Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [22]
Yet despite this constant effort of focused intelligence, R. gives the impression of restfulness, of calm serenity. He always seems aware of the tiniest ripples of activity in his surroundings. But R. does not notice things in order to change them or judge them. He is content to register reality, to understand, and then, perhaps, to express his understanding. R. is not going to make the immediate impact on society that E. has. But his consciousness is just as ordered and complex; his attention is stretched as far as it can go, interacting with the world around him. And like E., he seems to enjoy his life intensely.
Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy—as do E. and R. in the previous examples—or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested. The names we use to describe personality traits—such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid—refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention. At the same party, the extrovert will seek out and enjoy interactions with others, the high achiever will look for useful business contacts, and the paranoid will be on guard for signs of danger he must avoid. Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life either rich or miserable.
The flexibility of attentional structures is even more obvious when they are compared across cultures or occupational classes. Eskimo hunters are trained to discriminate between dozens of types of snow, and are always aware of the direction and speed of the wind. Traditional Melanesian sailors can be taken blindfolded to any point of the ocean within a radius of several hundred miles from their island home and, if allowed to float for a few minutes in the sea, are able to recognize the spot by the feel of the currents on their bodies. A musician structures her attention so as to focus on nuances of sound that ordinary people are not aware of, a stockbroker focuses on tiny changes in the market that others do not register, a good clinical diagnostician has an uncanny eye for symptoms—because they have trained their attention to process signals that otherwise would pass unnoticed.
Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.
ENTER THE SELF
But what do those first-person pronouns refer to in the lines above, those we s and our s that are supposed to control attention? Where is the I, the entity that decides what to do with the psychic energy generated by the nervous system? Where does the captain of the ship, the master of the soul, reside?
As soon as we consider these questions for even a short while, we realize that the I, or the self as we shall refer to it from now on, is also one of the contents of consciousness. It is one that never strays very far from the focus of attention. Of course my own self exists solely in my own consciousness; in that of others who know