The Secret To High Performance And fulfillment

I'd like to draw your attention to a pressing matter, and I'd like to begin with a story. It's about a classic experiment in social psychology that was conducted many years ago at Princeton Theological Seminary with divinity students. Each student was told that they would be giving a practice sermon, and they were given a topic to prepare. They then went to another building to deliver the sermon, which would be evaluated. Half of the students were given the parable of the Good Samaritan as their topic - the man who stopped to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. The other half were given random Bible topics.

As each divinity student went to the other building to give their sermon, they passed a man who was bent over and moaning in pain. The interesting question is: did they stop to help? The more interesting question is: did it matter if they were pondering the parable of the Good Samaritan? What do you think? Didn't it make a difference at all? What mattered was how much time pressure people felt they were under. And this, more or less, is the story of our lives.

There's a spectrum that runs from noticing the other person to tuning into the other person, to empathising and understanding what's going on with them. And then, if they're in need and there's something we can do, compassion and maybe helping them. But if we never notice in the first place, we never go down that road. And this is the problem with attention today - it's under siege.

I think the moment I knew we were in trouble was a while back, before I started writing . I was on my way to a meeting, driving, and I was running late. But I wanted the people there to know I was on my way, so as I was driving, I was texting them. That's rather dreadful, because it turns out that texting while driving is just as bad as drink-driving - it's really bad. In fact, in my state, it's against the law now.

Another thing I've noticed is that when I was writing the book, I'd be in a state of flow, really focused on my writing. Then I'd have to look something up, so I'd go to Google Scholar. I love Google Scholar because it gives you access to the academic database. So I opened my web browser, and my web browser presented me with the news of the day. And I'm a bit of a news addict, so all of a sudden I started reading news stories. And before I knew it, 15 or 20 minutes had gone by before I realised that I was supposed to be looking something up.

Today, we're all in the same boat. The tools that we use - our computers, our phones, and so on - are also designed to interrupt us, to distract us, to draw our attention from this to that. And usually, underneath that is an attempt to sell us something - a pop-up advert or whatever. Attention is under attack in a way that has never been true before.

When I was going around to publishers and telling them I wanted to write about attention, one publisher said to me, "That's wonderful, we'd love to have that book. But could you keep it short?" What happened to us in 2007? Time magazine, a major American publication, had a small article that said there's a new word in the English language - the word is "pizzle". It's a combination of "puzzled" and "pissed-off", and it refers to the moment when you're with someone who takes out their BlackBerry and starts talking to someone else, ignoring you. In 2007, that was unusual. But the word "pizzle" has died with the BlackBerry, because now that's the new social norm.

You go out to a dinner at a very romantic restaurant, and you see a couple together, and they're both staring at their phones instead of into each other's eyes. Something has happened to us. In 1977, Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon wrote a very prescient article. He said, "Information consumes attention. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." I think we've entered a time when we're in danger of intentional impoverishment.

The signs of it are more than you know. A couple gazing at their phones instead of into each other's eyes. A mother holding a little toddler, and the toddler is trying to get her attention, and she's busy texting. He's just not getting the attention he needs. And, of course, dads are just the same. I was on holiday on Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of New England, last summer, and I was taking a taxi from the ferry to my house. I happened to share it with seven sorority sisters, university students, who were going for a weekend together. We got