Cognitive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and engineer Robert Lucky estimate that our environment bombards us with approximately 10 million to 11 million bits of sensory input per second and yet many researchers place your conscious processing ability at roughly 40–120 bits per second. BIG discrepancy there!

Obviously, to keep us sane, our brains are forever performing an ongoing massive filtering process. The challenge is that what we focus on powerfully impacts the world we experience… and all too often that decision is on auto pilot and/or corrupted by outdated programing running beneath our level of conscious awareness.

Energy flows where attention goes, what we focus on expands, thoughts held in mind attract in kind. 

Time to take back control, ensure that your attention is directed in ways that serve you, not co-opted by your phone’s algorithm!

Your attention is most powerful when it is intentional; you can train your mind to focus on:

  • Quiet signals instead of loud noise, to sort the wheat from the chaff
  • The important which is rarely the most dramatic
  • Upstream causes instead of downstream symptoms
  • The ‘No’, given limited resources, that is implicit in every ‘Yes’
  • Long Term Consequences: Pick Up One End of the Stick, Pick up the Other End Too
  • Practice Critical Thinking Skills, verify vital data via trustworthy sources that utilize the scientific methods

Choosing a life of intentional attention requires cultivating deep self-awareness, an ongoing willingness to have one’s maps of reality challenged, and a passionate commitment to lifelong learning. 

Closing Quotes:

“People only see what they are prepared to see.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1802-1883

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980

“My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” – William James, 1842-1910

As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier

Note: Every effort has been made to properly source any 3rd person material. I am, however, a voracious reader. If anyone finds any unattributed material, pls let me know asap and I will be delighted to give credit where credit is due.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832