Yin vs YangThe Battle for Success in Life

I was driving home the other day from training thinking about the phrase ‘paying attention’. I love history and have always found it interesting how sayings originally developed into common practice. The reason I was intrigued was because of something I noticed during training, but more on that in a bit. Right now I was thinking of the common phrase ‘paying attention’.

I don’t know of any other nouns that have the verb ‘paying’ in front of them that are not associated with anything financial. You don’t, or at least I hope you don’t, go around saying you are ‘paying thought’ or ‘paying observation’. No. The only word not associated with money that I can think of is ‘paying attention’. As stupid as this sounds, I think I figured it out during training.

After I train Jiu Jitsu & Muay thai, I have about a 25 minute ride home. After blowing out your lungs and pushing your body for 3 hours your mind tends to drift off, replaying all of the mistakes you made in your head. One of the mistakes I made training a few weeks ago was revealed to me today in class. It was a simple leg placement on a regular move I had done 100 times before. However, I had never noticed this particular detail before.

I also teach Jiu Jitsu, so I had seen the same look I had on many of my student’s faces. New students tend to only ‘pay attention’ to what they think is important. When watching an arm bar, they concentrate on how the arm is about to break as oppose to why. The why consists of the entire picture: the body positioning, the weight pressure, balance, and timing. The new students only ‘pay attention’ to the details they care about….which is bending back the arm with all their might. There is a reason they consider all BJJ white belts the most dangerous training partners in the room: Because of their lack of knowledge, you have a better chance of getting hurt.

And this all leads back to ‘paying attention’. What I realized is that in life, no matter what we do, we only ‘pay attention’ to what we think is important at the time. We, and especially me, tend to rush through things, doing the important stuff, and leaving out the seemingly insignificant details. Whether in our love life, our work habits, or our cleanliness, we all tend to do enough, and not look at the entire picture. As in any good recipe, sometimes the minor details are more important than the major ones.

So this means that your attention costs you. Whatever direction your attention is focused on is what you will learn. Whatever you choose to ‘pay attention’ to is what you will be all about. Attention is very important. If you don’t ‘pay attention’ to something, you will not be able to fully understand it. You may know a few details, and from that try to paint the whole picture, but this rarely works, if ever.

You mus be careful on how you spend your attention. It probably has the biggest effect on your life in general. Whatever your focus is on is what your life will become. Think of the power hitter in baseball who never makes it to the big leagues. Sure, they could hit the crap out of the ball, but they never ‘paid attention’ to the little things like base running and breaking balls. They just ‘paid attention’ to how far they could hit it.

There are many examples of this in both of our lives, I’m sure. Right now, I’m ‘paying attention’ to my thoughts and not the road I’m driving on. Not a good thing, so I think I will get back to the road. But the next time you find yourself ‘paying attention’ to something, ask yourself what the true ‘cost’ is. In another words, what are you NOT ‘paying attention’ to?

Maybe it’s time you caught up on that ‘attention debt’.