Focus

The discovery of the mind-wandering mode also explains why paying attention to something takes effort. The phrase paying attention is well-worn figurative language, and there is some useful meaning in this cliche. Attention has a cost. It is a this-or-that, zero-sum game. We pay attention to one thing, either through conscious decision or because our attentional filter deemed it important enough to push it to the forefront of attentional focus. When we pay attention to one thing, we are necessarily taking attention away from something else.

There is a clear evolutionary advantage to being able to stay on task and concentrate, but not to entering an irreversible state of hyperfocus that makes us oblivious to a predatory or enemy lurking behind the bushes, or to a poisonous spider crawling up the back of our neck. This is where the attentional network comes in; the attentional filter is constantly monitoring the environment for anything that might be important.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

These highly successful person (HSPs) have many of their daily distractions of life handled for them, allowing them to devote all of their attention to whatever is immediately before them. They seem to live completely in the moment. Their staff handle correspondence, make appointments, interrupt those appointments when a more important one is waiting, and help to plan their days for maximum efficiency. Their bills are paid on time, their car is serviced when required, they’re given reminders of projects due, and their assistants send suitable gifts to the HSP’s loved ones on birthdays and anniversaries. Their ultimate prize if it all works? A Zen-like focus.

Our brains evolved to focus on one thing at a time. This enabled our ancestors to hunt animals, to create and fashion tools, to protect their clan from predators and invading neighbors. The attentional filter evolved to help us to stay on task, letting through only information that was important enough to deserve disrupting our train of thought. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century: The plethora of information and the technologies that serve it changed the way we use our brains. Multitasking is the enemy of a focused attentional system.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

But when I match up against opponents like Showmaker, I need all the attention I can muster. And if my mouse feels slightly off, that takes away some of my attention, which I need to play the game. However, if my setup is perfect, I can focus on the game. The stronger the opponent, the more attention I need, and that makes every last bit of it matter. That’s why I’m so obsessive over my setup.

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.

Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life. And the thing with focus is, it’s not this thing you aspire to, or you decide on Monday, “You know, I’m going to be focused.” It’s a every minute, “Why are we talking about this? This is what we’re working on.” You can achieve so much when you truly focus.

What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you end up saying no to it because you’re focusing on something else.

Conscious thought is focused attention, and that such concentration of our awareness is difficult or impossible when the field of attention is too complex. Attention therefore requires selection. The field of awareness must be divided into relatively simple unities or wholes, so structured that their parts can be taken in at one glance.

When you work from a clean desk, you can focus and concentrate on one thing at a time.

Single focus is the key to high productivity, and a clean desk is the key to single focus.

I was narrow, sharp, and focused, and did not waste time, but the price I paid for that was the blindness demanded by efficiency, accomplishment, and order. I was no longer seeing the world. I was seeing only the little I needed to navigate it with maximum speed and lowest cost.

When you are relaxed an not focusing on the world around you, your brain shows a specific pattern of activity; this is called the default mode network. It is thought that this network helps generate thoughts as you mind wanders, and may be linked with creativity, self-reflection, and moral reasoning.

Part of the development of expertise lies in the accumulation of experience. Something that distinguishes experts from novices is that the experts have been exposed to a large number of examples of the problems and solutions that occur in their domain. But a key competency of an expert is the ability to mentally stand back from the specifics of the accumulated examples, and form more abstract conceptualisations pertinent to their domain of expertise. Experts are able to store and access information in larger cognitive ‘chunks’ than novices, and to recognise underlying principles, rather than focusing on the surface features of problems.

Spotlights can be more or less focused. When focused to their maximum extent, they illuminate a very small area with a very bright light. When de-focused, they illuminate a larger area, but the light is less intense.

There are several ways to enter flow. One is to intentionally focus a sharp attention on the task at hand; a highly concentrated state is the essence of flow. There seems to be a feedback loop at the gateway to this zone: it can require considerable effort to get calm and focused enough to begin the task - this first step takes some discipline. But once focus starts to lock in, it takes on a force of its own, both offering relief from emotional turbulence and making the task effortless.

Entry to this zone can also occur when people find a task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their ability. People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them ar a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.

Because flow feels so good, it is intrinsically rewarding. It is a state in which people become utterly absorbed in what they are doing, paying undivided attention to the task, their awareness merged with their actions. Indeed, it interrupts flow to reflect too much on what is happening - the very thought “I’m doing this wonderfully” can break the feeling of flow. Attention becomes so focused that people are aware only of the narrow range of perception related to the immediate task, losing track of time and space.

