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 secondary sensing phenomenon is actually erosive. Matthew Crawford, in his The World Beyond Your Head (another masterpiece you should read before you do a single other thing), says that one of the ways we lose our ability to think is to surrender it to secondary sensing devices. We stop thinking when we obey the perceiver that is not in the room.

... your system of thought hides itself as the author of what you see, think or do.

When you make a fantasy affirmation and declaration, you assume that it will happen by itself.

Many of us have a hard time learning from our decisions. One reason is that our thinking and decision-making process is often invisible to us. We inadvertently conceal from ourselves the steps we took to reach our final decision. Once that decision gets made, we don’t stop to reflect, but just move forward. And when we look back at our decision later, our ego manipulates our memories. We confuse what we know now with what we knew at the time we made the decision. And we see the outcomes and read them back into our intentions: “Oh, I meant to do that.”

If you don’t check your thinking at the time you made the decision— what you knew, what you thought was important, and how you reasoned about it— you’ll never know whether you made a good decision or just got lucky. If you want to learn from decisions, you need to make the invisible thought process as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. The following safeguard can help:

Safeguard: Keep a record of your thoughts at the time you make the decision.