GNT #174: They're trying to take it

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read time: 3 minutes

I sat down the other day to clean up my notes from a meeting.

Notes open, and I reached for my phone to check one thing, the way you reach for a railing, before I'd decided to.

I don't know how long I was gone. A link, then another, then something that made me a little annoyed so I stayed with it. When I came back, the notes were still sitting there half done, and I had no memory of deciding to leave them.

Something I'd chosen had lost its place to a hundred things I hadn't.

Does that ever happen to you?

For a long time I filed it under willpower. A discipline problem I'd sort out when I got my act together. I don't think that anymore.

What you pay attention to shapes what you care about. What you care about shapes what you do. And what you do, over years, shapes what you become and the change you create in the world.

That's a long chain. But the whole thing starts at the front, with attention. The most ordinary, most stolen-from resource you have.

Let's dig in.

It isn't about thinking. It's about what you think about.

We talk about attention like it's horsepower. Focus harder. Concentrate more. Get your mind right.

But that's not really it.

It really isn't about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

You already have the capacity. You've had it your whole life. It's the scarce thing, the thing under pressure every waking minute, is the choosing. Where the beam points. What gets the hours and what doesn't.

And that choice is exactly what other people would like to make for you.

Some of them are trying to earn it. Some are trying to take it.

Everyone competes for your attention. That part isn't sinister. It's just true. Your kids, your clients, your inbox, the news, the people you love, the people who want your money.

But there's a line running through all of it.

Some of the biggest corporations in human history are not trying to earn your attention, or deserve it. They're trying to take it from you.

That's a different thing entirely.

Earning your attention means giving you something worth the trade. A real idea. A real laugh. A real connection. Something you'd choose again if you saw the whole transaction clearly.

Taking it means engineering the pull so you can't choose. The endless scroll. The notification timed to your weakest hour. The feed built by people far smarter and far better funded than any one person's willpower.

One attention seeker respects the chooser. The other is trying to get around the chooser entirely.

And the more capable the technology gets at predicting what will hook you, the wider that gap grows.

If I'm being honest, I'm in the mix too.

I have to sit with this one, because it's uncomfortable.

By publishing every week, I'm part of that mix too. I'm asking for your attention. The same scarce, pressured, fought-over resource. I send an email and I hope you open it.

So I've had to get clear on which side of that line I want to be on.

I'm not trying to take your attention. I'm trying to earn it.

That means this has to be worth the open. It means when I have nothing real to say, the honest move is to say less, not to manufacture a reason to land in your inbox. It means the goal isn't to hook you. It's to give you something you'd choose again if you saw the whole trade clearly.

That's a harder business to run. Taking is easier than earning. But it's the only version I'd be proud of.

Takeaway

You can't aim your attention at a direction you haven't chosen. That's the part the loud world counts on.

So the move isn't to notice more, or scroll less, or white-knuckle your focus. The move is upstream. Decide what you're actually for. What you're building. The change you want to make. Once that's clear, attention has somewhere to go, and most of the pull loses its grip on its own.

Keep your attention. It's the front of the whole chain.

And before you give it to anyone, including me, it's worth asking:

Are they trying to earn this, or take it?
 

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

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