Джон Харгрейв - Mind Hacking [How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days]

Eventually, Cassie was taken away to live on a farm. We thought she needed a little more room to run. Apparently, we were right, because as soon as her new owners let her off their truck, Cassie went bounding off into the sunset, barking wildly. They never saw her again.

Our minds are like that dog, constantly chasing squirrels, mailmen, and passing cars. This is easily observed by simply trying to quiet your mind. Within a few minutes your dog mind will leap up, run around in circles, and pee on the carpet. It doesn’t want to sit still, and it doesn’t want to obey your commands. What’s more, the temptation to let the mind do this is incredibly overwhelming.

I’m going to sit quietly and keep my mind empty , you vow to yourself. After about thirty seconds of silence, your mind starts whimpering. What did you eat for breakfast? it asks you. Cornflakes, right?

I’m sitting quietly , you say, swatting at the dog mind with a rolled-up newspaper.

How do they make cornflakes, anyway? it barks. Where’s the corn?

In any other situation, this question would hold zero interest for you. But now it becomes a burning obsession. How do they make cornflakes? you find yourself asking. Then: No! We are sitting still, dog mind!

The mind settles down for a second, then jumps back up, barking louder. There’s a rooster on the front of the cornflakes box! What’s that about?

That’s when the dog takes off, with you running behind it on a leash. Before you realize what’s happened, you’ve listed your top ten favorite breakfast cereals, created a new recipe for bacon muffins, and mentally replayed a grade school argument about Pop-Tarts.

It’s as if our minds have been misbehaving for so long that we’ve tuned out the incessant barking and are content to live with the craziness. In fact, we seem to relish the craziness, to take comfort in the stream of thoughts. I can’t emphasize enough how seductive and irresistible our thoughts can be, especially when we’re trying not to get lost in them. It is incredibly easy to get caught up in the movie—and when we’re caught up in it, we’re not directing it.

Now for the good news: like dogs, our minds can be trained . And, like a well-trained dog, our minds can go from a holy terror to man’s best friend. If you’ve ever owned a well-behaved dog, you know the pleasure of having a faithful companion, an obedient helper, and a loyal pal—and your mind can be the same way. (Sorry, cat people. Find your own analogy.)

Truly, your mind can be both your worst enemy and your best friend.

The Attention Economy

Imagine that you wake up tomorrow in a parallel universe. Everything in this universe is the same except for one big difference: money has been replaced by attention . All citizens have little meters attached to their heads, right between the eyes, that show where they’ve been spending their limited daily supply of attention.

Let’s say, in this universe, a minute of your attention is worth a dollar. This means when you sit down and enjoy a couple of hours of TV, you’re paying $120 for the privilege. Spending a few minutes (and you really are “spending” a few minutes) catching up with friends will cost you $10. When you drive down the interstate, you’re leaking pennies and nickels whenever a billboard catches your eye.

When your mind obsesses over some difficult relationship or unfortunate event, you pay $15 or $30 at a time. Over the course of a week, this adds up; you might spend a significant portion of your monthly attention on anxiety and guilt. In this universe, most citizens have no idea where all their attention goes; it just seems to get used up, and there’s never enough to go around. Everyone, it seems, has attention deficit disorder.

This is because there are hidden “attention taxes” everywhere you look: all kinds of messages, alerts, and interruptions that slowly drain your focus. Someone sends you a text message, and you pay a quarter for the ensuing conversation. You spend hundreds of dollars a year sifting through unwanted email. You happily spend thousands of dollars watching advertisements on TV. Your attention is constantly being depleted without your knowledge.

In this universe, instead of hiring a financial advisor, you hire an attention advisor. Looking at your forehead meter, he shows you how to stop the attention leaks and how to reduce your attention tax. Then he teaches you an incredibly valuable trick. When you focus your attention on attention itself , it’s like putting money in a savings account with compounding interest. He cites the old proverb “It takes attention to make attention,” showing you how to invest attention to create even more of it.

Now for the twist: except for the forehead meter, you’re in that universe right now .

The idea of an “attention economy,” named by Babson College professor and management consultant Thomas H. Davenport, states that human attention, not money , is the scarce and valuable commodity. 1All those Super Bowl advertisers are paying for all that human attention. Times Square is such valuable real estate because it attracts so much attention. A tech company with millions of users can be worth billions of dollars, even if it doesn’t make a dime in profit, because of its attention-generating power.

Time is money. And your time—in the form of your attention—is your most valuable resource.

The Myth of Multitasking

I know someone who multitasks during his one-hour commute to and from work each day. I don’t mean he just sends text messages or checks his email. I mean he actually watches movies on his laptop while he’s driving. Or he’ll pull up the New York Times on his tablet and put it on the steering wheel so he can read while he drives. Sometimes he’ll play games. He gets in a lot of accidents.

Go to any technology conference, and you’ll notice that practically everyone is immersed in a screen—phone, tablet, laptop—paying little attention to what is actually going on. It’s disconcerting to speak at these events, because no one is looking at you . Everyone is “listening with one ear,” which seems worse than not listening at all. These are conferences that cost thousands of dollars to attend, and people are barely paying attention!

Or take a look in the conference rooms of companies across the world, where there are dozens of employees supposedly engaged in the meeting but actually lost in their screens. If everyone is only giving the meeting one-tenth of their attention, it requires ten people to make up the attention of one person. This is why so many inessential people are invited to the meeting: hopefully someone is listening, someone who can make the critical decision!

We pay an awful lot of attention tax through the digital distractions that tempt us every waking moment: email, websites, instant messaging, social media, text messages, and funny photos of overweight babies. Who can resist all these things? And why would you want to, when clearly they are put there for our enjoyment?

Those who multitask

Are doing nothing fast.

The torrent of information, as well as the technologies that feed it to us, are so new that we don’t have rules for them yet. We indiscriminately install time-wasting apps, leave on concentration-interrupting alerts, and jump at text messages, emails, and friend requests. If our minds are already misbehaving dogs, then these technology toys are like squirrels in the front yard.

The problem is not the technology but our indiscriminate and undisciplined use of it . These attention-grabbing apps and alerts quickly become bad habits, making our minds even less disciplined. Just as we must watch our diet to avoid getting fat, we must watch our attention-interrupting habits so that our mental powers do not become weak and flabby.