiency is always the more exhausting and demanding alternative. Attention is finite. If I’m forced to operate under constraint all the time, my performance will suffer — and I may not even be capable of recognizing the deficit.
Abundant time can make us procrastinate. Deadline pressure makes us more efficient. What scarcity does is make you focus. When there’s no scarcity, you relax, you take it easy, and then you wonder, what happened to the day? You’re treating time the way the rich treat money.
They were so focused on operating under scarcity that they couldn’t think their way through to a strategy — or, indeed, even realize that an opportunity to do so was available. “Scarcity, of any kind, will create a tendency to borrow.”
When you get overloaded and you feel this deadline is overwhelming, you can say, I’ll take a vacation, I’ll focus on work-life balance. Poor people can’t say, “I’ll take a vacation from being poor.” It’s the same mental process, but a different feedback loop.
The poor are under a deadline that never lifts, pressure that can’t be relieved. The poor are so taxed they don’t even realize they have a problem.
Focus on the process. Poker is very much a stoic philosopher’s game. The stoics were so strong on figuring out what you are in control of, and just letting go of everything else because it’s not in your power.
Being mindful, being present, are really hard. Our brains are really bad at paying attention. The brain’s default mode network undermines us at every step. It makes us creative and does wonderful things. But we’re just constantly scanning the environment. It’s hard to focus. Focus is not our default state. Our default state is mind-wandering. That’s why modern technology is so additive. It’s junk food for our brain because it’s what our brain wants. “Oh, Yay! So many things to play with. I never had to focus on anything.” Focus takes effort.