Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,67

get right on that task, and not let anything distract you from that task. So why do most of us have only so much ability to maintain focus? Simply, I think it’s because we were never taught to do so. Certainly, I don’t recall having a focus class when I was in elementary school.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you went outside on a sunny day with a magnifying glass? How cool was it to hover the glass over a leaf, see an intensely bright spot appear on the leaf, and then watch as the leaf started to smoke and burn? What you were able to do was focus a greater level of the sun’s intensity on that leaf. And where the bright spot appeared, things were at their hottest. Interestingly, when we talk about someone being intelligent, we often call them “bright.” Going back to our magnifying glass analogy, maybe what we’re really saying isn’t that this person is much more intelligent than most other people; maybe that person is just more focused.

Focus allows us to train our brain power on a particular task to burn through that task. It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we’re focused. Conversely, when we’re less focused, we’re less likely to accomplish what we truly want to do because we’re just not as committed—both emotionally and physically—to doing it. The primary enemy to focus is distraction.

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Rate your current level of concentration from 0 to 10. Now rate your desire to increase this level. Your concentration is like a muscle. You can train to become stronger with practice.

PRACTICING CONCENTRATION

“Concentration is at the crux of all human success and endeavor,” Hindu priest, entrepreneur, and former monk Dandapani told me during one of my podcasts. “If you can’t concentrate, you can’t manifest.”1 What Dandapani is saying is that concentration is a critical component of anything you want to accomplish. But, like so many other things we’ve discussed already, we’ve never really been taught how to concentrate. Sure, our parents and our teachers might have implored us to concentrate harder, maybe even criticizing our lack of focus with a question such as, “Why can’t you just concentrate?” But the simple answer to that is that most of us never learned how.

Dandapani points out that concentration is like a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it. “Concentration is something you can learn and something you can practice to get better at,” he said.2 However, what most of us practice instead is distraction. We allow our minds to jump from thought to thought, often using technology to help us practice distraction until we’re experts at it—and we should be, because we often get a dozen or more hours of practice a day. Just imagine what it would be like if we practiced concentration for even a fraction of that time.

Dandapani has a remarkably clear way of looking at this. “I define concentration as my ability to keep my awareness on one thing for an extended period of time. Every time my concentration drifts, I use my will power to bring my awareness back.”3

Most of us think of lack of concentration as a function of our mind bouncing from place to place. Dandapani has a different—and more helpful—metaphor. To him, it isn’t your mind that’s moving; it’s your awareness. He sees awareness as a glowing ball of light that moves to different parts of your mind. In order to excel at concentration, you need to make yourself keep that ball of light trained on one spot in your mind for an extended period. This won’t be easy at first, but a conscious effort to exercise your will power in this way is likely to lead to impressive results.

You can work on this during nearly any pursuit. If you’re having a conversation with someone, make a concerted effort to pay attention to nothing other than that conversation. If you notice your awareness drifting away from the conversation, refocus your glowing ball of light. If you’re reading a report for work, train your eyes on the words as though nothing else exists. Again, if you notice the light of your awareness beginning to shine on something else, bring that ball back to the report. If you make the commitment to practice concentration an hour or so a day, it will soon become second nature.

Whenever possible, try to do one thing at a time. We’ve talked a bit about multitasking already, but for now just remember that