Daniel Goleman explains why great mental focus serves as a vital mainstream driver of personal growth, success, virtue, happiness, and fulfillment in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Former New York Times science author and Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman explains why great mental focus serves as a vital mainstream driver of personal growth, success, virtue, happiness, and fulfillment in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Daniel Goleman (2015)

Focus: the hidden driver of excellence

 

Former New York Times popular science author and Harvard clinical psychologist Daniel Goleman describes, discusses, and delves into why great mental focus can serve as a vital mainstream driver of personal growth, success, virtue, happiness, and fulfillment in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Paying attention pays dividends, but most people still need to master the rare unique ability to focus on one bigger, bolder, and brighter mission at one time for better results, outcomes, and iterative continuous performance improvements. Goleman suggests that great mental focus empowers us to navigate key external life circumstances, vicissitudes, scenarios, and episodes. This focus often allows us to perform our best. As a result, we can better lead our team players to enrich the lives of others for both the current and future generations. Goleman explains many different human brain functions in support of their collective emotional intelligence for lifelong learners, teachers, and business leaders. Goleman draws from many scientific experiments and research studies to explain how people think, feel, and interact with others in the wider social context. In addition to his simple explanations for several different brain functions, Goleman depicts our great mental focus as a key triad of attention paid to the inner, outer, and other targets. This key triad further illuminates the vital importance and practical relevance of emotional intelligence in life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. Goleman compares and contrasts our great focus and attention to mental muscles for iterative continuous improvements, and lifelong learners flex, train, and strengthen these mental muscles over time.

 

From day to day, we send emotional cues, colors, and signals in every encounter. These emotional cues, colors, and signals affect our family and friends, coworkers, leaders, teammates, and even strangers. When we apply emotional intelligence at its best, we are able to enter the new normal steady state of a natural flow of ideas, thoughts, insights, lessons, worldviews, actions, decisions, and behaviors. The key flow empowers us to immerse ourselves in creative, optimal, and impactful actions, pursuits, and experiences. During this key flow, we enjoy with intense mental focus what we try to accomplish in due time. Good examples of flow experiences include reading a novel, writing a book, composing music, coding a new software solution, playing a sport, and painting a portrait. A sense of accomplishment, or warm glow, often serves as the intrinsic reward for each of these flow experiences.

 

Psychologists identify a rare, unique, and positive peak-performance internal state, the flow experience, and this flow experience arises from the best use of emotional intelligence. In this flow experience, we completely engage our hearts, minds, and souls in some tasks, missions, and activities. With stellar skills, we enjoy the work so much that we fully immerse ourselves in applying our innate talents in light of a bigger, bolder, brighter, and broader long-term vision, social good, or life purpose. This flow experience often arrives in the sweet spot between boredom and creative anxiety. Through this flow experience, we feel many positive emotions such as joy, love, awe, peace, interest, gratitude, and inspiration. Emotionally intelligent people use, apply, and leverage these common positive emotions to further enhance self-care, self-efficacy, and internal motivation. In this flow experience, the human brain becomes calmer. This unique brain feature empowers us to complete intellectually hectic, hard, tough, and formidable tasks, missions, and activities with minimal time, effort, and energy.

 

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From day to day, we apply 3 major categories of mental focus to better accomplish tasks, goals, and missions in life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. These 3 major categories of focus include inner focus, outer focus, and other focus. We use, apply, and leverage these different types of mental focus to attain iterative continuous performance improvements. In modern psychology, selective attention refers to the rare unique ability to focus on one particular task, goal, or mission, at a time in spite of numerous external, sensory, and emotional distractions. Staying on target suppresses any emotional interferences. This mental focus helps people remain cool under pressure. In practice, emotions intrude on our own mental focus. It is harder, tougher, and more difficult for us to complete a particular task, goal, or mission when we are upset in a bad mood. Strong, intense, fervent, powerful, and dramatic human emotions interfere with clear rational thoughts, prescient insights, and other ideas. Specifically, fears, dreads, worries, and anxieties undermine the intellectual mind. In our life journey, it is vital for us to find an emotionally intelligent balance between reason and passion.

