#1448 - concentration vs exploration
You missed that. Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses. [...] This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. — from On Looking: About Everything There is to See by Alexandra Horowitz
What a fascinating perspective. What we call focus or concentration is a lack of attention to everything else outside the object of our focus. It's ignorance of what is happening outside our locus of attention.
So, on one side, concentration is necessary to do the work. Any work, really: from the most repetitive to the most creative. At some point, I need to focus on what I am doing to create my best results.
At the same time, there is so much to learn and discover out there. Things that may help me improve what I do or that may open up a new range of things to do. And I love to learn new things. Particularly things that are apparently unrelated to what I do. Stuff I didn't even know I wanted to learn in the first place. So, how do you balance these two competing forces? The need to focus and exploit what I know and the opposing need to wander and explore what I don't know?
I just realized I wrote about this tension between exploit and explore a while ago. Obviously, I still have to improve in this sense.
I could use the famous 80/20 balance: 80% of my time is dedicated to exploiting what I know and 20% on exploring new stuff. Or I may try the 70/20/10 rule. It's a distribution used in many contexts, from budgeting to learning and innovation. Regarding innovation, the rule says that I should invest 70% of my energy in core initiatives, 20% in adjacent ones and 10% in the more transformative but risky ones.
Do you have a similar challenge?
How does it work for you?