PDF Summary:Focus, by Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman argues that attention is a complex and underappreciated cognitive resource in our modern society overrun with distractions. In Focus, he explores how you can understand, strengthen, and effectively use your attention to lead a more fulfilling and productive life, as well as to connect better with others and have a positive impact on the world.

A renowned psychologist and New York Times science writer, Goleman is the author of international bestsellers on emotional intelligence and leadership. In this guide, we’ll explore his theories on how harnessing the power of inner, other, and outer focus can help you excel in everything you do. We’ll look at actionables he recommends to help, including mindfulness meditation and digital attention training games as tools to improve habits, skills, and overall success. We’ll also provide additional context to help you better understand the book’s concepts, and we’ll compare the author's insights to those of other psychology and neuroscience experts.

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(Shortform note: Goleman’s claim about the enormously positive influence of willpower in our lives may be outdated. For a long time, experts touted this idea, backed up by major studies such as the well-known Dunedin study conducted in the 1970s, which Goleman leans on heavily to support the claim. There has, however, been pushback from researchers taking a closer look. Methods for testing self-control have improved since the ‘70s, when several of the major willpower studies were conducted, and the new science suggests that it’s not those who are able to exert more self-control who achieve more in life but those who experience less temptation in the first place.)

Willpower is the ability to control your impulses and resist instant gratification in favor of long-term, delayed happiness. This inner resource is primarily about how you control your attention and is mostly driven by a top-down process where your conscious cognition overcomes your subconscious urges. People who can resist the strong pull of instant gratification do so with three techniques:

1. They shift their focus away from the object of their desire.
2. They focus on something else to keep their attention off the desired object (for example, they might mull over a conversation they had that morning—anything to keep their thoughts averted).
3. They keep their longer-term goal in mind.

These techniques are a part of what Goleman calls executive control, which includes the selective attention skills of shifting your focus and keeping it locked in on something new. According to Goleman, the executive control skills that drive your willpower are tied to genetic factors. However, like most things, executive control is influenced by our environments and experiences, and they can be developed and strengthened through tactics we will cover later in the guide.

Is the Power of Willpower a Myth?

Goleman uses the term executive control but doesn’t define it explicitly. It’s a mental process that helps you do more than just instinctively react to things happening around you, but instead lets you choose how to act.

Recent research on self-control is casting doubt on the simplistic idea that our innate executive control abilities determine our ability to break our focus away from temptations, focus on other things, or keep our long-term goals in mind. Instead, other factors may be driving self-controlled behavior, like routine and habit. People who exhibit self-control structure their lives in a way that minimizes the need for self-control decisions in the first place. This is not due to an increased amount of willpower but rather because routines and habits make it easier to stick to goals.

Focus on the Other

The second direction of attention is focusing on others. According to Goleman, effective focus toward others will improve empathy and social awareness—two key life skills.

Empathy

Empathy is tuning in to others and feeling as they feel, which is a crucial skill in social connection. Goleman points out that you can’t feel what another person is feeling if you aren’t paying attention to them. He describes three kinds of empathy: emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and empathic concern.

Emotional empathy is when you personally feel the emotions another person or group of people are feeling. Bottom-up processing helps with this, allowing you to pay attention to subtle information, like nonverbal cues and tone of voice, that clue us into their emotions.

(Shortform note: Emotional empathy is a good example of how the skills of each direction of attention build on one another. If you lack self-awareness and can’t detect or interpret what you’re feeling, you’ll struggle to pick up on what someone else is feeling because your body is also the instrument that detects emotional information from others. Researchers on empathy assert that the first step to empathizing with another person is to have self-awareness and empathy for yourself.)

Cognitive empathy is a top-down orientation to what other people are experiencing. It allows you to understand their thoughts, feelings, and state of mind but not to personally feel what they’re going through. This lets you tap into top-down cognitive skills like problem-solving, which can be especially useful in situations when someone needs your help and you must stay clear-headed and calm to do so.

(Shortform note: People on the Autism spectrum are often stereotyped for lacking the ability to empathize. Experts point out that people with Autism do not struggle with emotional empathy—they feel their own feelings and those of others very deeply. But they can struggle with cognitive empathy. Trying to read another’s body language and facial expressions and accurately interpret their emotional meaning can be challenging for people with Autism.)

