The only limited economic resource is...
It’s not money,
It’s not land,
It’s not labour,
It’s not even time,
We now have all of these in abundance, through leverage.
It’s attention.
Attention is the only scarce resource in the intelligence age.
Which makes the mastery of attention your primary goal.
But what is attention?
In order to understand it and to maximise it, we have to be able to define it.
I would define attention as:
The selection, direction and application of mental energy, towards a specific direction
We can’t understand attention without understanding focus.
Focus has two similar, related definitions
the act of putting something into your field of view at the exclusion of everything else
Focus is the central point of interest, activity, or concern around which other elements revolve
Attention is the resource; Focus is the tool.
Attention is the light, focus is the lens.
In order to improve attention, like we would improve our physical bodies, we have to break it down into the different parts. Strength, agility, stamina, etc., and then work on improving each part.
There are multiple aspects of attention
Executive (Meta) attention - which manages other types
Selective - the ability to ignore distractions
Intensity - the power of attention
Depth - how far attention can go - eg., something that is far away
Breadth - how many things can be held in attention at once
Sustained - the ability to sustain it over time
Shift - the ability to shift attention between topics
Divide - the ability to put attention on multiple things
In order to improve our attention, the first step is to understand it deeply.
When we define it, we can see that a big part of what makes our attention better is limiting what we apply it to.
Narrowing the lens, allows our attention to have more power.
This is counterintuitive to us, in a world seeking continual growth, and more.
We think more light = more power, but more light dispersed, is less powerful than less light concentrated into a laser.
The second step is to consciously make an effort to improve it.
On a macro level, the problem is that our economic system is designed for a previous age.
To succeed in the future, we must stop letting the economy farm us, and start guarding our attention as the precious asset it is.
With our drive towards GDP growth, attention, our most valuable resource, is not measured, it is a resource to be farmed to maximise and monetise.
Any future economic system should at least recognise the value of attention.