 

Our attention grows stronger, sharper, smarter, faster, and better with use, practice, and exercise. In a wandering state of mind with substantially less mental focus, we often pause for self-reflection, contemplate future scenarios, hatch new ideas, and question our assumptions. Our self-awareness tends to arise from recognizing our internal cues, thoughts, insights, ideas, habits, rewards, and numerous other social signals. Through our modern life journey, we often learn to interpret these internal cues, rewards, and other social signals accurately to make wise decisions in time. In addition to self-awareness, we empathize with others with substantially greater mental focus. This interpersonal empathy tends to take 3 central forms of cognitive, emotional, and empathic concerns for others. Today, many millennials and young adults grow up with greater attunement to digitally connective smartphones, tablets, computers, and other mobile devices than basic natural attunement to their parents, brothers and sisters, friends, classmates, co-workers, and so forth. Senior leaders should focus attention on the best, most practical, and most productive uses of our skills, talents, expert views, opinions, judgments, core competences, and dynamic capabilities in life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship.

 

Our great mental focus involves not only picking the right task, goal, or mission for smart execution in time, but this focus also requires saying no to all the other wrong tasks, goals, missions, and other human activities. Even though our attention often matters enormously for how we navigate and cope with external life circumstances, vicissitudes, scenarios, and episodes, our attention represents a vital mental asset that people tend to underrate in all its shapes, forms, and varieties. For this reason, we should learn to be more mindful of our own mental focus and selective attention. Although our rational mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts, insights, and even fantasies, our dominant emotional mind more often tends to converge toward fears, dreads, worries, concerns, anxieties, and many other negative emotions. In this sense, the common mechanism that induces our emotional mind to rumination often tends to support psychopathological episodes and conditions such as anxiety, depression, and several other mental disorders.

 

Our social skills and emotionally intelligent solutions account for more than 80% of success in life. Also, higher IQ is not a guarantee of success, virtue, and happiness in modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Many common positive emotions help us better cope with rare hard times of setbacks, failures, obstacles, difficulties, and disappointments. These positive emotions include hope, joy, love, awe, peace, interest, gratitude, amusement, and inspiration. Emotionally intelligent people use, apply, and leverage these common positive emotions to enhance self-care and intrinsic motivation. We should learn to draw a distinction between IQ and EQ: these social skills, talents, and positive personality traits are not opposite core competences, but alternatively, separate dynamic capabilities. Often a person can be intellectually brilliant but emotionally inept. This imbalance can cause many life problems in social relationships. When others tune out some people, these people not only stumble socially, but they also find bad surprises when someone tells them they have acted inappropriately.

 

Although the nexus between mental focus and excellence remains hidden most of the time, this nexus tends to ripple through almost all aspects of our social relations, personal growth advances, and iterative continuous improvements. It is practically useful for us to set aside some regular reflective time in our weekly schedule. This self-reflection helps us get beyond the firefight-of-the-day mentality. In this positive light, we take stock, look ahead, re-focus, and manage to accomplish substantially more tasks, goals, and missions in the next few weeks, months, quarters, and even years. Sometimes lifelong learners attempt to gamify their keystone habits, growth mindsets, hard truths, social relations, worldviews, and positive patterns in iterative continuous improvements in life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. Video games significantly focus our attention, prepare us for fresh challenges, and get us to repeat strategic moves multiple times. As a result, these games can serve as powerful lessons for us to learn new insights, expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions in a smarter, better, more flexible, and more cost-effective manner.

