Paying attention takes moment-by-moment courage
A casual conversation with a psychologist earlier this week reminded me that a lot of us live from distraction to distraction. We were talking about the intersection of watching young kids, getting work done, and, occasionally, transcendence. Habitual thumbing through social media is the most obvious example of the instant rewards of a “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loop” that keeps us engaged. But few would disagree that we are surrounded by distraction, enmeshed in distraction, scheduled for distraction, and paid to be distracted.
Distraction is our way of life, so we hardly ever recognize that we spend our days responding to whatever anyone else says rather than doing the hard work of saying the thing that is uniquely ours to say. Twenty years on, will we look back at streaming services and the stories given top billing at our news sources and the things we spent our worries on and say, “Geesh, we were gullible—90% of that was BS. Culture wars came and went, but we still have the hungry, the poor, and the refugees. Plus the hypocrites and the exploiters.”
We work with a lot of startup companies. We help these visionaries articulate their messages to the audiences they want to reach. Sometimes, mission-driven folks struggle to sort out what is most important for this moment. That is, they struggle to separate the important things from the urgent things. I don’t blame them—it’s hard with a small team, limited budget, and a vast objective when literally everything needs to be done right now.
It takes courage to say, “This is who we are.” and “This is what we’ll do.” It takes courage because it says “No” to some opportunities and “Yes” to the most important pieces—which will forever be a subjective choice. People lose friends and colleagues, and tribes by taking their stand.
Stephen Covey talked about putting first things first.[i] Those “first things” are the tasks that are important and urgent. Covey’s advice became axiomatic for a generation because it made sense to schedule the most important things first in our days—before the urgencies took over.
As we approach a long weekend for many in the United States, does it make sense to reflect and locate, yet again, those important things? I’m talking about those things unique to you or me, that only we can do, that maybe we alone care about, and move them higher on our list of priorities. We might just find ourselves refreshed in a new way. Perhaps we’ll come away with a sense of saying “No” to our distractions by the sheer weight of our calling and interest in that most important thing. Those first things, our unique priorities, just might carry with them the weight of calling and the courage to pay attention, despite the formidable distractions that beckon us.
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[i] Covey, Stephen R., A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill. First Things First. Simon and Schuster, 1995.