He just said it. Three thousand speeches and sixteen books is exactly what we meant. He’s undisciplined. He should have focused on two clients and one book.

It’s a company policy that before developing a new product the PM must submit a press release to their supervisor for that item before the team even starts working on it. The exercise forces the team to focus on exactly what its potential new product is and what’s special about it.

I found that the act of juggling perfectly mirrored my meditation. It became an external reflection of what was happening inside. If my mind was too tight, too focused, then the juggling balls didn’t flow. On the other hand, if the mind was too loose and I wasn’t concentrating enough, then I would drop the balls altogether. So there was something in working with this balance of focus and relaxation, which reflected the inner balance developed through meditation. I guess it’s what most people would describe as being “in the zone” and you’ve no doubt experienced it yourself at some time, perhaps while you were playing a sport, painting a picture, cooking a meal, or doing some other form of activity.

Jobs’s engagement with Eastern spirituality, and especially Zen Buddhism, was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it became deeply ingrained in his personality. “Steve is very much Zen,” said Kottke. “It was a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetic, intense focus.” Jobs also became deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on intuition. “I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis,” he later said. His intensity, however, made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace; his Zen awareness was not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind, or interpersonal mellowness.

Jobs had a way of focusing on something with insane intensity for a while and then, abruptly, turning away his gaze. At work, he would focus on what he wanted to, when he wanted to, and on other matters he would be unresponsive, no matter how hard people tried to get him to engage. In his personal life, he was the same way. At times he and Powell would indulge in public displays of affection that were so intense they embarrassed everyone in their presence, including Kat Smith and Powell’s mother. In the mornings at his Woodside mansion, he would wake Powell up by blasting the Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” on his tape deck. Yet at other times he would ignore her. “Steve would fluctuate between intense focus, where she was the center of the universe, to being coldly distant and focused on work,” said Smith. “He had the power to focus like a laser beam, and when it came across you, you basked in the light of his attention. When it moved to another point of focus, it was very, very dark for you. It was very confusing for Laurence.”

Bill Gates himself weighed in at 10:46 that night. His subject line, “Apple’s Jobs again,” indicated his frustration. “Steve Jobs’s ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things,” he said.

Part of it was the product of the dark side of his reality distortion field. “I think Steve has such a strong desire for the world to be a certain way that he wills it to be that way,” Levinson speculated. “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Reality is unforgiving.” The flip side of his wondrous ability to focus was his fearsome willingness to filter out things he did not wish to deal with. This led to many of his great breakthroughs, but it could also backfire. “He has that ability to ignore stuff he doesn’t want to confront,” Powell explained. “It’s just the way he’s wired.”

Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland’s farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that hey would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”

We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grow up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him — the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store — he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something — a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug — he would resolutely ignore it. That focus allowed him to say no. He got Apple back on track by cutting all except a few core products. He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.

He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The price you pay for that utility, the specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else. This doesn’t matter so much when things are going well, and we are getting what we want (although it can be a problem, even then, because getting what we currently want can make us blind to higher callings). But all that ignored world presents a truly terrible problem when we’re in crisis, and nothing whatsoever is turning out the way we want it to. Then, there can be far too much to deal with. Happily, however, that problem contains within it the seeds of its own solution. Since you’ve ignored so much, there is plenty of possibility left where you have not yet looked.

Without enemies around us, we grow lazy. An enemy at our heels sharpens our wits, keeping us focused and alert. It is sometimes better, then, to use enemies as enemies rather than transforming them into friends and allies.

I was almost too focused then; I didn’t really live in reality. I was interviewed for Sport Illustrated and I said, “What bothers me most is being around people who are having a lot of fun, with parties and stuff like that. It makes you soft. People who are only interested in having fun cannot accomplish anything.” I thought I was stronger than people who were weak and partying. I wanted in that Columbus celebrity world, but I was fighting that temptation to party.

This is the fight-or-flight response, and while you may not enjoying the feeling, it has kept us alive for thousands of years.

This early warning system is so quick and powerful that it overrides the rest of your brain. Whatever else you were focusing on falls away so dealing with the threat can take center stage.

Science is, moreover, an extreme instance of the entire method of attention which we have been discussing. It is an awareness of nature based upon the selective, analytic, and abstractive way of focusing attention. It understands the world by reducing it as minutely as possible to intelligible things. This it does by a “universal calculus,” that is, by translating the formlessness of nature into structures made up of simple and manageable units, as a surveyor measures a “shapeless” piece of land by approximating its areas as minutely as possible to such simple abstract figures as triangles, squares, and circles. By this method all oddities and irregularities are progressively screened out until at last it appears that God himself is the supreme geometer.