 

Starbucks’s core cultural values and rules for employees inculcate the key concept of willpower. As some research studies show, this key concept of willpower serves as the pre-eminent habit for broader personal success. Just as academic scholars achieve positive results in many other non-academic aspects of their modern lives when they meticulously practice self-discipline and persistence, Starbucks workers improve their own lives, careers, and relationships after they learn the willpower of remaining cheerful regardless of what crops up in their workdays. This key positive willpower is evocative of the famous marshmallow experiment. In the marshmallow experiments, psychologists told little children they could have a marshmallow right away, or they could have 2 marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes alone with the treat in front of them. In the subsequent years, the children who were able to wait for one more marshmallow proved to be substantially more successful throughout their elementary school, secondary school, college, and even the first ever job after college. Specifically, these children were able to apply their self-regulatory skills to delay gratification at a young age. By the same token, people can learn willpower as effectively as they make conscious efforts to learn to play a musical instrument, speak a foreign language, or adapt to many changes in external circumstances of life. Once people master willpower, they should continue to practice applying and improving their willpower, self-discipline, and perseverance, as they would work to exercise daily to keep their muscles firm, fit, brawny, active, and athletic in shape.

 

Self-awareness often serves as our basic, earnest, and essential mental focus on the key results, outcomes, and achievements in due course. This focus attunes us to our subtle internal cues, thoughts, desires, insights, and rewards. As we become more aware of our flaws, faults, failures, setbacks, obstacles, difficulties, and even disappointments, we pivot, persist, and persevere to help guide ourselves through life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. However, we often seem to keep zero neural radar for new potential risks, threats, dangers, and challenges to the global systems in support of human life advancement, even though we sustain our razor-sharp mental focus on smiles and frowns, growls and babies, and so on. In addition to self-awareness, we often learn to direct attention toward key results, tasks, goals, and missions. For senior leaders, this vital, primal, and practical skill helps translate team focus into actionable insights for smart execution. At the same time, senior leaders sometimes disengage our focus and attention from some task, goal, or mission. At a subsequent stage, these senior leaders move our focus and attention to another more important task, goal, or mission. This rare unique power is crucial, effective, and essential for our self-care, self-efficacy, self-improvement, and internal motivation in the long run. In due course, our keystone habits, growth mindsets, hard truths, social relations, worldviews, and positive patterns in iterative continuous performance improvements combine to help enrich the day-to-day lives of others in an increasingly inclusive global society. Although fears, dreads, worries, and anxieties undermine the intellectual mind, it is vital for us to find an emotionally intelligent balance between reason and passion through our modern life journey.

 

Lifelong learners should better pay attention to new ideas, cues, thoughts, insights, actions, social signals, behaviors, and many other human interactions.

How well we pay attention affects almost all aspects of life. Lifelong learners should learn to better focus on the vital matters, critical success factors, mental processes, insights, actions, creative ideas, social signals, and many other human interactions. In effect, we listen, learn, read social signals, understand new creative ideas, cope with hard times, and further enhance our mental models for specific scenarios and episodes of life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. Nowadays most people tend to underestimate the vital importance and practical relevance of focus through our life journey. With substantially smarter, faster, and better mental focus, we create value by compounding skillful execution over many years.

 

We need to practice all 3 major categories of mental focus, inner focus, outer focus, and other focus, to function well in life. Inner focus refers to heeding our hunches, instincts, core values, expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions etc. Outer focus allows us to adapt to external life circumstances, vicissitudes, scenarios, and episodes. Other focus revolves around how we read and understand social signals in response to others in the broader social context. We better relate to the emotions of others with greater mental focus, love, and empathy. In effect, we better connect with others by applying the smarter triad of mental focus to maintain a delicate and emotionally intelligent balance between reason and passion.

