Here’s an interesting quote from William Latson, a famous New Thought writer:
“Now what is concentration? In a word, concentration may be defined as being that state of mind which the total and entire energies of the individual, physical as well as mental, are focused upon the thing is doing or thinking.
All actions and all thoughts not connected with what he is doing or thinking are kept out of the mind; and all his forces are bent upon the task in hand.
He who can do this has concentration, has the power of attention. He who has not this power must acquire it before he can hope to do or be anything admirable or worthy in the world.
Now concentration is largely a negative process; it depends as much upon what you do not do, as upon what you do.
To take an example: You sit down to write a difficult letter. The trolley car whizzes by with its villainous “bang-bang”. You are suddenly reminded that you should have gone down town to get that book your wife wanted.
But there’s the letter. You turn back to it. You write another line or two, and then – suddenly you hear the excited bark of little Fido, the scotch terrier. You go to the window and look out. Nothing the matter – only another terrier not quite so scotch across the street.
You read back a few lines of your letter and start again. You don’t quite know what to say. Your eye wanders round the room. Ah, yes, that suit to be pressed. You attend to this matter. Then back to your letter. And so on.
A half-hour has passed, and the letter is only begun. Now this is a fair example of the lack of concentration – of a wandering mind. And such a habit of thought is an absolute bar to any achievement that is helpful either to one’s self or to the world at large.”
You can read this description and immediately notice how applicable it is to todays world as well. So we don’t write letters anymore. But we write emails.
And this description fits people of the early 1900s as it fits now more than a century later.
Human nature is the same and we continue to struggle with the same mental challenges someone from 1900s had. We continue to procrastinate and be unfocused in our tasks.
Nothing truly changed. If anything, it changed for the worst, since now the distractions are much more enticing. Now, it’s no longer a dog barking or a trolley car whizzing by. Now it’s a cell phone notification, a messenger chat, aimless browsing and facebook.
And all of them are built to grab your attention regardless of what you are doing. The engineers are working hard to make sure their software creations grab your attention faster and longer.
That’s why you should guard your attention with an iron shield and cultivate your concentration as best as you can.
It’s the single most important skill you can have in todays world.
That’s what we train in Concentration and Mind Control course.