Deconstructing Yourself

by Michael W. Taft Are you having trouble staying focused on your tax return? Is texting so fascinating that you can’t keep your eyes on the road? Concentration can be difficult for all of us, but it doesn’t actually have to be so hard. With just a few simple tricks and hacks, you can drastically [...]

by Michael W. Taft If you cannot focus on one thing at a time, or cannot maintain attention on one thing for as long as you want to, that is distraction. Distraction dilutes brain power, frazzles the nerves, and results in non-optimum outcomes. You end up stressed out and spun around, and don’t even have [...]

by Charles Choi Meditation is often thought to help open up the mind, and new findings suggest it can steer people away from the mental traps that drag out problem solving. Meditative techniques could help not only help negotiators and managers find novel solutions to challenges, but perhaps also help people who are depressed or [...]

by Michael W. Taft I was in Paris recently, and visited the Rodin museum. I’ve always loved his work, and some of the best pieces are at this gorgeous 18th century hotel-cum-museum. In the garden outside sat the French sculptor’s most well known piece, The Thinker, atop a tall granite plinth. As I gazed at [...]

Nothing is more important to meditation than the quality of attention. In mindfulness meditation, we are doing more than just concentrating—the point is to concentrate on something useful—but to do it requires high quality attention. Between the rise of mindfulness practices in America and the rise of the Internet and a host of distractions, attention [...]

by Michael W. Taft In the last three articles, I wrote about concentration as an iterative process, the activity of listening, and the skill of breaking things down into smaller, manageable pieces. In other articles we also looked at how multitasking is multi-failing, and ways to reduce distraction. At this point you probably get the [...]

by Michael W. Taft You may think that you are too busy to practice meditation. But there is nobody who doesn’t have a spare minute here or there to be mindful. Even in the midst of a crazy workday, focusing on sensory events now and then is a powerful way to banish stress, anxiety, overwhelm, [...]

by Michael W. Taft “Never eat anything bigger than your head.” — B. Kliban A good friend of mine recently returned to school. As an adult learner, he set a goal for himself to do the best job possible, to ace every class he could. As someone with slight learning disabilities, however, school posed special [...]

by Michael W. Taft You’re having complex feelings about the things that happened with your partner yesterday. You feel upset and confused, there’s so much going on. You meet your friend at a coffee shop, hoping to talk about some of this. But as soon as you start, she digs out her iPhone and starts [...]

by Michael W. Taft Concentration is the eternal secret of every mortal achievement – Stefan Zweig There is an ancient story from India that tells of five young princes who were practicing archery in the woods with their teacher, named Drona. One day Drona decided to test the boys by having them shoot birds—an extremely [...]