Quotes About Attention

Polemical, conflicting, attention-grabbing headlines like these are the mainstay of the media. And with good reason. It isn't truth that grabs our brains. It is certainty. It isn't balanced, considered analysis that captures our attention. It is bold and confident assertion.

Yet anchoring your thoughts unswervingly in the present, focusing exclusively, immediately, on the here and now, is a cognitive discipline that both psychopathy and spiritual enlightenment have in common.

Energy flows where attention goes, and some of that attention is just emboldening the negative forces in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one is because people who can't get positive attention often opt for negative attention, rather than getting no attention at all.

It's not even about you. It's just what people like to do online.

Here is the central paradox: the pastor is a public figure who must make himself nothing, who must speak not to attract attention to himself but rather to point away from himself—unlike most contemporary celebrities. The pastor must make truth claims to win people not to his own way of thinking but to God's way. The pastor must succeed, not by increasing his own social status but, if need be, by decreasing it.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

Simon's insight is often reduced to "In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Simon's insight is often reduced to "In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention." Our

Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained. The number of factors and possibilities we have to attend to rises each year almost exponentially. Thus our seemingly permanently distracted state and our endless flitting from one thing to another is not a sign of disaster, but is a necessary adaptation to this current environment.

In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant—it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.

Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of—stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper—won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What

high-profile tech companies) are earning only an average of $3 per hour of attention—

Keeping a website or a software program afloat is like keeping a yacht afloat. It is a black hole for attention. I

To keep young kids behaving well on a car road trip, have a bag of their favorite unwrapped candy and throw a piece out the window each time they misbehave.

We are unconsciously distracted by seeing our reflection. You can alleviate a lot of the fatigue of teleconferencing all day if you turn off your self-view.

the value of our attention has been remarkably stable over 20 years.

their social influence (how many people followed them and what their influence was) in order to optimize attention and influence per dollar. Done at the scale

We want our self-driving car to be inhumanly focused on the road, not obsessing over an argument it had with the garage.

Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.

When you don't come on strong, they're more likely to listen to what you have to say.

I married a pretty famous girl, and when we drive through town there's usually a car following us, when I walk out of my front door in Chelsea there's six guys waiting for me.

Each time she brushed her fingers over the convex curve of her stomach, she noticed that the minister's wife, the upper part of her face a whirring glass eye, would purse her lips with disgust. Camille began to rub her stomach more and more often, smiling as the minister's wife expressed her sour displeasure with the proceedings like a Pavlovian response.

When did things go wrong? Probably already at the kick-off meeting. Some of the project members didn't pay attention. Others didn't understand the point. Worse, some disagreed and were already planning their coding standard rebellion. Finally, some got the point and agreed but, when the pressure in the project got too high, they had to let something go.

In America, they make a lot of fuss over little things.