 

Someone who focuses on composing music on a PC in a busy cafe demonstrates selective attention. Selective attention refers to focusing on only one particular task, goal, or mission with no regard to external distractions. Sometimes these external distractions can be either sensory or emotional. From shapes and colors to sounds and textures, sensory distractions stimulate our senses. Emotional distractions cut through the clutter to draw our attention. For instance, someone calls our name in a busy restaurant. Sometimes these external distractions evoke emotions as they make us feel intrinsically in some specific manners with evanescent smiles, frowns, memories, and reactions. Emotions often intrude on our mental focus. It is harder, tougher, and more difficult for us to complete some task, goal, or mission when we are upset in a bad mood. Intense, fervent, powerful, and dramatic human emotions often interfere with our clear rational thoughts, prescient insights, and other ideas. Specifically, fears, dreads, worries, and anxieties undermine the intellectual mind. In our life journey, it is vital for us to find an emotionally intelligent balance between reason and passion.

 

The brain’s pre-frontal region is responsible for selective attention. When we focus our time, effort, and energy on some specific task, goal, or mission, we often make iterative continuous improvements in our peak performance, task completion, goal attainment, and mission accomplishment. This deliberate selective attention allows us to gradually stretch our mental, physical, and even intellectual limits. Staying on target helps suppress emotional interferences. As a result, such selective attention helps us remain cool under pressure. Our mental health is sound when we control our attention by focusing on one task, goal, or mission at a time, and then moving onto the next. Jumping abruptly from one task to another with no good reason often multiplies our negative emotions such as fears, dreads, worries, and anxieties. In due course, such emotional interferences further make us feel helpless with a lack of progress.

 

We tend to better focus on our peak performance, task completion, goal attainment, and mission accomplishment, especially when we enjoy applying our skills, talents, core competences, and dynamic capabilities. Feeling in the zone targets the sweet spot between boredom and creative anxiety. This natural baseline flow experience results from greater immersion in one enjoyable, productive, and impactful activity. This greater immersion empowers us to experience internal motivation, intellectual stimulation, and a positive sense of accomplishment in time. Sometimes new and even harder tasks, threats, and challenges serve as new opportunities for this flow experience with substantially greater focus, immersion, and intellectual stimulation. By contrast, repetitive routine tasks and missions can cause boredom, apathy, and disengagement. In life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship, senior leaders should learn to assign work on the manifold basis of mental focus, immersion, peak performance, and sufficient intellectual stimulation. In a positive sense, all the team players should cooperate to make iterative continuous performance improvements, and even disruptive innovations, in response to new and hidden blue-ocean market demands, opportunities, and user preferences.

 

The human brain comprises 2 semi-independent systems. Also known as the neo-cortex, this top brain governs our rational, logical, and analytical thoughts, insights, expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions at the blink of an eye. In essence, the top brain serves as the key locus of voluntary mental focus under our conscious control. The top brain is active when we watch a sunset, join a phone call, plan our day, or learn a new task. By contrast, the bottom brain runs and operates massive computational power under our subconscious control. The bottom brain comes to the forefront only when we face several unforeseen life circumstances, vicissitudes, scenarios, and episodes. At these moments, the bottom brain activates subcortical circuitry to communicate directly with the top brain for better mental focus, attention, and coordination. With emotional stimulation, the bottom brain runs and operates massive computational power in a fast, reflexive, and involuntary way. The bottom brain handles many rote routine actions, filters outside changes and emotions, and constantly learns, adapts, and adjusts human perceptions. Indeed, emotions sway the bottom brain. Sometimes the top-to-bottom brains share mental focus activities to optimize our key results, outcomes, tasks, actions, missions, and achievements. For instance, we master driving the car as the top brain learns, adapts, and adjusts our human perceptions, and the bottom brain takes over several rote, routine, and almost instinctive actions for steering behind the wheel.

 

Midbrain circuitry notices outside changes, physical threats, and human emotions on a neural level. For example, a baby’s cry, a toxic spider on the wall, or a sudden rainfall attracts our attention, and this immediate reaction sends signals to the top brain. The brain’s amygdala checks all our external life circumstances, vicissitudes, scenarios, and episodes for any new threats, dangers, and challenges. Specifically, the brain’s amygdala senses some threats and dangers and then sends alarms to the bottom brain. At these moments, the bottom brain commandeers emotions until the top brain further analyzes the new threats, dangers, and challenges. As the top brain calms our bottom brain and the rest of the body, the new calm signals defend ourselves with less intense emotions.

