19 February, 2016

Assert Your Freedom of Attention

This week’s Breaking Borders had two superb talks, one from Christopher Murphy the other by James Williams. While there is no way I can do them justice, I wanted to jot down some snippets from their talks – if you get the chance to see either talk, I would totally recommend it.

 

Snippets from James:

When information is available in abundance, attention becomes the scarce recourse.

Distractions keep us from:

– Wanting what we want to want

– Doing what we want to do

– Being who we want to be

How can you have freedom of speech without freedom of thought?

How can you have freedom of thought, without attention, and a freedom from distraction?

For further details see:

http://timewellspent.io/ : Let’s build a more attention-respectful world.

Snippets from Christopher:

I’d previously heard clips of Alan Watts narratives, without knowing who was talking… Christopher played part of one of his lectures, and I’ve been steadily working my way through so many of his incredible perspectives for the last few evenings – they are incredibly insightful.

Christopher also talked about his Tiny Books project, which is something he has been struggling to get some headway for a year or two now. It was something he clearly cared deeply about, but was being sidelined by procrastination and struggling to ‘start’… so he’s been strategically living out of his office and nearby Travel lodge to get over that hump…

He also talked about how each day, we are all gifted 86,400 seconds…. use them or lose them.

This was his calculation about the amount of time he might has remaining to utilise, if he was have an average life span!

You can read more about Tiny Books (and will soon be able to view and purchase the fruits of his labour) here: http://tinybooks.org/

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