221: Attend to your attention

What you attend to determines what you learn from life.

I have a friend who quotes some ancient theologian to the effect that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

What does that mean?

I think I can illustrate it with a story about zucchini bread.

When I was 17 or 18 I was driving a friend to college in Pennsylvania. This would have been at the end of the summer or in the early Fall. On the trip, she mentioned zucchini bread, which – so far as I knew – I had never heard of before in my life.

When I got home that night, there was a loaf of zucchini bread sitting on my parents’ dining room table. Our neighbor had brought it by that day.

What a coincidence, right? How did that happen?

There’s nothing magical going on here. That time of year is a good time for zucchini bread, which is why my friend mentioned it, and also why my neighbor made a loaf.

Think of it this way. Our brains are assaulted by ten billion things a day. We can’t possibly pay attention to or remember all of them. Most of them fly right by.

What distinguishes the ones that don’t fly right by? We might say that they “grab our attention.” And while there may be some sense in that, I think it goes the other way. They don’t grab our attention. Our attention grabs them.

In other words, if I had come home from my trip and found a loaf of zucchini bread on the dining room table, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, and a week later, if you asked me about zucchini bread, I might not have remembered it. It stood out to me precisely because it was in my recent memory. It was an element of what I was attending to that day.

What’s the takeaway?

Ten billion things are flying past you every day. Which ones will you learn from?

You’ll learn from the ones that you’re paying attention to. If you’re thinking about marketing all the time, you’ll find marketing lessons everywhere. If you’re thinking about content creation all the time, you’ll find lessons about content creation.

When the student is ready – that is, when the student is paying attention – the teacher will appear.

There are lessons all around us all the time. We just have to listen.