What is Attention?

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July 5, 2006 by Jim Parker in avatar

What is Attention? Attention is Everything.

We all have a limited amount of resources. Money, Time, Capital, and Talent are just a few of the more important ones.

It suffices to say that if you have enough of the above resources, you can do anything - which means you can do everything you ever wanted to do. But what is everything? What does it mean to “do everything you ever wanted to do”? That’s the key. Everyone has a different definition of what everything is. A retired couple defines everything as the mean to live a comfortable existence for 30 years or more. A technical school graduate considers everything to be going to work in an auto repair shop, like his dad did, and earning enough to buy a big boat to hang out on the lake with his buddies. To a homeless man, everything may be for the deli owner to give him a couple of special made sandwiches that didn’t get picked up and then to sleep under the stars in the park with 75 degree weather.

For each it is different. And for each, the amount of resources required to pull it off varies greatly.

Ah, but there is one more resource to consider: “Your Current Situation” – that is, what you have previously used your resources to accomplish. The tech grad has is education and a standard of living taught to him by his father. The retired couple has been saving their entire life – a full and productive life at that. The homeless guy has a relationship with the deli owner which he has nurtured.

How you define everything is a product of your current situation, what your resources are, and yet, one more very important thing: “What you choose to pay attention to”. Framed in this context, since you can’t do anything to change your current situation at this moment in time or to change your quantity and quality of resources at this moment in time, then truly, the only thing you actually have a choice in is where you direct your attention.¼br /> Thus, if you want to have everything you can think of, then you need to properly spend your attention – properly focus your time – on ways to get what you want.

The only difference between the homeless guy and Fred Wilson is, over a number of years, they have chosen to pay attention to different things. If the homeless man paid attention to things like Fred Wilson does for a period of 10 years, he’d be more like Fred Wilson today. He could be rich. If Fred Wilson paid attention to the things that the homeless man did for a period of 10 years, he’d be more like a homeless man. He could be poor.

Thus, Attention is the great Equalizer. What you think about and what you pay attention to are all that matters.

What are you paying attention too? And what are you getting from it?

1 Comment »

[…] Jim Parker is a lead developer for a Fortune 500 company in St. Louis. I came across his entry today relating to the role that attention plays in our lives. In his post titled, “What is Attention” he claims up front that it is in fact, “everything.” […]

Pingback by The Attention Store » Where Can Attention Lead Us? — July 8, 2006 @ 2:42 pm