How do you maintain a long-term, consistent, and steady effort?
Name one, rather interesting phenomenon.
I’ve found that all people who are learning and working inefficiently are confused as to why, when it comes time to do something, they feel tempted by the winds of the world.
Long-term?
Sustained?
Stable?
Effort?
Can’t do it, can’t do it.
When you can’t focus, the vast majority of your diligence and effort is time-consuming, ineffective and exhausting.
What diligence can determine is only the lower limit; what really determines the gap between people’s upper limits is your ability to focus on what you’re doing for a long period of time, with your full attention.
And this is the trait that is really possessed in those who are good at what they do.
They can pretty much ignore the world and remain fully engaged and highly focused when they are concentrating on their studies and work.
What’s even more frightening is that they can often continue to do so for more than ten hours a day for years and years, never slacking off, as long as they need to.
This is the real quality hidden behind the appearance of diligence, a more fundamental ability: focus.
Ten hours of diligence, but also than an hour of concentration.
But what many people do not realize is that, compared to diligence and other things, focus is more like a gift, a kind of spontaneous behavior.
The same family environment, the same parents, two children study together, may be one concentrated, one is distracted.
Those Qingbei schoolboys I mentioned earlier, on the other hand, have always been more focused than their peers almost since elementary school, more able to resist external temptations, and maintain efficient learning for a longer period of time.
Modern neuroscientific research has found that this attention system, which ignores distractions and inhibits impulses, generally begins to develop when a child is 3 years old and reaches maturity at 8 years old.
This means that the vast majority of people’s ability to focus is determined at a very young age, while some (about 10%) are even born with an attention deficit disorder.
They can’t even focus for an hour or two.
Concentration is an extremely rare natural ability in modern society.
And scarcity means that people with this ability are more likely to stand out.
I became cluelessly aware in junior high and high school that focus is most likely an innate ability.
There are people who just study and read all day long and don’t feel tired, much less in pain, so they are able to maintain a long, consistent, and steady effort.
I, on the other hand, feel pain once I study for more than two hours.
I was often distracted in class, preferred to do other things during self-study, and I was usually the first one to turn my head to look when the door was blown open by the wind in the classroom.
But in my senior year of high school, because of my strong desire to change my fate through the college entrance examination, I finally broke out a strong fighting spirit.
During the winter vacation, I locked myself in my room with a dim incandescent light and read and studied from morning to night.
There is no heating in the south, my hands are full of frostbite, cold to really can not stand the time to run two laps in the yard, tired to lie down and sleep, sleep and wake up and then learn.
At that time, I knew that although I was born with poor concentration, I could still force myself to stay focused through willpower.
Later on, I read psychology and realized that concentration consists of two sets of neural systems: bottom-up and top-down, which correspond to instinct-driven and motivation-driven respectively.
Bottom-up, like when you run or play a game, you don’t need to do anything to focus and you don’t need to make much effort, this is the realm of instinct and talent.
Top-down, on the other hand, is like improvising before an exam, where you need to overcome internal slackness, overcome external temptations, and remind yourself all the time.
It’s hard to do without extreme motivation.
To be honest, we are all at this age, long past the accumulation and development of talent, if we still want to rely on instinct can do focus, almost impossible.
How strong a motivation you have is how much control you have over your attention.
Psychology has even found that if people are motivated strongly enough, they can stay sharply focused even if they stay awake for three or more nights in a row, but if they don’t care at all, they will soon start to stumble.
The reason I emphasize focus.
The first reason is because if we lack focus for a long time, we are likely to become distracted in our lives and end up missing out on too many opportunities, goodness and possibilities.
We must not live a life of walking dead and getting by.
As the psychologist Platonov once said, the best way to become a highly focused person is to not be careless in whatever you do.
The second reason is that when we consciously work on concentration through the ‘top-down’ system, this ability eventually affects the ‘bottom-up’ system.
In other words, concentration can be achieved or strengthened through acquired training.
Let’s end with some dry facts.
Over the years, I’ve summarized my approach on how to enhance the ability to focus through active awareness into a threefold realm.
The first realm: create an environment conducive to concentration.
A friend of mine works in Tencent as a game, which is the largest department of Tencent, and their group of gifted people who work overtime until 12 hours every night work mainly to make the game more fun and make your attention more focused on the game.
Another friend in today’s headlines, do information flow, the pressure is very strong, he used to be in the advertising company, do the advertisement more than 10 seconds can not attract people, people will change the station.
But now, if a page can’t be viewed for 5 seconds, people may click on other apps, so they need to keep researching algorithms and creating more gimmicky content that can attract people’s attention.