 

In a wandering state of mind with significantly less mental focus, we pause for self-reflection, hatch new ideas, question our assumptions, dwell on many kinds of past vivid memories, and think about all possible future scenarios. In this default context, our thoughts travel, wander, and meander through time when we cease to engage ourselves in some immersive tasks, missions, and experiences. Brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex activates during downtime. This prefrontal cortex serves as our executive brain system for smarter, faster, better, and greater mental focus. When our mind wanders over time, our sensory systems seem to dim in due course. For this reason, some relaxation exercises that require little laser focus free up our mind to ramble. When we focus sharply on some task, goal, and mission, this focus quells outside stimulants. Indeed, it can be tough for us to sustain sharp focus and deep attention for several hours. Ultimately, this sharp focus drains our energy. To replenish our energy, we take breaks, meditate for a while, play some sport, or try some fun activity.

 

We should learn to be more mindful of our recent immersive flow experiences with greater self-care, self-control, self-awareness, and self-efficacy.

Our self-awareness often seems to result from recognizing our internal cues, ideas, thoughts, insights, habits, rewards, and several other social signals. Through our modern life journey, we need to interpret these internal cues, rewards, and social signals accurately to make wise decisions in time. People who remain in sync with their inner voices have highly effective gut messages from the brain’s frontal lobes. These frontal lobes serve as the central nerve system for our internal organs. Over time, these gut messages help us better intuitively come up with fresh ideas, views, values, opinions, judgments, and decisions. These ideas become more concrete as we articulate them to ourselves. When we practice what we preach, we enhance our self-care, self-control, self-awareness, and self-efficacy with sharper focus.

 

Self-awareness serves as our sharp, deep, and broad mental focus, and this focus works as an internal compass. Self-awareness governs our internal cues, thoughts, ideas, insights, actions, decisions, and behaviors. This deep self-awareness helps better align our internal cues and rewards with our core values, central beliefs, and life principles. Greater willpower, self-care, and self-control serve as our main brain functions of executive attention. When we focus on completing some task, goal, or mission, this focus requires applying self-control to subdue our impulses with fewer intrusive emotions. In the 1970s, one iconic study by the social psychologist Walter Mischel showed the marshmallow test that young children who were able to delay gratification achieved substantially better performance through elementary school, middle school, college, and even the first job after college. Given these longer-run experimental results, social psychologists argue that people who learn to maintain the rare unique ability to delay gratification often tend to perform significantly better in almost all aspects of their adult lives.

 

Cognitive empathy is another top-down human brain function. This particular brain function allows us to look at many matters in life from another person’s perspective. In this rare unique fashion, we understand another person’s internal cues, thoughts, ideas, insights, actions, and emotions. Moreover, we better manage our emotional responses when we empathize with others. When our internal emotions align with someone else’s emotions, we learn to experience the bottom-up brain response of emotional empathy. Our empathic concerns often prompt us to take helpful actions in response to the basic needs, demands, and emotions of others. We empathize with others with substantially more mental focus. This interpersonal empathy tends to take 3 primary forms of cognitive, emotional, and empathic concerns for others. Today, many millennials and other young adults grow up with greater attunement to digitally connective smartphones, tablets, computers, and other mobile devices than natural attunement to their parents, brothers and sisters, friends, classmates, and co-workers. Senior leaders should focus attention on the best, most practical, and most productive uses of our skills, talents, expert views, opinions, judgments, core competences, and dynamic capabilities in life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. This interpersonal empathy can help train many millennials and other young adults to better focus on applying their rare unique skills, talents, core competences, and dynamic capabilities not only for broader business success but also for personal fulfillment in life. In time, this team empathy combines with expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions to cause the next disruptive innovations, technological advancements, and several other iterative continuous improvements in teamwork, interactive team performance, and dynamic team progression. In this broader social context, the whole team gameplay becomes bigger than the sum of individual parts.