Empathic concern is related to compassion. It is a blend of bottom-up and top-down processes that help us feel and evaluate. It allows us to go beyond merely understanding what another person is going through and instead moves us to help them.

(Shortform note: Goleman’s choice to separate empathic concern from emotional and cognitive empathy is confusing since emotional and cognitive empathy produce emotions and impulses to respond to others. It’s hard to imagine feeling or understanding someone’s distress and not feeling motivated to engage with them in a supportive way. Therefore, Goleman may have intended to present empathic concern as a natural outcome of empathy rather than a separate variety.)

Empathy doesn’t always come naturally to everyone or in all situations. The good news is most people can improve empathy with practice. Goleman discusses one way to practice—fake it till you make it. Suppose you don’t feel empathetic toward someone but want to be. In that case, practice “behavioral empathy,” where you perform the actions of empathy, like looking people in the eye and mirroring their body language. Likely, the feeling of empathy will follow.

(Shortform note: In Nonviolent Communication, Marshall Rosenberg explains that having and expressing empathy for others can be challenging if you are emotionally or physically exhausted or have strong feelings about the situation that the other person is dealing with. If you are in the right headspace to be empathetic towards someone else, you can practice empathic listening in which you give your full attention to what the other person is saying (verbally and nonverbally) and refrain from trying to come up with the “right” answer, argue with them, or “fix” the situation.)

Social Awareness

When we turn our beam of attention on others, we pick up on body language and social cues that help us interact socially with others.

Paying attention to body language helps us navigate social situations, understand what others are feeling and expressing, and read between the lines of communication. The cognitive process of understanding the unsaid is largely bottom-up—unconscious and automatic. But the skill can be learned and developed with practice.

Social intuition is how good you are at collecting and making sense of nonverbal information from people and then using that information to modify your behavior. This skill helps you navigate group dynamics and “fit in” to groups like school cohorts or at a new job. Social intuition is a largely bottom-up, instinctual process. People who have chronic problems with social intuition may come off as rude, say inappropriate things, and violate social norms.

(Shortform note: Skills in reading body language and skills in social intuition are related: Mastery of either one will help with mastery of the other, and both are dependent on having strong self-awareness. In Quiet, Susan Cain calls these skills self-monitoring. She explains that people who are good at self-monitoring do two things: they notice social cues from others, and they notice how their behavior can change to blend in with what those cues say about the group.)

Outer Focus

The last direction of attention is outer focus. With outer focus, you direct your beam of attention to large circles of influence and connection—the systems in which you live. Goleman writes that to address large-scale issues that humanity and the planet face, like inequality and the climate crisis, we must collectively master this direction of attention, which he calls systems awareness.

Our lives are embedded in many systems, large and small. A system is a set of patterns and rules—they include natural systems like ecological and biological systems and human-made systems like economies, governments, and families.

(Shortform note: While Goleman’s definition of a system as a set of cohesive patterns is not incorrect, it may be more useful to think about what is interacting in a cohesive, patterned way to create the system. In Thinking in Systems, Donella Meadows explains that systems are composed of three things: the individuals in the system, the relationships between the individuals, and their collective purpose or goal.)

To achieve systems awareness, you have to detect and map the patterns of a system by using data and information from external sources and make analyses. Recognizing patterns takes top-down mental cognition and therefore requires more effort and comes less naturally than feeling empathy or reading body language. To attain systems awareness, your attention must be agile and capable of zooming in and out to see details and the bigger picture. Then, you must be able to make sense of that information.

Concrete Steps to Systems Awareness

Meadows agrees with Goleman that systems are challenging to understand, and she lays out some concrete steps you can take to understand a complex system:

• Observe. Gather data and information from individuals inside the system, research the history of the system, and aim to observe what is working well in the system and what isn’t.

• Don’t ignore qualitative data. In human-made systems, elements such as emotion, motivation, and hope are factors that should not be ignored simply because they are subjective.

• Widen your focus. We tend to focus on the short-term rather than the long-term, but systems play out over long periods of time. If your lens is too narrow, you may miss important information about the system.

• Put it down on paper. Writing or drawing your system can help you visualize and understand the relationships within it.

How Attention Affects Our Lives

Goleman spotlights two major life areas where our deployment of attention is particularly impactful—in leadership and in addressing the climate crisis.

