Stories & Attention

First some household items. I told you I would post my X usage so here it is below. I did realize that I am not able to capture my X usage on my laptop but really the one im trying to avoid is the one on my phone. Why the phone? because thats far more addictive than being on my laptop. Why isn’t it crazy on my laptop? Because I have a standing desk and I tire quickly. This naturally causes me to step away from my laptop from time to time.

As you can see my daily average on my phone is over an hour! That’s significant and I need to cut that down by 75%. Im on it. Next week’s plan is to be around 45 minutes.

Alright onto todays brain dump. I have been thinking about attention a lot as a continuation from yesterday. What is attention? How does the human mind focus it’s attention? How are we able to have meta thoughts to realize we are not paying attention?

Theres two concepts here Attention and Meta Cognition.

Per Gemini:

Attention, in the human brain, is the cognitive process that allows us to selectively focus on specific information while filtering out irrelevant distractions. It’s not a single mechanism but rather a complex set of neural networks that work together to prioritize sensory input and internal thoughts.

Metacognitive monitoring of attention is your brain’s ability to observe and evaluate its own attentional state. It’s the inner voice or feeling that tells you when your focus is drifting or when you’re no longer fully engaged.

So this goes into the whole concept of learning. There’s a thought that says learning is not enough, learning how to learn is the real secret. Ok so monitoring your attention is important and so is learning how to learn. The pattern here is that its always the second deeper layer where the real value is.

I read the great book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. In that book he sets the narrative that the Homo Sapiens survived because were able to develop parts of our brain which could tell stories. What did stories do? They were a mind virus. Stories changed behavior. Stories allowed a large group of HomoSapiens to band together to a similar cause simply based on the premise of the story.

Lot of times when my buddy and I are talking about markets or life, we come to the same conclusion, “eh which story do you want to believe”. That right there is the second layer. Once you realize EVERYTHING IS A STORY, you start to gain control over your thoughts, your attention.

There’s a lot I want to say today but we have family coming over and its a friday so I have to leave this short.

Attention is important. A good friend of mine has learned to master her attention using meditation. Similarly another dear friend is able to manage his attention during basketball. My wife is a master of attention because she keeps busy all day physically and with her sisters constantly calling. She rarely loses her attention to the tasks she has assigned herself. Me, im all over the place but I realize my attention keeps coming back to education, teaching and wanting to learn about how the world functions financially, politically and how money ties everything together as the greatest story ever told.

Stories are all around us, money, religion, family, going to college, saving into your 401k, etc. They can all be false or true for each individuals because they are just stories. Now that doesn’t mean they aren’t helpful. Infact stories are the reason we are so successful as the apex predator on this planet. Raw nature just is. We give it meaning with stories.