Focus on the right things
August 9th, 2008
Recently, I explained how you can ask the right questions to achieve more in life. Today, I’ll show you how the same principles apply more broadly.
When you ask yourself a question, (“How can I most easily…?”) you hand your subconscious mind a request, and it returns whatever matches that request. And it will filter through whatever assumptions you include in your question.
But your subconscious mind filters a lot more for you than just questions!
Have you ever looked for something (like your sunglasses) for a long time (like 10 minutes) and eventually found it in a really obvious place? (like on your forehead?)
Yes? Say hi to selective perception!
Your mind is literally bombarded with information. Just notice the hundreds of little things you can see in front of you right now. And all the background noise you normally ignore. Right now you can likely hear muffled sound of traffic, the whirrrr of your computer fan, sounds of people talking, occasionally people walking and phones ringing, creaking of your own chair and so on and so on. And don’t even get me started on all the things you can feel right now with the surface of your body.
Good thing your subconscious mind filters information for you! Otherwise you’d be completely paralyzed by the flood of stimuli. Scientists apparently found that most humans can only hold up to 4 things simultaneously in their conscious mind. (Yikes!) Thus, most information is delegated to your unconscious. Only the stuff that’s important to you gets passed to your conscious mind. (Or urgent stuff. Like when you staple a paper to your finger.)
Hmm, wait a sec. “Important to you”? How does the subconscious mind decide what that is?
Letting your subconscious mind know what’s important
When you normally walk in a street, you probably don’t even notice a red car. But if you were about to buy a car, and wondering if you want it red - then you would definitely notice all red cars and how the color looks on them.
Or, normally you don’t see any elephants walking down the street. But if you consistently focus on thinking about elephants, you will notice every elephant that walks down the street towards you.
Read the last paragraph again. It’s completely true.
Okay, now that I’ve given you a trivial example, and a completely irrelevant example, let’s move on to the real stuff!
You tell your mind what to filter for by focusing on the things.
Wow, that’s deep. (Not!)
Wait! Just like phrasing your questions right, focusing on the right stuff is trickier than it looks.
Misplaced focus
Don’t think of a pink elephant! No, really, don’t. No pink elephants please. Focus really hard on not thinking of a pink elephant.
(No pink elephant!)
If you’re like most people, you probably just imagined a pink elephant. It’s a classic children’s game - not thinking about something. But, in order not to think of something, you first need to think of it… (hey! look at me! I sound like a philosophy textbook!)
And there’s the problem. Lots of people focus on “not being poor” or “not being fat”. That automatically keeps their focus and self-image on “being poor” or “being fat”. They look around them and filter for “being poor” and “being fat”. Every time they focus on not being fat, they’re reinforcing their fatness in their mind.
What you focus on, you get more of.
This is what the famous “Law of Attraction” is about.
Some wackos say it works because it “bends the fabric of the universe” or “attracts probability particles to your life” or whatever. I don’t think that’s right.
I think it works simply because you start to notice the possibilities around you. Just like the sunglasses magically appear on your forehead when you could have sworn they weren’t there before.
Affirmations
Ever heard of affirmations?
You know… “I feel pretty and happy and gaaay!”
Affirmations are always phrased in positive, present tense. Like “I am becoming rich.” Not “I want to be rich.” or “I will be rich.”
That’s the exact same principle. *Focusing on the right things.*
If you said “I want to be rich” and your affirmation came true… it would be true that you want to be rich. Uhhh… yeah, not quite what you had in mind 
I once tried this affirmation thingy. I wrote down “I, Vlad Dolezal, will win WOC [World Othello Championships] 2007″, sixteen times a day, for about two months. Now, I’m nowhere near a world-class player in Othello… and yet I ended up 8th at the World Championships. (That’s a damn good result). I’m not saying it to brag (ok I am saying it to brag, but anyway…), but to show you that there’s something to affirmations.
Not some magic. They simply made me play my best, and never give up.
Because the moment you say “I’ve lost this, I’ve got no chance.”, your mind stops looking for a solution. But if you keep looking for a way out, even when you’re in a disastrous situation, you will notice opportunities when they appear. And trust me, whether it’s in a board game, in your job, or in any other part of your life, there are a lot more opportunities out there than you think. You just need to know how to look. How to focus on the right things.
How to focus on what you want
So how do you go about it? Here’s my method you can use right now!
This stuff is deceptively simple. But don’t skip it! It’s incredibly powerful.
1. Take a pen and paper, and spend 15 minutes writing down all the things you want. It could be a sports car, a happy marriage, a million-dollar business, or a pair of warm socks. Just get it all down on paper. Don’t worry, no one else will read it.
2. Select 5 of all the things you wrote down that you really want.
3. For each of them, figure out three one-step simple actions that bring you closer to having them. The first action can be done immediately. It could be sending an e-mail, making a phone call, or looking up some information.
The second action, you will do in the next 24 hours.
The third action, you will do within the next 7 days.
4. Focus on each of your 5 goals for a couple of minutes daily. Just run mentally through your life and see if there are any opportunities for achieving them that you overlooked. You will be amazed at how many chances you notice!
Happy focusing!
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A note to my regular readers:
My next blog post will be a rerun. Don’t panic, you’ll get fresh bombastic content on Saturday :).
But I’ll try changing a few things in the rerun post, like the headline, and see if I can get it to become popular on social news sites. I recently read some stuff about marketing, and I wanna try it out immediately 
August 12th, 2008 at 17:46
Hi Vlad!
I think saying “bends the fabric of the universe” or “attracts probability particles to your life” is a poetry interpretation (like a biblical analogy).
In that way we could say you are explaining with micro-planning the effect (when you mention that you notice new possibilities if you are focused)
August 15th, 2008 at 20:41
Vlad,
I’ve been an occasional reader, but now I can’t wait to go home and subscribe to your rss feed. Your stuff is so sensible, and you’re a fine writer.
Can’t wait for the next post.
A new fan,
Brian (a.k.a. Professor Homunculus)
October 27th, 2008 at 7:54
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