The World Our Attention Creates

I have been paying attention to attention.

Once I started noticing where mine went, I became fascinated by how rarely I had consciously chosen its destination. An email arrived, and I followed it. Someone asked a question, and my mind moved towards theirs. A problem appeared and suddenly seemed more deserving of my attention than whatever I had been thinking about a moment before.

I also began to notice how easily I blamed the interruption. The email, the meeting, the person asking for something, all those external forces pulling at me. It was rather less comfortable to notice my own part in it. The world certainly asked for my attention, but I was remarkably quick to give it away.

Then I noticed something else. Whatever received my attention began to feel important.

We talk about attention as a resource. We pay attention, give someone our attention and complain when something demands too much of it. We try to protect it from distraction and reclaim it when we feel we have lost control of it. All of this makes attention sound like something we spend.

I am beginning to think it is also something that creates.

Photo by Aidan Engel

There is far more happening around us, and inside us, than we could notice at once. Something must always move into the foreground while something else recedes: a problem, a deadline, the expression on someone’s face, an idea we cannot quite let go of. Attention makes that selection, and whatever we select usually grows.

Spend enough time looking for what is going wrong and problems start to fill the landscape. Spend enough time wondering what other people think and their imagined opinions can become louder than your own. Spend enough time attending to what is urgent and almost everything important but unhurried can disappear from view.

None of what we see is necessarily untrue. It is simply not everything. Perhaps that distinction matters more than we realize, because attention has a strange ability to make one part of reality feel like the whole.

For a long time, I thought distraction was the opposite of attention. Now I am not so sure. Distraction is still attention; something else has claimed it. And there is no shortage of things willing to claim it.

I notice this particularly at work, where we can spend extraordinary amounts of time looking at what is measurable, immediate and already known: the latest numbers, the next deadline, the problem requiring resolution, the agenda someone has already written. These things matter, of course. Work requires us to respond to the world around us.

But while we are responding, questions without deadlines wait quietly. So do ideas and possibilities. One of the scarcest resources in our organizations is not time, money or even talent, but unclaimed attention: attention that has not already been allocated before we have had the chance to decide what deserves it.

Attention shapes our world in another way. The more familiar something becomes, the easier it is to stop seeing it.

We stop noticing the people closest to us in their full complexity. We stop recognizing strengths because using them has become effortless. We stop questioning processes because they have always been there. And, perhaps most consequentially, we stop seeing assumptions.

This is what our clients want. People won’t change. We tried that before. That’s just how this works. I’m not the kind of person who…

An assumption repeated often enough begins to sound like a fact. That is what makes assumptions so powerful: they influence what we see while becoming almost invisible themselves. Sometimes what limits our imagination is not a lack of ideas. It is something we have stopped noticing.

This has made me think differently about creativity.

We tend to locate creativity at the moment something new appears: the idea, the invention, the breakthrough. But I think creativity begins much earlier, with the quality of our attention. Someone notices an inconvenience everyone else has learned to tolerate. Someone questions a process everyone else has accepted. Someone looks at something ordinary from a slightly different angle and, for a moment, it catches our attention again.

The world has not necessarily changed. What has changed is what the person noticed, and that makes a different question possible.

Imagine a process that isn’t working particularly well. If my attention is fixed on efficiency, I might ask, How can we make this faster? It is a perfectly reasonable question and might lead to a useful improvement.

But if my attention shifts and I notice that nobody can quite explain why the process exists anymore, I might ask, Why are we doing this at all?

The first question might improve the process. The second might make it unnecessary.

That small shift fascinates me because it reveals something larger about attention. What we notice influences what we question. What we question influences what we imagine. And what we imagine shapes what becomes possible.

Perhaps this is why many of the things I care about are struggling to compete for my attention.

Creativity rarely sends an urgent email. A relationship does not always announce the moment it needs more of us. An idea may arrive quietly and disappear just as quietly if we don’t give it somewhere to go. Our own thoughts can be particularly easy to lose; before one has fully formed, someone else’s question can take its place.

Possibility may be the quietest of all.

Urgency arrives already equipped to capture us. It has deadlines, notifications, calendar invitations and people waiting for answers. Possibility arrives with almost none of these advantages. Often it is little more than a thought we cannot quite explain, a question that keeps returning or the faint sense that there might be another way.

By the time a possibility becomes obvious, it is easy to notice it. The harder part is noticing it before it has become important enough to insist upon us.

This is why spaciousness matters. Not because empty time is inherently virtuous, and certainly not because we need another perfectly optimized routine for protecting it, but because some things can only become visible when nothing louder is standing in front of them. Some questions need us to stay with them before we understand what they are asking. Some thoughts become interesting only after the obvious answer has passed. And some possibilities need our attention before they have enough substance to demand it.

I don’t think the answer is to control our attention perfectly. I am not even sure I would want to. Some of life’s best moments claim our attention without permission: a child interrupts us, someone says something that changes the conversation, light falls differently through a window, or a song we haven’t heard in years begins playing somewhere. Attention can be wonderfully disobedient.

Perhaps we only need to become more aware of our relationship with it: to notice, now and then, where it has gone and what keeps claiming it; to wonder what we have been looking at so closely that it has grown disproportionately large; and to become curious about what might have been pushed to the edges of our vision while we were looking elsewhere.

What we attend to does more than determine what we see. It shapes the questions we think to ask, and those questions shape what we can imagine.

Somewhere in that space between attention and imagination, possibility begins.

And perhaps that is the thing about possibility: we have to notice possibility before it becomes obvious.