Stolen Focus - Book Review

 

 

Stolen Focus

Johan Hari

4.8 stars

 

Johan Hari shares a wealth of details, data and anecdotes on how lost we have become in our focus. He gives evidence of the changes over the course of decades, and how we have become victims to society in general. 

He reminds us of a time when a child's job was to play! In that play you learned about rules, negotiation, how to be a leader, respect etc. Hari shares an incident when some children given the task to play, didn't know how. He says that our society is giving children rules to follow to be successful. We are not letting them figure it out on their own (like many of us did).

Advertising and work schedules have deprived us of uninterrupted time, lack of focus has stolen our creativity, we fill our minds incessantly and don’t give time to process.

Our sleep, our commitments and our relationships suffer. What will we do about it?

This book reads like a dense, interesting and wonderful textbook filled with references from BF Skinner (psychologist, behaviorist, social philosopher) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow) (2 of my favourites) and even covers how our food consumption has changed.

Buy this book, read in whatever format you prefer but don’t miss it. It will provide hours of knowledge, thoughts to ponder and encourage our dedication to take back what we’ve increasingly lost.

And to continue with some learning, my next read is The Good Life, Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.


 

 

 

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