Jim Kwik and Dandapani argue that concentration is a learnable skill most people were never taught. Asking someone to focus without instruction is like demanding a piano performance without lessons. They advocate teaching specific techniques first, then building the habit through daily practice.
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Concentration is something that you can learn. You need to learn how to do, and then you need to practice to become better at it. Yeah. So it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I learned to concentrate, and my life completely changed after that.
And so I think it gives people permission to be kind to themselves if they're not great at concentrating or focusing, especially in the world of distraction we're in, because we've never been taught, like many things in school. They'll teach us math and history and science, but not necessarily how to focus.
How does the mind work?
How does the mind work? Yeah, exactly.
They don't, right? So, you know, and exactly. And that should be the reason why you should have empathy and compassion for yourself, right? The question to ask yourself, have you ever been taught to concentrate? And have you been taught how to practice concentration? Because learning concentration is not enough if you don't practice it, right? You only become good at something when you practice it. So learning concentration is not practicing it throughout the day, it's what makes you become good at it.
And someone beating you up on it, or you beating yourself up that you can't focus, it's like somebody being mean to you because you can't play the violin if you've never taken a violin lesson.
It's so interesting you say that because one of the examples I give in my workshops and my talks is I pick on someone in the audience and say, who here does not play the piano?
Right.
And someone will put their hand up and I go like, okay, play the piano.
Right.
And they go like— so no, play the piano. It's the same way when adults go to kids and they go, can you just focus for a second?
Right.
You see parents yelling at their kids, right? Raising their voice. Can you just concentrate for a second? But you're telling your child to focus when you've never taught them how to focus. You're asking someone to play the violin when they've never played the violin before. So first step is teaching them how to do it. Second step is helping them to practice it. The more they practice it, the better they become at it. And people don't realize this. And it's so interesting. This is prevalent all across every level of society, even in big corporations and stuff. You know, I work with a lot of successful entrepreneurs and they'll tell their team, hey guys, we've got this big project that's due in 2 weeks. We need everybody to focus.
Right.
And I go like, what is the biggest mistake with that statement? You see, you never taught your team how to focus. And you didn't teach them how to practice concentration. You just told your team that you need to focus because there's a big project due. And same with athletes, right? The coach will say to the soccer team or the football team, the basketball team, guys, we really need to go out there and we need to be so focused in the last quarter.
Right.
Okay. Have you taught them how to concentrate? No. Do they practice concentration? No.
Right. So they live the physical activities, But not the, uh—
Yeah, no training in the mind on how to concentrate. So how can you actually concentrate when you never taught the people how to concentrate?
