Good morning. In this age of constant distraction, we could all stand to “lock in.”
Focus pointLast week, my colleague Nicole Stock wrote about the Great Lock In challenge on TikTok. “It’s just about hunkering down for the rest of the year and doing everything that you said you’re going to do,” a content creator told Nicole. Participants set goals — run a marathon, reach 100,000 Instagram followers — they hope to reach before Dec. 31, when the rest of the world typically makes their resolutions. When you’re locked in, you’re hyper-focused. Nothing is going to divert your attention, nothing will deter you from reaching your goal. Doesn’t this sound appealing? Sometimes it seems that the world is composed entirely of distractions, a mess of seductively windy byways coaxing you off the path. These detours form a tangle so convoluted that any efforts to make it back to the trailhead are futile. I’ve been trying lately to examine the conditions necessary for undivided attention on a task, whether it’s taking on a long-term aspiration or just making it through a lengthy article on my iPad without meandering to, say, answer three texts, do a little of the crossword, pay my electric bill, check tomorrow’s weather. We tell ourselves that if we could just get off our devices, we could lock in. I find it amusing and slightly alarming to observe how my brain is online even when I’m not. When my thoughts reach an impasse or my memory glitches, my brain assumes a Google search is impending, help is on the way. There’s a pause where my brain wants to hand off the baton to the machine. When the machine isn’t there, there’s static before the brain, crackling back to life, remembers that it knows how to think without help, without every unknown addressed. It’s silly to say, but I miss the spaces my brain used to hold before it saw all the things it didn’t know as knowable. Creativity happened there. I think about flow, that effortless state that athletes and artists experience when they’re performing or working and everything aligns, when self-consciousness evaporates and they’re totally absorbed in the task at hand. This kind of locked-in-ness isn’t a state you can will into happening by turning off your phone or being disciplined. It happens on its own, when the conditions are favorable. I covet flow, imagine sometimes I’ve achieved it when working, wonder how to create the environment for it to happen again. My friend Peter is a writer, the author of several books, fiction and nonfiction. He seems, always, to be in a locked-in state. He’s a closer. When he says he’s going to get work done, he does it. I asked him about how one can get so locked in that a goal — cleaning out the garage, doing 100 push-ups, finishing a novel — feels attainable, and that the journey toward it feels like its own reward. How can one, if not engineer flow, at least cultivate habits that might invite it? “If you think of the end product, you’re toast,” he said, sort of, though he used an expletive in place of “toast” that we wouldn’t publish in The Morning. When endeavoring a big project, he said, your mantra must be, “I gotta move a little bit forward today,” rather than, “I must meet my goal.” This makes sense: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business,” T.S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker.” It’s inspiring, exciting, healthy to set goals and focus on achieving them. But letting go of attachment to the outcome, making our business the trying rather than the end product, allows us to enjoy our lives along the way, whether we arrive at our planned destination or somewhere else entirely.
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