Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them - and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but ... getting rid of the damn thing.

This is what I think it takes.

Two things.

One, we have to get it, really get it, that one person’s generative attention produces another person’s new thinking.

Don’t rush that.

Two, a person’s generative attention loses its power the very second it wavers. Attention like this has to be continuous.

Take that in, too. It defies 3,000 years of instruction in how to listen.

Let’s start with the first component’s question:

Where is your attention?

That is the groundbreaking question. Change where your attention is, and you change where another person’s mind is.

Attention generates thinking. Think about that. But maybe don’t think too hard about it because it will make you feel a bit sick remembering how absent it was from the things you were probably taught about being with people.

This puzzled me. But then I thought about this: on screen the promise of no interruption is broken, yes. But not by the listener. It is broken by the platform. And it is the listener’s promise, not the platform’s, that ignites the thinker’s mind. It is the thinker’s trust in that human promise that allows them to claim their own intelligence and fly. And although this means that one of the three aspects of the component of place – the room – is deeply compromised, the most important aspect – the listener – holds steady and perhaps does ‘double duty’ to make up significantly for the interruptive room.

In fact, just the other day I was sent an analysis of this phenomenon by Alan Lightman, physicist and writer:

By not giving ourselves the minutes – or hours – free of devices and distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s distractions, we risk losing our ability to know who we are and what’s important to us. The destruction of our inner selves via the wired world is a subtle phenomenon. The loss of slowness, of time for reflection and contemplation, of privacy and solitude, of silence, of the ability to sit quietly in a chair for fifteen minutes without external stimulation – all have happened quickly and almost invisibly.

The situation is dire. We are losing our ability to know who we are and what is important to us. We are creating a global machine in which each of us is a mindless and reflexive cog, relentlessly driven by the speed, noise, and artificial urgency of the wired world. I would like to make a bold proposal: that half our waking minds be designated and saved for quiet reflection.

We need a mental attitude that protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.