The single most valuable asset you have is your attention

How intentionally do you spend it?

Spend, because it is a scarce resource.

We have about 4,000 weeks of it each.

Some say that human attention is the only scarcity we have in this world.

After all, we live in “the attention economy”.

The competition is not for our money but for our eyeballs.

The saying goes that if you’re not paying for the product you are the product.

What masquerades as information is attention seeking in disguise.

Attention that, once captured, is sold to the highest advertising budget.

And a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently and intentionally.

We allocate a large portion of our remaining attention to the world of work.

A world where rapidly shifting attention has become the new normal.

That rarely requires us to work sequentially on projects in a state of “flow”.

But instead urges us to multi task or risk falling behind.

If you’re walking in the woods while checking your email you’re not walking in the woods; you’re checking your email.

Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.

Your experience is what you attend to.

So what remains of attention that hasn’t been harvested or sold is finally yours to spend.

That’s why the greatest gift you can give someone is that attention.

Attention is like a superpower.

Because we know it is so precious, and in demand, and easily stolen, when someone pays us their attention we feel seen.

We matter.

And what better way to spend what remains of our attention than to pay it to the people that matter to us most.