A Story
I recently heard a story about a brilliant entrepreneur who secured a significant investment to build a transformational technology. Everyone around him knew he was gifted, and they put a lot of faith in him. He had so many brilliant ideas, his mind moved quickly, and people were sure he would change the world.
But shortly after he received the check and set up shop, he decided to build something far bigger instead. He changed the plan without telling his backer and convinced his team that they were heading in the right direction. After pivoting and deciding to expand the project’s scope, he was forced to let his investors know that the bigger version was worth the wait. But as soon as he explained himself, he would turn around and tell reporters about three or four other breakthroughs he fully intended to deliver.
Eventually the investor refused to fund the changes, and the project failed.
Now this entrepreneur was not short on talent, and people would later argue that he was a genius. However, he was short on the ability to stay with one thing long enough to finish it, and he was addicted to the big and the bold. Every time he got close to done, he found something bigger and farther away that he could chase after. He was addicted to his ambition and seduced by the myth that his scattered attention was a strength rather than a liability.
His name was Nikola Tesla, and he died in 1943 in a hotel room, broke, and holding around 300 patents.
An Insight
I think a lot of us are running a smaller version of the same story.
We treat speed as the engine of progress, so we move faster, say yes more, and keep every plate spinning, in hopes that all of our activity will eventually pay off. So we play the game of addition by adding projects, commitments, side ideas, and opportunities we can’t bring ourselves to turn down.
But here is what happens.
Our attention breaks apart across too many ambitions, and we get stuck in an unproductive pattern. We fail to realize that our attention doesn’t multiply when we divide it; it just gets thinner. Give twenty different things a piece of you, and each one receives a version of you too small to move it.
That is why the busiest seasons of our lives feel like the least productive ones. We are working constantly, but don’t feel like we are making progress. The days feel full but the years feel empty. Our effort doesn’t correlate with the distance we think we are covering. We feel like hamsters running hard on a hamster wheel.
The worst part about all of this is that the feeling of progress disappears right along with the progress. Momentum is something we sense, but we can’t sense it when our attention is spread across a dozen surfaces. So we speed up to compensate, which scatters our attention further, and kills whatever momentum we thought we were gaining.
When we move too fast, we feel like we aren’t moving.
A Subtle Shift
The shift I’m proposing is a simple but counterintuitive one:
Stop pushing for progress and relax into presence.
Pushing for progress keeps our attention out in front of us: on the outcome we want, the deadline we’re behind, and the version of our life that lives somewhere past this moment. Presence brings our attention back to what is actually in front of us, which happens to be the only place where we can get something done.
And there is an added bonus:
Once our attention settles, we start having insights.
The word Insight literally means sight from within. It isn’t information you go out and collect; it’s understanding that surfaces when you have stayed with something long enough for it to reveal itself to you. It is hard to have a quality insight while frantically scanning twenty open loops. Insights arrive when our attention settles.
All of this matters, because insight is where real progress comes from. One clear seeing of a problem you’ve been circling for months will move you further than six more weeks of effort pointed in the wrong direction.
Which brings me to the part of the Tesla story I can’t get out of my head. In February of 1882, he was walking through a city park in Budapest with a friend at sunset, winding down for the day. An insight arrived in a flash, so he picked up a stick, drew the rotating magnetic field in the sand, and six years later that sketch became the patents that electrified the world.
The one insight that made him matter came while he was present in a park!
So here’s a gentle suggestion. Pick one thing this week and give it all of your attention. Relax into presence and get away from your screens, and to-do list. Go for a walk, and pay attention to the birds and the trees. Listen to the sounds of nature rather than listening to a podcast with your earbuds in.
Then reach out to tell me what insights show up.
