Brian Johnson watches his 13-year-old son Emerson train for chess mastery and notices him working on puzzles while listening to an audiobook. He uses the moment to teach about focus: that happy, successful people direct their attention like a spotlight, and that even a visible phone on a desk drains productivity and weakens connection.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Heroic Plus One. Now, I'm typing this a few feet away from Emerson as he works on a challenging chess puzzle. We just wrapped up a chat about the importance of focusing his attention on one thing at a time. Let's rewind about 15 minutes. He's working in his little chess office that now has 2 desks set up in it. One desk has his nice chessboard and pieces on it. The other has his computer on it. His number one target right now is to become a national master by his 14th birthday, which is almost exactly 4 months away as I type this. Now, as we've discussed, he can do it, but it's an aggressive goal. To hit the target, he and his coach have created a training program that involves 3 hours of deep training a day, 90 minutes of solving very difficult puzzles from a book called Perfect Your Chess, 30 minutes of reviewing his openings on an incredible site called Chessable, In another hour, going through one of the 100 best games of a guy named Anatoly Karpov, one of the all-time great chess grandmasters who played with a style that's like Emerson's, which I'm told is very positional and systematically suffocates his opponents like an anaconda. Now, I poked my head into his office to celebrate his hard work. He was working on a puzzle. Nope. These are such hard puzzles made for grandmasters that his coach wants him to spend up to 45 minutes on just one puzzle trying to figure out what the grandmaster would have done. And he was working on that puzzle and he had an audiobook playing. And let's just say that we've had more than a couple chats about how much I dislike— all caps— him doing that. Enter teaching moment. Long story slightly shorter, I whipped out my wise mentor playbook and told him how proud of him I am and how much I believe in him and his potential and how committed I am to helping him achieve his goals. And we had a great chat about how important it is to be able to focus our attention on one thing. I told him that helping preserve his attention was one of the number one things I knew I wanted to do for him before he was even born. He said, really? Note, he said that with genuine surprise and joy and gratitude. I told him, yes, the ability to shine the spotlight of your attention where you want, when you want, for how long you want is one of the hallmarks of happy and successful people. I continued, very few people can do that these days. Have you noticed how many people are constantly looking at their phones? Yeah. Me, I struggle with it too, which is one of the reasons why I have 2 phones. The work one and the bad phone that I only use with Mommy. Now, his old school iPod that we got on eBay— you can't even get them anymore, but that's what we love to use instead of a phone— that he uses to listen to audiobooks was on the desk next to his chessboard. I pointed at it and I said, did you know that simply having that or a phone visible on your desk hooks a part of your attention and will make you less productive? He said, really? I said, really? Can you guess why? And he said, because part of my attention will be wondering what's going on in the book, even if it's not playing. I said, exactly. Then I said, imagine if I had my phone right there on the desk right now as we're talking, and it kept on dinging while we were chatting. Would that make our connection stronger or weaker? And would you think I cared that much about you if I looked away from you every time a ding showed up on my phone? He said, definitely not. And that's today's +1. I can and will share more about what we chatted about, but for now, quit multitasking, put your phone away, focus on whatever it is you're doing, whether that's solving a life puzzle or connecting with a loved one all day, every day, especially today. Hey, this is Brian. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe so that the best of the show keeps landing in your feed. Then head over to heroic.us. That's heroic.us, where you'll find the full library of wisdom I've created over the last 20 years, as well as the app, advanced training programs, coaching, and everything else we've built to help you optimize your life, actualize your potential, and live heroically. It is day 1. We are all in. Let's go.