Attention and Leadership

Goleman argues that attention skills are particularly necessary in leadership positions, and everyone is a leader in some capacity, whether we’re parents, teachers, social media influencers, activists, or leaders in our professions.

The author writes how good leaders effectively use all three directions of attention:

Inner Focus: Self-awareness is required to assess your own strengths and weaknesses, which in turn helps you manage your impact on the team, the organization, and society at large. With strong self-awareness, you can stay connected to your intuition to make big organizational decisions.

Focus on the Other: Empathy is required to effectively communicate strategies to the team and listen attentively. Goleman describes how good leaders have the ability to zoom in on one person’s feelings or zoom out to read the room. This helps you understand group dynamics and sense the direction of your team’s energy and attention.

Outer Focus: Without systems awareness, leaders may attempt to solve a problem without understanding the larger picture and therefore misdiagnose the problem. A leader without systems awareness might also focus on short-term solutions for short-term gain, which can be detrimental long-term. Goleman argues good leaders understand what to focus on and ignore and can perceive emerging patterns and trends.

(Shortform note: As you may recall, emotional intelligence is comprised of self-awareness, empathy, social awareness, and managing relationships. In another Goleman book, Primal Leadership, he and his coauthors argue that emotional intelligence is a crucial trait for successful leaders to cultivate. Here, Goleman is essentially making the same case for emotional intelligence’s powerful role in leadership while developing systems awareness as an additional key trait of successful and effective leaders.)

Attention and Climate Change

Goleman draws a connection between our attention skills and the climate crisis. He argues the crisis facing our planet now is partially due to the challenges it poses to our attention and that effectively addressing the crisis will require us to develop systems awareness and long-view, future-oriented attention.

The climate crisis challenges our individual and collective attention abilities because long-range threats like the climate crisis do not produce the physiological and emotional responses in our bodies that result in active attention, fear, and action. Therefore, there are different responses to the crisis depending on where you live. Many people face real threats to their survival, which motivates them to demand more attention be paid to the climate crisis than those who live in less affected parts of the world.

(Shortform note: For developed and wealthy nations like the United States, the climate crisis may not feel like an urgent threat to our lives and livelihoods because many of the most dramatic environmental changes, like rising ocean levels, will not impact us as greatly or as swiftly as poorer island nations such as the Maldives. But even so, our physical proximity to the damage of environmental changes is not the only factor influencing our level of concern about the crisis. Research shows that your gender, your age, and your politics also predict your level of concern.)

Paying attention to the crisis is also difficult because it is upsetting and overwhelming. Our attention naturally gravitates away from negative, frightening, shameful things and toward what feels safe and manageable.

(Shortform note: In many cases, people may find it difficult to engage with overwhelming, frightening, and shameful situations. But this idea contradicts what psychology calls the “negativity bias,” which contends that we tend to pay more attention to negative stimuli than positive or neutral ones. This bias is thought to be a fundamental aspect of our psychology and may have evolved to help us survive by being more sensitive to potential dangers. However, some researchers have argued that this bias is not universal and may be influenced by cultural and individual differences.)

Troubleshooting Attention

In this section, we will look at the ways Goleman says you can improve your attention—by strengthening it with training and restoring it when it’s fatigued. We’ll start by exploring what weakens and disrupts our attention.

What Disrupts Attention?

Goleman outlines two main ways in which your attention can be disrupted: distraction and attention fatigue.

Distraction

If you live in modern society, the demands on your attention are at an all-time high. Distractions are waiting for us at every turn.

(Shortform note: What makes something a distraction or not? Bailey defines distraction as anything that pulls you away from your intended purpose or task. Understood this way, anything can become a distraction if it diverts your attention away from what you want or need to be focusing on.)

Goleman outlines two main types of distractions:

• Emotional, in which emotion takes center stage and interrupts our attention. The stronger the emotion, the greater the disruption it has on our focus. Goleman stresses that emotions are a potent source of distraction.
• Sensory, in which a physical sensation inside our bodies, like pain, or something from the outside environment, like a loud noise, commands our attention. Goleman spotlights how modern technology, especially our personal devices, are a relentless source of sensory distraction and can lead to addictive relationships with digital technology.

