With a few clicks of a button, we can go from one shallow
thought to another shallow thought. This leaves us not fully realizing the impact of a decision
or action on many aspects of our life.
Part of the reason this is because of our in ability to
focus.
We get easily distracted…
What you want to do in life is to cultivate focus through a technique called productive meditation.
Productive meditation isn’t some weird or mystical
thing. In essence, it’s really just structured thinking.
The goal is to make your thinking more effective and more
valuable.
The reason productive meditation is great is that we can
somehow take a period where we are occupied physically, but not mentally and
still focus on a single well-defined problem.
Instances such as driving a car in a commute, walking your
dog, jogging around the neighborhood do not require mentally demanding deep work.
Typically, when we walk, our minds tend to wander or flit
from thought to thought.
Instead of this, Cal Newport recommends to think
intentionally about a hard problem in your life to solve.
The keyword is intentionally.
Now, as you take your walk and think about this hard problem
in your life, you will get distracted or keep looping around. We all do.
The key is you have to gently guide your brain back
to that specific thought process to the solution. That is the meditation part. Most just let the distractions get the best of them for hours.
When you are aware of what's occurring, you can make adjustments with some effort. Your stale shallow thinking slowly evolves to deep thinking. Deep thinking gets you closer to solving your important problems.
The idea is to take 20 minutes a day to solve the biggest
problem in your life, whether it’s personal, business, family or friends and
thinking it through deeply.
This type of brain training through a span of 3 months,
6 months and on, will allow you to gain
the ability to focus completely and deeply in those full 20 minutes.
Give it a try.
You and your thinking are worth it.
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