Your Attention Is Everything

Ever looked into buying a specific car, only to start seeing that car everywhere you go? 

Or bought a new pair of trainers, only to start seeing every other person wearing them?

Nothing changed here except for your attention, the cars would have driven by, and the trainers would have walked on without you ever having noticed them.

You do not experience reality, you experience the tiny portion that your brain allows you to see. You only see what it thinks is important to you, which it can only gather through your attention.

This doesn’t only apply to shoes, though, it applies to some of the most important parts of your life.

Including:

Goals

When your goal is constantly in front of mind, every seemingly insignificant action starts to align.

You’ll notice resources, opportunities, people and actions that’ll move you closer to your goal.

What went unnoticed or seemed irrelevant now becomes front of mind because the brain knows what’s important.

Without this, distraction becomes your default. Without attention and a fixation on your desired outcome, your brain will react to anything demanding its attention, including mindless distraction.

The clearer the goal and the more you think about it, the easier it is to identify the best path toward achieving it.

Opportunities

Opportunities aren't rare, they’re everywhere, all the time. What’s rare is being the type of person who's able to not only notice them, but act upon them when they do.

What I always think about is the common belief that some people are just lucky, they stumble on a business idea randomly, and get things going just when the demand is at its highest, and the reason we’re stuck in our dead-end jobs is that we’re yet to stumble on such luck.

This comes to mind as I vividly remember being one of the people who believed this.

But this is just what we say and believe to protect ourselves, because the truth is, most people wouldn’t see an opportunity if it stared them in the face, and even then, they wouldn’t act upon it if they did.

As Lou Bloom says in Nightcrawler, “If you want to win the lottery you have to make the money to buy a ticket”

You need to be the type of person who takes an opportunity when it comes, which takes noticing the opportunity, which takes being where the opportunity is, which takes being the type of person who is where they need to be, which takes becoming that person in the first place, which takes acting as them for long enough, which takes paying attention to who that person is.

It all starts with attention, as without it, you’re many steps removed from being “Lucky”.

Problems

Just as many opportunities pass us by, there are equally as many problems.

We all know someone who just can’t seem to catch a break, they’re constantly going through something and as far as we’re concerned, they’re extremely unlucky. Or are they?

We’ve already established that luck isn't all that it’s made out to be, and the same applies here.

You genuinely do attract what you focus on, not because you become a literal magnet, but because what’s around you is infinite, so the difference between what passes you by and what nudges you on its way through is your attention, problems included.

I’m not suggesting that some people “Like” problems in the literal sense, I’m saying that sometimes we can be drawn toward things without ever knowing it, even if what we were drawn to isn’t exactly all that good.

So, when you’re working on a project, training for a race, studying for an exam or simply just working toward any goal, and you’re the type of person to constantly look for problems, you’re bound to find them.

It’s not about ignoring problems, as that just makes them worse, but there’s a difference between paying attention to problems vs paying attention to solutions, so choose wisely.