By Daniel Goleman
Attention as the key to excellence
Subject
Themes
Attention functions as a mental muscle that determines the quality of virtually everything people do, from learning and creativity to empathy and leadership. Three essential varieties shape a well-lived life: inner focus, which attunes to intuitions and guiding values; other focus, which connects with people and reads emotions; and outer focus, which navigates the complex systems of the wider world. A department store detective scanning fifty shoppers at once, a Polynesian wayfinder reading stars and ocean swells across thousands of miles of open sea, and a CEO deciding which products to cut all demonstrate these capacities in action.
Attention functions as a mental muscle that determines the quality of virtually everything people do, from learning and creativity to empathy and leadership. Three essential varieties shape a well-lived life: inner focus, which attunes to intuitions and guiding values; other focus, which connects…
Daniel Goleman established himself as a leading populariser of psychological research with Emotional Intelligence in 1995, a work that reshaped public understanding of what drives human success. Focus, published in 2013, extends that earlier framework by arguing that attention, rather than emotional…
Three distinct varieties of attention shape every dimension of human performance, and mastery of all three distinguishes those who thrive from those who merely cope. Inner focus attunes to intuitions, values, and the body's subtle physiological signals. Other focus connects with people, reads…
Self-control is not a fixed character trait but a function of how attention is deployed. The marshmallow test, conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford, demonstrated this with elegant simplicity. Four-year-olds who resisted eating one marshmallow for fifteen minutes to earn two did not succeed…
Every act of learning depends on attention, and the quality of that attention determines whether new information takes root in memory or vanishes without trace. The brain maps new information onto existing knowledge through neural phase-locking, a synchronised state between prefrontal circuitry and…
Power systematically erodes the capacity to read other people's emotions, creating an invisible divide between those who hold authority and those who do not. Research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley, confirms a striking pattern: wealthy individuals show fewer signs of…
The human brain has no dedicated neural system for understanding the larger systems within which life unfolds. Unlike self-awareness, which runs on the insula and prefrontal circuitry, and empathy, which operates through the fusiform face area and mirror neuron networks, systems understanding relies…
A department store detective named John Berger patrols the first floor of a Manhattan shop, his gaze roaming among fifty shoppers at once. He zeroes in on telltale signs of theft: a furtive glance, a suspicious cluster of bodies, a particular motion. Berger embodies sustained vigilance, alerting,…
William James identified the ability to bring back a wandering mind as the root of judgement, character, and will. Yet surveys of thousands of people reveal that minds wander roughly half the time, most frequently during work and commuting, and least during lovemaking and exercise. On average, mind…
Katrina grew up with a volatile father whose explosive temper forced her into hypervigilant emotional radar. She learned to read the subtlest cues: a rise in vocal tone, a lowering of eyebrows. In graduate school, she detected a secret affair between a student and professor simply by observing how…
Mau Piailug, born in 1932 on the Caroline island of Satawal, was the last surviving practitioner of Polynesian wayfinding, an ancient art of navigating thousands of miles of open ocean by reading stars, wave swells, wind temperatures, bird flight patterns, and seawater salinity. In 1976 he piloted a…
At P.S. 112 in Spanish Harlem, where every kindergartner knows a shooting victim, twenty-two second graders practise "breathing buddies." A chime sounds, children retrieve fist-sized stuffed animals from their cubbies, lie down with the toys on their bellies, and follow guided deep breathing. Half…
Alvin Weinberg, a nuclear physicist and director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory for twenty-five years, was fired for persistently warning about reactor safety and nuclear waste. He urged the industry to create institutions that would guard radioactive stockpiles for centuries or millennia, and was…
By Daniel Goleman
Subject
Themes
Attention functions as a mental muscle that determines the quality of virtually everything people do, from learning and creativity to empathy and leadership. Three essential varieties shape a well-lived life: inner focus, which attunes to intuitions and guiding values; other focus, which connects with people and reads emotions; and outer focus, which navigates the complex systems of the wider world. A department store detective scanning fifty shoppers at once, a Polynesian wayfinder reading stars and ocean swells across thousands of miles of open sea, and a CEO deciding which products to cut all demonstrate these capacities in action.