Pay Attention — to improve your skill development
If you want to learn anything, paying attention is essential.
Only by paying attention to the information that matters, can we act on it, direct our behaviour in the desired direction and hopefully improve.
To improve, it is necessary to both pay attention and know where to focus the attention. It doesn’t help much to pay attention, if you have no idea where to look.
A coach or teacher can often be helpful to direct your attention in a useful direction. But as you improve a skill, you will usually become better at deciding where you should focus in order to improve.
A distracted world
Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction. -Austin Kleon
Nowadays, we are constantly bombarded by things that are aiming to attract our attention. Whether it’s Instagram, Netflix or YouTube. They all make a living on getting a hold of your attention. And they are good.
Many people now live distracted lives, where they are rarely able to focus on one activity for a longer period of time. All the information that enter their life require a response, and hence requires their attention. The problem is that if you use your attention on trivial, non-important matters, you will have no attention left for things that matter, such as developing your skills.
Information consumes attention. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. -Herbert Simon
Every world-class performer is also world-class at paying attention
My greatest skill was being teachable. I was like a sponge. Even if I thought my coaches were wrong, I tried to listen and learn something. -Michael Jordan
It is necessary to pay attention if one is to learn something. Top athletes are extremely good at focusing and directing their attention where it really matters. If you keep doing this practice after practice, over weeks, months and years; you have a good chance of becoming world-class in whatever you do.
The experience of directing all your attention towards a process or performance is referred to as flow. If you’re in this state, you will have no additional attention to use on other things. You will be so focused that you often lose the perception of time and other non-significant things going on around you.
World champions show an extreme ability to pay attention. And if you want to become one, you must master this skill.
Limited capacity of attention
But why is it so important to be fully focused you may ask. The reason is that our attentional capacity is very limited. Our working memory is where information that is undergoing active processing is held, and it can only hold about seven chunks of information simultaneously and only process and focus on two-three chunks at a time.
This means that we can maximally focus on two-three things in our performance at the same time. If you want to experience a short example of how limited our attentional capacity is, I recommend watching this 1 minute video.
When you are paying attention to one thing, you can be blind to other things even when they are in plain sight. Since there are only so many things we can pay attention to at a time, the more things we can automate, the more attention we have left for the finer details of performance.
Our goal with practice is to build up our repertoire of skillful actions that we can perform with no or a very small amount of attention. Having control of the ball in football or basket without having to look at it, means that you will be able to look for teammates in good positions and pass them the ball.
Players at the highest level have even automated where they should look. As soon as they get control of the ball, they will automatically look in a certain direction for their teammate (who has also automated the move they should make when this situation occurs).
When a top player gets a hold of the ball in any area of the field, they will quickly have a few automated options they will consider. Taking these actions will be so quick, that it will seem completely natural for a spectator. But having this type of trained vision, depends on years of practice.
The more sub-skills you are able to fully automate, the higher the level you can perform at. And the most important skills to automate are the basic moves, those that you do again and again all the time.
Focus on improving one skill at a time
When learning a new skill, there will be so much new information that it can feel overwhelming. In complex tasks you should focus on improving one or two things at a time, and put all your attention into perfecting these parts.
As you gradually improve each part, they will become more and more automated. This frees up attention that you can spend on improving other parts of the complex skill and eventually puzzling it all together towards an overall performance.
The mastery of all complex skills, such as writing, dance, music or sports, therefore depends on your ability to attend to and improve one sub-skill at a time.
Spend your best hours of the day on what matters most to you
You have a few hours every day when you are most alert and attentive. Any professional athlete will prioritise these hours to improve their chosen skill. The activity or skill that matters most to you, are best exercised in these hours of the day.
Depending on your energy levels, you will also have several more hours per day which can be used to improve a skill (but with less focus and improvement).
Then you will have some hours, where you are tired after coping with all the challenges your day has presented to you. It means that it’s difficult to focus and improve much. This time is best spent on rest and recovery of your energy.
‘From my experience, trying to learn at times when I’m tired is mostly a waste of time. The time is better spent resting until you can pay full attention to what you are doing. Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.’ -Tim Ferriss
Strengthening the attention muscle
Focused attention, like a strained muscle, gets fatigued. Research on world-class competitors, whether pianists, weight lifters, or a dog sled team, tend to limit strenous practice to about four hours per day (Ericsson). The rest of their days consists of rest and restoration of physical and mental energy.
All experts have trained their ability to sustain long hours of practice with intense focus. When you’re first starting out with a skill, you will not be able to fully focus for this many hours per day. It would simply be an overwhelming amount of new information to process. It could also lead to both burnout and injury.
When you do a skill for the first time, it takes a ton of attention, and usually makes you very tired. You need to gradually strengthen your tolerance to practice a skill for several hours per day. It usually takes several years, before you can practice a skill for many hours per day, with optimal focus.
Skills and habits frees up attention
The peak of automaticity can be seen by all world class athletes or performers. Whether it’s finding the best move in a world championships chess match, pinpointing a perfect through-pass in a Champions League final or climbing the 1000 meter granite wall of El Capitan without a rope.
These achievements are only possible due to the athletes extremely high level of automatisation of nearly every move they have to do. This means that they have the necessary attentional capacity to use on these high-level and very fine details of performance. They have freed up enough attention to see the extras only seen by those at the top level.
Top performers further develop habits and routines around nearly everything connected to their performance. From how they put on their clothes, to what music they listen to, what they and and how they warm up. Every little detail they don’t have to think about, gives them more attention to focus on what really matters, their performance.
Take home message
Learning a skill depends on your ability to pay attention.
World-class performers are extremely good at focusing their attention during practice.
Our attentional capacity is very limited, so you need all of it in order to improve.
The attention needs to be directed at the sub-skill your are currently improving.
You can only be fully focused for a few hours every day, so spend this time wisely.
As you automate each sub-skill, you free up attention, that can be used on finer details in your performance.
Thanks for reading, following and sharing ! :)
My 100hour challenges:
