Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallager - Review

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life has a fairly simple premise that is revealed in the book’s subtitle: the quality of your life depends on what you pay attention to. Sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? But there is more than meets the eye.

Gallager claims that: “Skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience, from mood to productivity to relationships.”

And,

If you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art.

A hidden lies behind this approach. While you cannot control whether you’ll always be happy, due to circumstance beyond your control, you can choose to be focused, which Gallager says, “is the next best thing.”

Paying attention doesn’t mean just focusing on the external world but also to your internal world, in particular to positive emotions which “literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it.”

Paying attention also doesn’t consist just of sitting “rapt” on nothing particular. Gallager incorporates the concept “flow”, originally identified by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, in which the challenge we tackle stretches us a bit. If the task is too easy we drift into boredom; too challenging and we start to feel anxiety. Csikszenmihalyi’s research into rock climbers, artists, etc. found that people found flow when they became absorbed in their work, losing sense of time and even of self.

To live a life filled with raptness Gallager recommends: “The antidote to leisure-time ennui is to pay as much attention to scheduling a productive evening or weekend as you do to your workday.”

Over time, a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life.

Recently I reviewed the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I believe there is a natural connection between the two approaches. We can strive to be rapt as much as we want but I think our efforts will be thwarted if we have what Dweck calls a “fixed” mindset, the belief that we are saddled with innate talents with little room for development. I think this mindset will make it more difficult to slide into raptness because we’ll be too concerned about avoiding challenges, one of Dweck’s findings about the consequence of having a fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset fear taking on challenges because should they fail it would reveal that maybe their innate talent isn’t as deep or as strong as they believe. And, having a fixed mindset means they can’t do anything about it!

A person with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believes they can improve and therefore will look for challenges that lead to raptness.

(Just this week I also picked up another book in the same vein: Curious?: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life by Todd Kashdan. It will be interesting to see how his ideas mesh with Gallager’s and Dweck’s. Stay tuned!)

Overall, I highly recommend Rapt. It deserves your focused attention.