Attention and Compulsion
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Traction versus distraction
The opposite of distraction is not focus, but traction: traction is any action done with intent that moves you toward what you planned, while distraction pulls you away from your planned intent, often prioritizing the urgent over the important.
“Is the trigger serving me or am I serving the trigger?”
Odysseus and the Sirens
Knowing no man could resist the Sirens, Odysseus had his crew plug their ears with beeswax and bind him to the mast, recognising that compulsion can remove voluntary choice.
“I think when you multi-task so much, you don’t have time to think about anything deeply. You’re giving the world an advantage you shouldn’t do. Practically everybody is drifting into that mistake.”
“Concentrating hard on something that is important is ... I can’t succeed at all without doing it. I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”
“No man is free who is not master of himself.”
QuoteSelf-discipline and impulse controlSmartphone and notification distraction2 more related links
Lenses
Modules
“One can avoid opportunities for gratification of the drive [for pleasure], and through long and ever longer periods of non-gratification weaken it and make it wither away. Then, one can impose upon oneself strict regularity in its gratification: by thus imposing a rule upon the drive itself and enclosing its ebb and flow within firm time-boundaries, one has then gained intervals during which one is no longer troubled by it ...”
Rusticus: read attentively
From his teacher Quintus Junius Rusticus, Marcus learned to read attentively rather than skimming and not to be satisfied with superficial knowledge.
“Desultory reading is delightful, but to be beneficial, our reading must be carefully directed.”
“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.”
“Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.”