Internal Sensations Cause External Distraction

In Indistractable, Nir Eyal provides a different take on distraction—he argues that distressing internal emotional and sensory experiences (like loneliness or pain, for example) are not merely distractions, they are the reason why you become distracted by external things. He explains that external distractions, like the ones digital technology provide for us in abundance, are essentially avenues we use to escape internal physical and emotional discomfort. Without the internal trigger of discomfort, your attention would not be driven to escape into something else like your Twitter mentions or binge-watching television. To be able to resist being derailed by external distractions, you first have to take steps to understand and address the internal emotional and physical sensations driving your distractibility.

When distractions interrupt our attention, they decrease our ability to use selective attention skills by pulling our focus away. They also interrupt states of open awareness by narrowing our attention to immediate concerns like pain or relationship problems.

(Shortform note: Distractions have this effect on both selective attention and open awareness because of one of the fundamental characteristics of attention: It is finite and indivisible. Bailey explains that this is due to the limited capacity of our working memory.)

The costs of distraction include a tendency to miss important information, poorer learning comprehension, less capacity for empathy, and diminished productivity and performance. Children growing up in our era of technological distraction may be especially at risk for attention problems, such as the inability to complete tasks, follow the logic or arc of a story, or tap into their creativity.

(Shortform note: Goleman focuses on the negative consequences of distraction, but some psychologists note that distraction can have positive benefits, as well. For instance, it can be a tool for coping with mental health challenges and can help you avoid harmful behaviors that might be triggered by intense emotions. It can also help you better manage and cope with difficult feelings over time. Of course, these benefits must be weighed against the harm that distractions might bring to mental health—all the consequences Goleman discusses above can negatively impact mental well-being by disrupting relationships and impeding success.)

Goleman notes that our modern era of relentless distractions and information overload is driving some people to self-medicate in an attempt to improve their focus at school and work.

(Shortform note: Self-medicating for improving your focus can lead to substance misuse and addiction. Sometimes, people even seek prescription stimulants such as Adderall for non-medical reasons and may attempt to obtain a prescription by pretending to have or exaggerating symptoms of ADHD. This is called "doctor shopping," and it is considered a form of prescription drug abuse. If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse or addiction, it is important to seek help from a qualified healthcare professional. There are many resources available to help individuals overcome these struggles, including counseling and support groups.)

Attention Fatigue

Attention gets fatigued, just like a muscle, writes Goleman. Attention fatigue can occur when our brains are exposed to a prolonged or demanding task that requires sustained focus. Distractions, interruptions, sleep deprivation, and stress can also bring about or exacerbate it. When attention fatigue occurs, it becomes more difficult to maintain focus on a task and to process information effectively.

Your attention might need restoration if you notice a decrease in your ability to complete tasks effectively and comprehend what you're learning, an increase in how distractable you are, or if you’re feeling irritable and impatient.

(Shortform: The symptoms of attention fatigue are also signs of burnout—a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that can result from chronic stress, often work-related. Overworking yourself, not getting enough sleep, and not managing stress well contribute to both attention fatigue and burnout.)

How to Train Attention

You can strengthen your self-awareness, willpower, social awareness, and systems awareness by improving your selective attention skills. Attention training exercises help build connections between neurons; the more neural connectivity you have, the stronger your attention.

(Shortform note: Attention is thought to rely on the communication and coordination between different brain regions, and having more connections between these regions may facilitate this communication and coordination. Repeated activation of the neurons, or nerve cells over time, like in attention training exercises, can lead to the formation of new connections or the strengthening of existing ones. The more neurons communicate with one another this way, the stronger the bond between them becomes, which may play a role in your attentional abilities.)

Goleman focuses primarily on two training activities: digital games and meditation.

Digital Games

Goleman notes that while video games are typically regarded as distractions, they can also play a role in training your brain for attention skills. Research has shown that games can improve certain cognitive and attention skills, such as visual attention, object tracking, speed of processing information, switching attention from one thing to another, and increased memory capacity.

Goleman writes that some games are better than others at training your brain for useful attention skills. Targeted games are designed to train specific aspects of attention, like ignoring distractions and resisting impulses. Such games are better for strengthening skills you use in your daily life, as opposed to commercial video games, which might train your brain in, for example, object tracking, which is less useful in the real world.

