How to maintain long-term, sustained and stable efforts?
Let’s talk about an interesting phenomenon.
I find that all the people who study and work inefficiently have a puzzle: why when it comes to doing things, they feel that the wind and grass all over the world are temptations.
Long-term?
Sustained?
Stable?
Strive? Can’t
do it, can’t do it.
When you can’t concentrate, most of the hard work and effort is time consuming, inefficient and exhausting.
Diligence can only determine the lower limit. What really determines the gap between people is whether you can concentrate on what you are doing for a long time and concentrate on it.
And that’s what good people really have. When they
concentrate on their study and work, they can almost ignore the whole world and keep their full attention and high concentration.
What is more terrible is that as long as they need, they can often continue to do this for more than ten hours a day, and never slack off over the years.
This is the real quality behind the appearance of diligence, a more fundamental ability: concentration.
Ten hours of diligence is not as good as one hour of concentration.
But what a lot of people don’t realize is that concentration is more like a gift, a spontaneous act, than something like diligence. The
same family environment, the same parents, two children study together, one may be single-minded, the other half-hearted. The Qingbei Xueba students
I mentioned earlier, almost since elementary school, have always been more focused than their peers, more able to resist external temptations and maintain efficient learning for a longer time.
Modern neuroscience research has found that this attention system, which can ignore interference and inhibit impulses, generally begins to develop at the age of 3 and reaches maturity at the age of 8.
This means that the vast majority of people’s ability to focus is determined at an early age, and some people (about 10%) are even born with attention deficit disorder.
They can’t even focus for an hour or two. In
modern society, concentration is an extremely scarce talent.
Scarcity means that people with this ability are more likely to stand out. When I
was in junior high school, I began to realize that concentration was probably a natural ability.
Some people just study and read all day, and they don’t feel tired or painful, so they can maintain long-term, sustained and stable efforts. Once
I study for more than two hours, I will feel miserable. I am often distracted in
class and like to do other things in self-study. When the door of the classroom is blown open by the wind, I am usually the first person to turn around and look at it.
But in the third year of senior high school, because of my strong desire to change my destiny through the college entrance examination, I finally broke out a strong fighting spirit. During the
winter vacation, I shut myself in my room, reading and studying from morning till night with a dim incandescent lamp. In the south
without heating, my hands were covered with frostbite. When I couldn’t stand the cold, I ran two laps in the yard. When I was tired, I slept on my stomach. When I woke up, I continued to learn.
At that time, I knew that although I was not born with strong concentration, I could still force myself to stay focused through willpower. It wasn’t
until I looked at psychology that I learned that concentration includes two nervous systems, “bottom-up” and “top-down,” which correspond to “instinct-driven” and “motivation-driven.”. For example
, when you run or play games, you don’t need to do anything to concentrate, and you don’t need to work hard. This is the realm of instinct and talent.
From top to bottom, just like cramming before an exam, we need to overcome our inner slackness, overcome external temptations and remind ourselves at all times. It is very difficult to do
without strong motivation.
To be honest, everyone has reached this age and has already passed the period of talent accumulation and development. It is almost impossible to concentrate on instinct. How strongly motivated
you are, how much control you have over your attention.
Psychological studies have even found that if people are motivated enough to stay awake for three or more nights in a row, they can maintain sharp concentration, but if they don’t care at all, they will soon start to fall asleep. The reason why
I emphasize concentration.
The first reason is that if we lack concentration for a long time, we are likely to become absent-minded in life and eventually miss too many opportunities, beauty and possibilities.
We must not live a life like a walking corpse.
As psychologist Platonov once said, the best way to make yourself a very focused person is not to be careless in whatever you do.
The second reason is that when we consciously exercise concentration through the “top-down” system, this ability will eventually affect the “bottom-up” system.
That is to say, concentration can be achieved or strengthened through acquired training.
Finally, let’s have some dry goods.
Over the years, I have summed up my approach to how to enhance concentration through active awareness into three levels.
The first level is to create an environment conducive to concentration.
A friend of mine plays games in Tencent, which is the largest department of Tencent. They are talented people who work overtime for 12 hours every night. Their main job is to make the game more interesting and make your attention more focused on the game.
Another friend in today’s headlines, doing information flow, is under great pressure. He used to be in an advertising company. If an advertisement could not attract people for more than 10 seconds, people would change the channel.
But now with information flow, if a page can’t be seen in five seconds, people may click on other APPs, so they need to constantly develop the most attractive algorithms and create more gimmicky content.
