It’s all about perception
We all live in the same physical world. However, the world we perceive is infinitely smaller.
We only see what our attention looks at. If you’re not paying attention to something, you cannot realize it even exists.
We learn through reading or other people
We learn new things because we are facing things outside our current knowledge.
We read about them on the internet. Or we hear about new things through the stories of other people.
And suddenly, we open a new door into a new subset of the world.
Our attention is selective
Once we put our attention onto a new subject, we suddenly realize that it was around us all along.
We all know about a thing that we saw everywhere around us after discovering it for the first time. For instance, a friend of yours mentions a particular car you ignored its existence and suddenly you see it everywhere.
Our brain is seeing millions of things during a single day. But in order not to overwhelm us with information, it’s not bringing everything to our attention.
Once we decide to consider a subject as worthy of our focus, our brain will bring it to our attention every time it is appearing in our world.
To focus on the right things, you need to ask yourself the right questions
Now we know that our brain will only put to our attention the things are focusing on, it means that depending on what we focus on, we will perceive the world in that way.
If you focus on positive subjects that make you grow, you will grow and learn about these subjects.
If you focus on trivial matters, your life will be trivial.
Now, what if you want to focus on the very best things, how do you get to master them?
The answer is simple: learning something new, becoming better at a skill, understanding the world better comes down to asking yourself the right questions.
The quality of the questions will lead to a better understanding of the world
To find the absolute best things to focus on, you’ll need:
- to ask the people with the knowledge,
- to ask them the best possible questions
People will tell you something they know in a summarized way. They know more than they will ever tell you, especially if they are the best at what they do.
The important is therefore to ask the question that will focus on the right angle.
Learning to ask top-quality questions is then the key to learning the very best things from the very best people.
“The questions you ask yourself create a lens through which you see the world”
Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show, Episode #394
Top performers spend their life developing that craft. And the time to develop yours has already started.