(Shortform note: Lumosity and NeuroNation are a few examples of targeted games. Importantly, many of these games are marketed for adults, and if you hope to use digital games to support growth in your child’s attention skills, you should try to find ones that they actually find enjoyable to play. It’s also important to note that video games should be used in moderation, as excessive screen time can negatively impact overall health and well-being.)

Meditation

Goleman also recommends meditation as a powerful way to train and improve your attention. Goleman focuses on mindfulness meditation, which he describes as a practice of paying attention to our thoughts, letting them go, and directing our attention back to the present moment. In doing so, you can develop the capacity to sustain your attention in the here and now without getting swept away by wandering thoughts, ruminations, or outside distractions.

(Shortform note: The book doesn’t clearly explain that mindfulness is a state of sustained and relaxed awareness and that meditation is a method you can use to achieve mindfulness. Goleman conflates the two, but it is important to know that you can practice mindfulness anytime while doing anything, and meditation is a powerful tool to cultivate a mindful state of mind.)

Goleman writes that mindfulness develops the capacity of your selective attention through the practice of directing your attention from one thing to another, staying with the new object of focus, and ignoring distractions. Other positive effects include greater self-awareness and empathy and stronger meta-awareness, which helps you monitor your own thoughts and get back on task.

(Shortform note: In addition to improving selective attention (as it is defined outside of the book), mindfulness can improve your capacity for sustained attention— the ability to sustain your focus on one thing for extended periods of time. It can also strengthen your attentional control—your ability to switch your attention between different tasks or stimuli, which can be useful in situations that require task-switching or adapting to changing demands.)

To develop this capacity, you can practice meditation by focusing your attention on your breath or on your sensory experience (for example, focusing only on the sounds you are hearing or the sensations you feel on your skin). Goleman contends that improvements can be seen in as little as twenty minutes a day for four days, but the more consistently you practice, the better your results will be.

(Shortform note: Meditation isn’t the only way you can monitor your thoughts and get back on track. Bailey outlines a method of tracking your attention and developing greater meta-awareness through setting what he calls an “hourly awareness chime.” With this method, you set an alarm that repeats throughout the day as a reminder to come back to the present moment and check where your attention is.)

How to Restore Attention

Just as your body needs time to rest and recover from strenuous physical exertion, your attention needs restoration after it becomes fatigued. To do this, Goleman recommends switching from effortful top-down activities to restful bottom-up activities. Note that not all bottom-up activities refresh our attention, especially overstimulating ones mediated by technology, like scrolling mindlessly through social media. The author recommends we unplug from our screens often and engage our attention in one of two ways—in restful states of open awareness or in states of relaxed, focused attention.

(Shortform note: Goleman’s recommendation to switch from top-down to bottom-up activities is confusing because, at the same time, he advises that some top-down activities are also restful, as long as they involve a relaxed state of focus. Reading between the lines, it is not that top-down activities tax your attention and bottom-up activities restore it, rather, the restorative nature of an activity largely depends on your personality, preferences, and state of mind while you’re doing them. It is a matter of how you do them, your intention, and how the activity makes you feel. For example, if you are extroverted, socializing with friends may restore your attention, while for introverted people, socializing will further drain their energy.)

Immersing yourself in nature, even for a short time, is a powerful and simple way to enter states of restful open awareness. Researchers have found spending time in natural environments restores our attention by initiating bottom-up attention in an environment free from an overwhelming amount of distractions. In this environment, we can allow our attention to wander in a relaxed way that replenishes the strength of top-down, focused attention.

(Shortform note: Research not only supports nature’s restorative properties for your attention, but there is also extensive scientific evidence that nature is restorative and healing for your physical body and your emotional well-being, too. For example, Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, is a Japanese form of nature-based therapy that has been shown to have powerful positive effects on human physiology.)

To restore your attention, Goleman also recommends getting fully lost in pleasurable activities, as these focus your attention in a relaxed manner and engage all of your senses. Cooking, eating a home-cooked meal, martial arts, and dancing could be such activities for you.

(Shortform note: One thing that these sorts of relaxed, focused activities have in common, but Goleman doesn’t explicitly name, is that they all engage your body and senses in a mindful way. Activities that are physical like running, or sensorial, like cooking a meal, can be done with your attention focused on other things, like worries about the future. The key is that you stay in the present moment and adopt a mindful awareness while you do these activities, which further supports the point that the restorative properties of activities depend primarily on how you do them and the intention behind them.)