As a result, he told me recently that he was addicted to Tik Tok. Sometimes he just went in along the link point carelessly. If he was not interested, he would immediately brush the next one. An hour or two passed carelessly.
From a commercial point of view, Tencent, Toutiao and even Tik Tok are all successful.
But for me, it was a huge wake-up call. Every minute of my
life is occupied by something like this. How can I concentrate on something else.
Excessive information consumes people’s attention. The more information, the less attention people pay. The more distracted we are, the more difficult it is to think deeply. The shorter the time we think, the more superficial it is.
So, for people like me who are naturally not strong in concentration, the best way is not to create “enemies” for their fragile concentration, not to see, not to pay attention, not to install these dazzling things, so that they are in a more conducive environment for concentration.
Spare time to read more paper books and think deeply. The reason why
this realm is the lowest is that it relies entirely on confrontation with the outside world and is too passive.
The second level: Training into the mode of concentration, concentration and muscle contraction will produce fatigue.
This means that if you don’t have a strong natural attention span, don’t do the challenge of watching five hours of movies or playing six hours of games before learning to work.
Learn to use 80% of your energy to do 20% of the important work, but also learn to exercise consciously, so that when you need to concentrate, you can quickly take heart, as long as you want to put your attention into it.
For example, consciously associate your ability to concentrate with certain sounds and smells, and when you need to concentrate, play this music and light some kind of incense to remind yourself to enter the concentration mode.
For example, when you need to concentrate, meditate for 5 minutes to calm the complicated thoughts in your brain. Once you notice that your mind is wandering, remind yourself to pull back. If your mind is wandering again, repeat the same steps and repeat the cycle.
With practice, it becomes easier and easier to stop thinking and stay focused.
Chronic meditators have increased neural connections in their brains, in the same way that strong weightlifters have perfect chest muscles. Another
extreme way is to put yourself in some kind of “dangerous situation” on a regular basis, which is one of the reasons why many people love dangerous sports such as mountain climbing. Dangerous sports allow instinct to take over the control of your brain, so that you have to devote all your attention.
In this way, we can feel the process of concentration and experience the powerful energy of concentration, which helps us to train ourselves to enter this mode in our daily life. The Pomodoro Technique for
time management is also a good training method. The brain will gradually get used to this time cycle. When you need to concentrate, the brain will concentrate. If you are interested, you can reply to “Time” in the background to see related articles.
At this point, concentration is more dependent on your inner discipline and discipline, and you can consciously control your attention.
When we use willpower to support concentration and consciously suppress all kinds of interference, after long-term training, concentration may change from active action to passive form, and instinctive concentration can be restored and improved. It is
even possible that because of too much concentration, we will enter a state of forgetting both things and having no joy or sorrow, and even the passage of time can not be perceived. The feeling of peace and joy caused by
this intense concentration is called flow.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people only have this experience when they play games.
Of course, there is another thing that psychology recommends without any inclination that all people can easily experience flow-making love.
But in addition, most people can’t get into the flow of all the things that need to be actively engaged, such as reading, studying, working, writing code and so on. The brain is reminding itself all the time: tired, tired, take a break. One of the secrets to generating more flow in our
lives is to combine our attention and interest. Those who can do this are undoubtedly lucky. Those who have achieved great success in any field have found this combination.
In addition, there are other ways to generate flow. For example, when we deal with one thing wholeheartedly, we exert our ability to the maximum, and reach the scope of “within our power”, flow may also occur.
Regarding the brain as an army, the flow of mind is when the whole army is at its strongest, every unit is mobilized, charging, archery, grain transportation, and hundreds of millions of nerve signals are flowing in an endless and well-organized way.
At that moment, the neural connections between different brain regions are frequent and precise, and in this state, no matter what we do, we can perform at our best level. When
some famous writers were young, they often wandered among them, full of ideas and words, but as their energy declined, they could not enter this state, and even tried to take stimulants. The reason why Sherlock Holmes and Conan in
detective novels seem to be able to pay attention to amazing details that ordinary people can’t understand is that they can maintain a state of flow for a long time.
Unfortunately, for ordinary people, flow is always an ideal state that can be met but not sought. I can only enter it occasionally in my work or writing, so I can’t accurately describe that wonderful feeling. To finish,
Steve Jobs said, “Focus and simplicity are my mantra. You have to work harder to keep your mind clean and simple, because once you do, you can move mountains.”.
— —. Focus on not getting lost ~