Just because concentrated attention is exclusive, selective, and divisive it is much easier for it to notice differences than unities. Visual attention notices things as figures against a contrasting background, and our thought about such things emphasizes the difference between figure and ground. The outline of the figure or the “inline” of the ground divides the two from each other. Yet we do not so easily notice the union or inseparability of figure and ground, or solid and space. This is easily seen when we ask what would become of the figure or the solid without any surrounding ground or space. Conversely, we might as what would become of the surrounding space if unoccupied by any solids. The answer is surely that it would no longer be space, for space is a “surrounding function” and there would be nothing to surround. It is important to note that this mutuality or inseparability of figure and ground is not only logical and grammatical but also sensuous.

Figure-and-ground, then, constitute a relationship — an inseparable relationship of unity-in-diversity.

Remember that the mind-wandering mode an the central executive work in opposition and are mutually exclusive states; they’re like the little devil and angel standing on opposite shoulders, each trying to tempt you. While you’re working on one project, the mind-wandering devil starts thinking of all the other things going on in your life and tries to distract you. Writing them down gets them out of your head, clearing your brain of the clutter that is interfering with being able to focus on what you want to focus on.

The prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new — the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.

It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming also takes less energy than multitasking. And the natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate and restore the brain. Multitasking does not.

Perhaps most important, multitasking by definition disrupts the kind of sustained thought usually necessary for problem solving and for creativity. “Ten and a half minutes on one project is not enough time to think in-depth about anything.” Creative solutions often arise from allowing a sequence of altercations between dedicated focus and daydreaming.

Flow states don’t occur for just any old task or activity. They can occur only when one is deeply focused on the task, when the task requires intense concentration and commitment, contains clear goals, provides immediate feedback, and is perfectly matched to one’s skill level.

The greatest life satisfaction comes from completing projects that required sustained focus and energy. It seems unlikely that anyone will look back at their lives with pride and say with satisfaction that they managed to send an extra thousand text messages or check social network updates a few hundred extra times while they were working.

A question that often comes up at times of strategic transformation is, should you pursue a highly focused approach, betting everything on one strategic goal, or should you hedge? I tend to believe Mark Twain hit it on the head when he said, “Put all of your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.”

What we needed was a balanced interaction between the middle managers, with their deep knowledge but narrow focus, and senior management, whose larger perspective could set a context. The dialectic between these two would often result in searing intellectual debates.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.

A match can be won or lost at any moment. The first time you are less than totally focused, you can find yourself on your back looking up the ceiling.

Personal knowledge is the key to making discoveries. As we study a particular field, we absorb increasing amounts of specific knowledge, including rules, facts, terminology and relationships. At some point, we know these details well enough that we can begin to focus on the whole. We can then begin to see patterns, the meaning of things, and sense when something is wrong, even though we may not always be able to articulate our understanding. This improves our ability to perceive problems and opportunities when doing research, interviewing a candidate or screening acquisitions.

But if you have nothing else due, nothing else to do, no other measurable output but that thing you’ve promised yourself, if all your mental bandwidth is focused on this one and this only, then yep, you can bet that you will get more brave.

Long hour of concentrated attention gave him a very focused personality. But this was at the cost of ignoring the dark and primitive aspects that appeared in his dream. The more refined our conscious personality, the more shadow we have built up on the other side.

In a hectic moment, it’s easy to lose focus on the task at hand and get lost in the vastness of our lives. We look far in the uncertain future and back in the certain but gone past. No wonder we get overwhelmed.

Let’s not forget that the past and the future are not under our control. The whole power we have comes down to this very moment. Right now, we can control the choices we make. Only in this very moment.

You have to be very narrowly focused on the task of becoming president for much of your life. You therefore have to be blindingly ambitious. More often than not, you have to discard traditional notions of balance in your day-to-day existence.

The second question is more profound. What do you really believe? Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work, properly designed, with intense focus for hours a day and years on end, your performance will grow dramatically better and eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there’s at least a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance.

I never start out negatively, and unless we’re in the late stages of a production, I never start small. I’ve found that often people will focus on little details as a way of masking a lack of any clear, coherent, big thoughts. If you start petty, you seem petty. And if the big picture is a mess, then the small things don’t matter anyway, and you shouldn’t spend time focusing on them.