 

In collaborative teamwork, we often need to focus to tune in to the non-verbal cues, gestures, and emotions of others. These non-verbal cues, gestures, and emotions include facial expressions, smiles, frowns, body languages, perceptions, and other social movements. Sometimes we feel someone else’s pain, dread, distress, and frustration in our amygdala. This physiological response helps focus our attention on some parts and regions of the human brain in relation to social sensitivity. This focus allows us to feel love, mercy, and compassion for others. As a result, we can better manage our emotional reactions. Love, mercy, and compassion tend to grow naturally from social empathy. In practice, people want, seek, and expect empathy from doctors, teachers, senior business leaders, and family and friends. In recent clinical trials, patients are more likely to sue their doctors for malpractice when the physicians share substantially fewer signs of social empathy, even if their average error rate matches the average error rate of more empathetic doctors.

 

Everyone’s social sensitivity, acuity, empathy often tend to fall on a continuum from socially oblivious to highly intuitive. People who fail to notice social cues often act inappropriately, miss nonverbal messages, and misread the broader social context. These people are not aware or even oblivious when they make some social gaffes. These social gaffes may involve being rude, making bad noises, and speaking too loudly in a quiet place. Where we fall on the social hierarchy further affects our rare unique ability to read the social cues, gestures, and emotions of others. In modern life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship, senior leaders should learn to be aware of the statistically significant correlation between power and attention. Most people pay significant attention to the social cues, gestures, and emotions of senior leaders. However, these senior leaders are often less aware and even oblivious of the social cues, gestures, and emotions of both their direct reports and other junior team players.

 

With greater mental focus, most people describe, depict, design, and develop rare unique mental models to better understand wider system navigation in accordance with the neoclassical 10,000-hour heuristic rule of thumb for expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions.

No single area of the human brain deals exclusively with wider system navigation, recognition, and comprehension. However, our rational mind often uses the brain’s parietal cortex to learn new positive patterns for iterative continuous performance improvements. This rare unique ability for us to better read broader social systems is a lifelong mental focus process. This focus process is separate from self-mastery, self-awareness, and social empathy. System navigation is an essential life skill for many senior leaders in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. In practice, people learn, master, and understand social systems indirectly by building unique mental models through firsthand experiences. In the broader social context, many distributive knowledge spillovers can often help these senior leaders better absorb the social cues, gestures, and emotions of others. With greater mental focus, most people describe, depict, design, and develop rare unique mental models to better understand broader system navigation in accordance with the neo-classic 10,000-hour heuristic rule of thumb for expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions.

 

The cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson describes the neo-classic 10,000-hour heuristic rule of thumb for human expertise in medicine, music, chess, and sports. In essence, this rule suggests that achieving the highest possible level of expertise takes at least 10,000 hours of professional practice. This professional practice can help make almost perfect performance when we deliberately focus to practice in a smart way. Specifically, we should seek to make iterative continuous performance improvements over the finite time frame of at least 10,000 hours with greater focus, attention, and feedback. Lifelong learners pay substantially more attention to many micro-to-macro skill adjustments for peak performance, practice, and productivity. Just as dancers practice in front of a mirror, productive practice requires real-time feedback on iterative continuous performance improvements.  

 

Professional athletes, doctors, experts, and many other peak performers and high achievers better balance the brain’s natural inclination to make rote routines semi-automatic. With immediate feedback, productive practice helps transfer these rote routines to the bottom brain with vivid emotional memories. These high achievers use, apply, and leverage mental focus, skill development, refinement, and positivity to further strengthen their midbrain circuitry. Feeling upbeat is a vital requirement for productive practice. From hope, love, peace, and joy to contentment, happiness, and optimism, positive emotions ignite the human brain’s left prefrontal region for us to feel greater interest, internal motivation, self-awareness, and self-efficacy.

