Daniel Goleman.

Daniel Goleman, a former science journalist for the New York Times is the author of thirteen books including the bestseller “Emotional Intelligence”.

In his latest book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Daniel Goleman proves that the ability to focus is a key to excellence in both our personal and professional lives.

“Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention in all its varieties represents a little-noticed and underrated mental asset. My goal here is to spotlight this elusive and under-appreciated mental faculty in the mind’s operations and its role in fulfilling life.”

The good news is that we can strengthen this vital muscle of the mind. However if we do not use it, it will wither but if we use it well, it will grow. Incidentally, technology especially smart phones, hijack our attention and disrupt our connection with people.

Children nowadays are growing up in a different reality, one where they are interacting more with machines than human beings. This has consequences on a child’s social and emotional development.

A college student who has observed the loneliness and isolation triggered by the intrusion of the social media, tweets and messages in our lives, remarks that “no birthday, concert, hangout session, or party can be enjoyed without taking the time to distance yourself from what you are doing to make sure that those in your digital world know instantly how much fun you are having.”

Adults are also facing symptoms of attention decline. A college professor admits that he can’t read more than two pages at a stretch without getting this overwhelming urge to go online and see if he has received a new e-mail. He believes that he is losing his ability to sustain concentration on anything serious.

The fact is that the plethora of messages and e-mails that we receive on a daily basis, leaves us too little time to reflect on what they really mean. All this was foreseen by the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon who warned against the coming of an information-rich world. He wrote that information consumes “the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. “

At this point, it should be said that the people who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence. They are more able to remain calm in a crisis and to experience a constant mood despite life’s emotional upheavals.

The inability to discard the attention of our focus and jump to another center of interest, leaves the mind in a state of anxiety. The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for our mental well-being.

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, believes focus is one of a handful of essential life abilities which lead us through the turbulence of our inner lives, our relationships, and whatever challenges life brings.

We learn best when our attention is focused. If you and a small child look at an object while you name it, the child will learn its name but if his focus drifts away as you pronounce the word, he will not memorize it. When our mind is not focused, we do not remember what we are learning.

Incidentally, education is increasingly being dispensed on web-based formats which can hamper learning. The philosopher Marin Heidegger in the 1950s feared that technology would replace meditative thinking by calculative thinking. In other words, in an increasingly digitalized world, we are becoming less capable of sustaining a focused mind.

“Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections; likewise the shorter our reflection, the more trivial they are likely to be” says Daniel Goleman.

However, a lack of focus or a wandering mind is not as negative as it might seem. A mind adrift “lets our creative juices flow”. Chance, as Louis Pasteur (the famous French scientist) put it, favors a prepared mind. Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

This is the case of the late Peter Schweitzer, a founder of the field of evaluating cryptography, encrypted codes that protect the secrecy of everything from government records to your credit card. His specialty was to break codes in a friendly test of encryption that shows you if some adversary like a rogue hacker can crack your system and steal your secrets. Schweitzer incidentally did not work in an insulated office. He would mull an encrypted code while on a long walk or simply resting with his eyes closed. He looked like someone relaxing when in fact he was doing higher mathematics in his head. Creative insights flow best when people have clear goals but also the freedom to reach them. And, most importantly, they need enough time to really think freely.

Our focus regulates our emotions. As we grow our attention changes into willpower and self-discipline. Our mind deploys self-awareness to keep everything we do on the right track or in other words to let us know how our mental operations are going and adjust them as needed.

According to neuroscientists, self-control helps manage mental skills like self-awareness and self-regulation, critical for navigating our lives.

Years of research underline the importance of willpower in determining the course of life. One of the first of these was a small project in the 1960s in which kids from deprived homes were given special attention in a preschool program that helped them cultivate self-control, among other life skills. That project failed to boost their IQ but over the years it showed that children who had not participated in the program had lower rates of school dropout, delinquency, and even days missed from work.

Statistical analysis showed that a child’s level of self-control plays a role as important as social class, family wealth or IQ in his future life. Willpower emerged as a completely independent force in life and the key to success. It is a stronger predictor than both IQ or social class.

Children who possess high self-control have better grades, and they also possess a good emotional adjustment, better interpersonal skills, also a sense of security and adaptability. Finally, anything one can do to increase children’s capacity for cognitive control will help them throughout life. Willpower is what keeps us focused on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings.

BP CEO Tony Hayward offers the perfect example of the costs of a leader with deficits in focus. Blind to his impact on others and to the public perception of his company, Tony Hayward set off a firestorm of antagonism during the 2010 disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He didn’t show the least concern for the victims, he even seemed annoyed by the inconvenience and went on to claim the disaster was not BP’s fault! He blamed its subcontractors and took no responsibility. Photos showed him at the peak of the tragedy sailing on a yacht taking a vacation while thousands of people were affected by the oil spill. The disaster has cost BP up to 40 billion in liabilities and led to the American government eventually forbidding BP further business including new oil bases in the Gulf of Mexico because of lack of business integrity.

Focus is a powerful guide for taking control of your attention and will lead you to nothing less than taking control of your life. The ability to focus is indeed a key to excellence in both our personal and professional lives. The secret to high performance lies in one word: attention.

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