Perhaps it’s because of the need to such fierce concentration on keeping your stroke efficient, with every lap feeling harder than the last. But whatever the reason, this race tests it all: your mental focus, the staying power of your efficiency, and the quality of your conditioning.

The separation of concerns. This is what I mean by “focusing one’s attention upon some aspect”: it does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect’s point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one - and multiple-track minded simultaneously.

Any one person’s reality is ultimately wherever they choose to focus their attention and time.

Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we’ve seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander…

It was at Harvard Law that Acheson realized that “excellence counted - a sloppy try wasn’t enough.” He began comparing his mind to a welder’s torch, waiting to be focused. His sense of security firmly re-established after the grueling trial of Groton, Acheson began to push himself intellectually, to take great pride in the sharpness of his mind. At Groton, intellectual ambition was considered socially suspect. But at Harvard Law School, Acheson found it prized as a path to social distinction.

Work from a clean desk. When you have a neat desk and an orderly office, you look like a successful person. On the other hand, when your desk is cluttered with all sorts of things, you look confused, disorderly, and incompetent. People conclude that it would be unsafe to do business with you.

When you work from a clean desk, you can focus and concentrate on one thing at a time.

Single focus is the key to high productivity, and a clean desk is the key to single focus.

I almost am never stressed out during pro play, so I don’t really need a method to keep calm. I almost never get angry or excited when playing, since I’m always focused on the game state itself.

Once you address the golf ball, hitting it has to be the most important thing in your life at that moment. Shut out all thoughts other than picking out a target and taking dead aim at it.

This is a good way to calm a case of nerves.

A high handicapper will be surprised at how often the mind will make the muscles hit the ball to the target, even with a far less than perfect swing.

The expert player won’t be surprised. The expert expects to hit the target. The only surprise here is that the expert sometimes allows disorganized thinking to make him become distracted from the primary object of the shot, which is to hit the target.

I can’t say it too many times. It’s the most important advice in this book.

Take dead aim.

Make a point to do it every time on every shot. Don’t just do it from time to time, when you happen to remember.

Take dead aim.

Sometimes he was able to see so many sides to a question that he lost the single-mindedness essential to all leaders and very marked in his own PM.

The driver swing is the most physical act in all of golf. But there’s a strong mental aspect to it, too. To consistently drive the ball long and straight, you need to be single-minded about what you’re doing. You must be totally impervious to distractions and immune to thoughts that can make your swing fall to pieces. Because the driver swing is long and a bit violent in terms of the sheer speed you’re trying to generate, timing is extremely important. If you allow something to break your concentration and upset your rhythm or tempo, you’re in deep trouble.

I’m asked all the time about my ability to focus and stay in the moment when the pressure is on. It’s simple. I realize that the only thing I can control is my game. That is my only security blanket in a game where you could easily feel naked to the world.

There is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated. In short the first principle is: act with the utmost concentration.

Casanova attributed his success in life to his ability to concentrate on a single goal and push at it until it yielded. It was his ability to give himself over completely to the women he desired that made him so intensely seductive.

If you’re always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that’s necessary for effective learning and top performance.

Don’t try to look at everything. Wait until something really arouses your attention, and then give it your full attention. Spend at least three minutes just looking in detail at everything in the picture, without commenting. Then your questioning of what is in front of you will be very useful in clarifying your understanding.

That large fuzzy area of your vision is sensitive to changes in pattern and texture as well as movement. As soon as it detects unexpected change, your eye sends its tiny high-definition core to inspect it. This movement is the fastest in the human body.

Now that you’ve made your Top 5 plan, let’s talk about the other 20 items on your list: Buffett asked his pilot, “What is your plan for completing those?” The pilot stated that he would work on those intermittently, as he had time, since they were not part of the Top 5.

To the pilot’s surprise, Buffett said: “No, you’ve got it all wrong. Everything you didn’t circle just became your ‘Avoid at all cost list.’ No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with you Top 5.”

The essence of tactical skill is to be able to move rapidly from one to the other, from width to depth, and to disperse or concentrate as appropriate.

Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

They have to focus on what they want to happen, be it a particular shot or an entire career. Everyone thinks this way some of the time. Doing it consistently is a habit that requires disciplined effort.

The difference is that when you guys get in tournaments, the likelihood is that you’ll lose your concentration on 4 or 5 shots every round. Over a 4-day tournament, even if every lapse costs you just 1 stroke, that’s 16-20 shots a week, and that’s the difference between the leading money winner and losing your card. If one of these lapses costs you 2 or 3 strokes, or you get upset and lose concentration on a 2nd shot, you can be talking about 25-30 strokes a week, and you won’t even make the college golf team. Over a career, losing concentration once in a while can mean lots of strokes.

The brain and nervous system respond best when the eyes focus on the smallest possible target. The smaller the target, the sharper the athlete’s focus, the better his concentration, and the better the results.

But it has another benefit. A golfer needs to have something on his mind if he does not want thoughts about swing mechanics to intrude on his consciousness just as he is preparing to play his shot. The target helps to fill that void. It helps prevent distractions.

A good preshot routine is both mental and physical. The player clears his mind and forgets about his last shot and all previous and future shots. There is only the shot to be played. There is only the present moment. He doesn’t think about the consequences of the shot or about the way it will affect the results of the tournament.

You’ve got to choose what you put love into really carefully.

Everyone had different strategies to stay consistent. My favorite strategy was called the pause-music strategy (for lack of a better name, sorry). Each week, one engineer I talked to would play a 10-hour long soundtrack on YouTube while working on his mobile app. Any time he got distracted, he would pause the video and would only unpause once his focus was back. He went through the soundtrack twice during the week. This forced him to have 20 hours of focused work a week and he told himself he would stick to it for a whole year before quitting.

Try to shut out everything around you. Develop your ability to think only of how and where you want to hit the shot you are playing. If something disturbs my concentration while I am lining up a shot I start all over again.

An ability to concentrate for long periods of time while exposed to all sort of distractions is invaluable in golf. Adopt the habit of concentrating to the exclusion of everything else while you are on the practice tee, and you will find that you are automatically following the same routine while playing a round in competition.

Vốn là Quách Tĩnh tâm tư thuần phác, rất ít tạp niệm nên luyện nội công dễ tiến bộ hơn những kẻ thông minh trong đầu cứ có hàng trăm ý nghĩ dồn dập kéo tới khó mà khu trừ, nên chỉ không đầy hai năm đã có chút thành tựu.

Khi biết mình phải làm gì, bạn sẽ tập trung và không nghĩ nhiều đến những điều khác gây căng thẳng.

The best way to quiet the mind is not by telling it to shut up, or by arguing with it, or criticizing it for criticizing you. Fighting the mind does not work. What works best is learning to focus it.

To still the mind one must learn to put it somewhere. It cannot just be let go; it must be focused. If peak performance is a function of a still mind, then we are led to the question of where and how to focus it.

As one achieves focus, the mind quiets. As the mind is kept in the present, it becomes calm. Focus means keeping the mind now and here. Relaxed concentration is the supreme art because no art can be achieved without it, while with it, much can be achieved.

So the question arises as to how to maintain focus for extended periods of time. The best way is to allow yourself to get interested in the ball. How do you do this? By not thinking you already know all about it, no matter how many thousands of balls you have seen in your life. Not assuming you already know is a powerful principle of focus.

The message of the Inner Game is simple: focus. Focus of attention in the present moment, the only one you can really live in, is at the heart of this book and at the heart of the art of doing anything well. The ability to focus the mind is the ability to not let it run away with you. It does not mean not to think — but to be the one who directs your own thinking.

Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.

This illustrates 3 foundational mechanisms of human thinking. First, the mind automatically responds to the questions we ask ourselves. Second, the questions we ask ourselves determine where we focus our attention in the sense that, while you were asking those questions, you were not thinking about anything else. And third, the answers to the questions we ask ourselves often come back in visual form.

Again, the focus is on the result, when the focus should be on the process.

Ben Hogan’s real secret? Concentration. “I didn’t win in the 1930s because I hadn’t yet learned to concentrate, to ignore the gallery and the other golfers, and to shut my mind against everything but my own game.”

Much of the success I’ve had helping golfers has boiled down to teaching them to teach themselves to ask the right questions as they play. Asking “What is the best strategy for this hole?” and “What is my target?” focuses golfers’ attention on the course and on the shot which, in turn, means that they do not focus on other golfers and their performance.

First, you need to be honest with yourself about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it. The key is to identify and label your emotions as you experience them. Associating words with what you are feeling makes the emotion tangible and less mysterious. This helps you relax, figure out what’s behind your emotion, and move forward. If you try to stifle your emotions and tackle your work without addressing them, they will slowly eat away at you and impair your focus.