 

Today, we should learn to be more mindful of our internal states, instincts, interests, desires, and other natural human emotions. Mindfulness refers to the peak practice of paying attention to attention. Meditation often helps us better focus on our inner states. In this rare unique fashion, we can better develop our inner capacity to find ourselves in the moment with no judgment. Meditation helps strengthen our mental focus by incrementally improving our innate ability to sustain attention. This innate meditation cycle rotates through 4 major steps. The mind first wanders; we notice our wandering state of mind; we seek to shift our mental focus and attention to our deep breaths; and then we maintain our mental focus and attention right there until our mind starts wandering again.

 

Sometimes lifelong learners seek to gamify their keystone habits, growth mindsets, hard truths, social relations, worldviews, and iterative continuous improvements in life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship. These games help focus our attention, prepare us for new challenges, and motivate us to repeat some strategic moves many times. As a result, these games serve as powerful lessons for us to learn new insights, expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions in a smarter, faster, better, more flexible, and more cost-effective manner.

Playing video games generally diminishes our brainpower. Particular video games can however help improve some cognitive dynamic capabilities. These capabilities include visual acuity, spatial comprehension, greater perceptive attention, wisdom, prescience, eye-to-hand coordination, and the rare unique capability for us to make better decisions in time. Smart games that help substantially improve our cognitive focus have become educational tools, robots, machines, and instruments. These smart games provide real-time corrective feedback to each game player, fair game progression, some specific tasks, goals, and missions for different levels of game play, and new challenges and opportunities for us to apply specific skills in different social contexts.

 

Sometimes lifelong learners seek to gamify their keystone habits, growth mindsets, hard truths, social relations, worldviews, and iterative continuous improvements in life, business, innovation, and entrepreneurship. These smart games substantially focus our attention on some specific tasks, prepare us for new challenges, and get us to repeat strategic moves many times. As a result, these smart games serve as powerful lessons for us to learn deeper insights, expert views, opinions, judgments, and decisions in a smarter, better, more flexible, and more cost-effective manner.

 

In the modern era of information technology, the constant temptation of technology diverts, demands, and waylays cognitive focus and attention from many millennials and young adults. Today, many millennials and young adults grow up with greater attunement to smartphones, computers, and many other mobile devices than basic natural attunement to their parents, brothers and sisters, friends, classmates, and co-workers. These young people develop cognitive skills for navigating the virtual world at the hefty cost of both mindful and attentive interpersonal skills for them to build rapport, empathy, and social dexterity. Also, these young people might find it hard to maintain their attention span by reading more than 15 pages, listening to a speech or a lecture for more than 15 minutes, or checking the smartphone no more than once every 15 minutes. In support of better social relationships, senior leaders should focus attention on the best, most practical, and most productive uses of our skills, talents, expert views, opinions, judgments, core competences, and dynamic capabilities in modern life, business, innovation, and even entrepreneurship.

 

All kinds of effective leaders should focus attention on the best, most practical, and most productive uses of internal organizational resources. These resources span rare unique brainpower, professional expertise, AI robots, machines, avatars, and instruments, other technological advances, tangible assets, and so forth. Effective leadership requires keeping laser focus on the core values, central beliefs, and life principles. In the vast majority of corporate conferences, departmental committees, team councils, and one-on-one discussions, senior leaders should communicate their core values, beliefs, and life principles in support of the bolder, bigger, brighter, and broader long-term vision. For better corporate performance, this vision unites, inspires, and motivates most team players to accomplish the medium-term mission, social good, and life purpose. Lifelong learners listen, focus, adapt, respond, and collaborate with others through sound social skills and interpersonal relationships. In time, senior leaders focus on the big picture, adjust complex gameplay systems, and inspire all team players to help attain key results, outcomes, and decisions in the future.

 

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