As a result, he recently told me that he actually indulged into the jittery voice, sometimes just accidentally follow the link to click in, not interested in immediately brush the next, accidentally an hour or two will pass.
Commercially, Tencent, Headline and even Jieyin, they are all successful.
But for me, it’s a huge wake-up call.
How can you concentrate on something else when every second of your life is taken up by something like this.
What the overload of information consumes is people’s ability to concentrate, the more information there is, the less people concentrate, the more we are distracted, the harder it is to think deeply, and the shorter we think, the more likely we are to drift into superficiality.
Therefore, for people like me, who are not naturally strong in concentration, the best way is not to create ‘enemies’ for my fragile concentration, not to see, not to pay attention to, not to install these things that dazzle people’s eyes and ears, so that I am in an environment more conducive to concentration.
In the time you have free, go read more paper books and do deeper thinking.
This realm is the lowest because it relies entirely on confronting the outside world and is too passive.
The second realm: training to get into a focused mode Concentration produces fatigue just as much as contracting muscles.
This means that if one is naturally short on concentration, don’t bother with the challenge of watching a 5-hour movie or playing a 6-hour game before studying for work.
Learn to use 80% of your energy to do 20% of the important work, and even more so, learn to do so by consciously exercising to be able to wind down quickly when focus is needed and to be able to devote your attention whenever you want to.
For example, consciously associate the times when your ability to focus is particularly strong with certain sounds and smells, and when you need to focus, play this kind of music, burn a certain kind of incense, to remind yourself that you are going into focus mode.
Also for example, when you need to focus, take 5 minutes to meditate, to calm the brain in the complex thinking, once you notice that you are distracted, remind yourself to pull back, if you are distracted again, repeat the same steps, and the cycle repeats itself.
After practicing, it becomes easier and easier to stop thinking and stay focused on your thoughts.
Long-term meditators have increased neural connections in their brains for the same reason that strong weightlifters have perfect pectoral muscles.
Another extreme way to do this is to regularly put yourself in some sort of ‘dangerous situation’, which is one of the reasons why many people love dangerous sports such as mountaineering; dangerous sports allow instinct to take over control of your brain, so that you are forced to throw your full concentration.
Feeling the process of concentration in this way, and experiencing the powerful energy of concentration, will help you train yourself to enter this mode in your daily life.
(Time management of the tomato work method is also a good training method, the brain will gradually get used to this time cycle, when you need to focus, the brain will focus on concentration, interested in the background can reply to the “time” to view related articles.
) By this level, concentration is more dependent on the training and laws within yourself, and you can already consciously control your attention.
The third realm: efforts to stimulate the mind stream of concentration When we use willpower to support concentration, consciously inhibit all kinds of interference, through long-term training, concentration may change from active action to passive form, instinctive concentration can be restored and improved.
It is even possible to be so focused that you enter a state of forgetfulness, joylessness, and sadness that you can’t even perceive the passage of time.
This feeling of calmness and joy triggered by intense concentration is called Heart Flow.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people can only have this experience when playing games.
There is, of course, another thing that psychology recommends without any inclination that all people can easily experience mind flow – making love.
But other than that, all the kinds of things that require active consciousness to ensure full engagement, such as reading, studying, working, writing code, and so on, most people can’t get into the mindstream, and their brains are constantly reminding them: tired, tired, take a break.
One of the secrets to generating more mindful flow in life is to combine our attention with our interests, and those who can do this are undoubtedly lucky; anyone who has achieved great things in any field has found this combination.
There are also other ways of generating mind flow, such as when we are working on something with our full attention, pushing our abilities to the limit, to the extent of ‘what we can do’, and mind flow may also occur.
Think of the brain as an army, and the mind stream is when the whole army is at its peak of combat power, when every unit is mobilized, charging, shooting arrows, transporting food, and hundreds of millions of neural signals flowing in a continuous and well-organized manner.
At that moment, the neural connections between different brain regions are both frequent and precise, and in this state, we can perform at our best no matter what we do.
Some famous writers used to wander around when they were young, and their thoughts flowed, and they leaned on their horses to speak a thousand words, but as their energy declined and they were unable to enter this state, they would even try to take stimulant drugs.
Detective novels, Sherlock Holmes or Conan, the reason why seemingly randomly walking through a place, you can focus on the amazing details of the ordinary people can not understand, but also because they are able to maintain the state of mind flow for a long time.
Unfortunately, for ordinary people, mindstream is always an ideal state that can be encountered but not sought, and I myself can only occasionally enter it in my work or writing, so I can’t accurately describe that wonderful feeling.
Let’s wrap it up with a quote from Steve Jobs: Focus and simplicity are my mantras, and you have to work harder to keep your mind clean and simple, because once you do, you can move mountains.
