Your most valuable asset may just be your biggest liability

Given how much marketers, politicians, corporations and advertising companies are willing to pay to attract your attention, it must be important. If fact I would comfortably argue that your attention is your most valuable asset.

Well this is not exactly true. Your attention may be valuable to others, but it only becomes valuable (to you) when it's trained and obedient. Until then, if it bounces around like a hyperactive five year old, it's a serious liability.

I call obedient attention, concentration... The skill to place your attention where you want it and effortlessly hold it there for as long as you need to. The effortlessly part comes with lots of practice and begins with hours of grind. Just like starting gym or running.

Concentration can also be understood as exclusive attention on one object, or our ability to stay focused on the task at hand. It's the key to improved thinking, wellbeing and performance, and radically improves the speed with which we acquire new knowledge and skills. 

Given the role of concentration or trained attention to our success, it's important that we intentionally create a deliberate practice to develop and deepen it. Ahemmm!

It requires no muscle memory, no physical skill at all. So in this way it's a purely mental activity. That of course does not make it any less demanding, in fact in many ways it's more so.

There are two forms of concentration, one useful and the other very damaging. 

a/ Hard, focussed and exclusive concentration works on the principal of domination or denial. And although it may keep your attention focussed it destroys your quality of life. This is the easier of the two. Control always is.

b/ Soft, open, aware and yet focussed attention - both expansively aware + narrowly focussed. It's aware of everything but firmly holds only one thing as a point of interest, without denying anything else. This is much more difficult, but has much better all round results. And makes you a much nicer, healthier, happier person. Which weirdly enough contributes to success.

It helps to get guidance or a mentor at the beginning.