On Attention

Why the most valuable thing you can give—or get—is focus

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Why this resonated with me this week
In teaching, attention was everything. Without it, no lesson mattered; with it, anything was possible. What struck me most was how often the real work wasn’t in explaining the idea—it was in earning the right to be heard. That truth feels just as urgent outside the classroom.

The most precious resource in any classroom isn’t intelligence, talent, or even time. It’s attention.

If you don’t have a student’s attention, nothing else matters. You could deliver the most polished lecture in the world, but if your audience is in another mental zip code, you’re talking into the void.

It’s the same in business, in relationships, in life. Attention is the baseline condition for everything else. Without it, no learning sticks, no ideas land, no change takes root.

Attention as Currency

Economics teaches us that value follows scarcity. And today, attention is the most heavily bid-on resource in the world.

Advertising, entertainment, algorithms—trillions are spent every year to seize it, hold it, and monetize it. Google doesn’t just answer questions. Its business is capturing your eyes at the exact moment they’re worth the most.

Which raises the real question: who owns your attention—you, or someone else?

Seized vs. Sustained

Not all attention is created equal.

• Seized attention is stolen. A notification pings, a headline shocks, a feed scrolls on. Your willpower is bypassed.
• Sustained attention is chosen. You direct it, you invest it, you protect it. Sustained attention is what makes deep work—and deep learning—possible.

The difference is the same as junk food vs. a nourishing meal. Both fill you for a moment. Only one builds you over time.

Deep vs. Shallow

Think of attention like sleep. You can doze lightly, waking at every creak in the house—or you can sink into REM, where the real restoration happens.

Shallow attention is surface-level. You’re present, but uninvested.
Deep attention is immersive, reflective, generative. It’s where breakthroughs happen.

But like sleep, you can’t drop straight into depth. It takes time without interruptions—no context switching, no wandering off into dinner plans mid-equation. Distraction doesn’t just dilute attention. It destroys depth.

The Teacher’s Burden

When I was teaching one-to-one, I never really had to fight for a student’s attention. My presence guaranteed it. But keeping it alive—that was the art.

The trick wasn’t to dismiss tangents or force my agenda. It was to meet students where they were. If a student loved equestrian sports, I asked about it. If they drifted off-topic, I pulled them back with genuine interest rather than shutting them down.

That’s what sustained their attention: respect, curiosity, and a willingness to let their interests set the path—at least some of the time.

Attention isn’t sustained by force. It’s sustained by resonance.

Protecting Your Own

Every time your attention is seized, someone else is profiting. That’s not inherently bad—but it’s worth asking: what’s the return?

Protecting your attention is like protecting capital. Let it leak into distractions and you end up broke at the end of the day, wondering where the hours went. Invest it deliberately—into work, into relationships, into curiosity—and it compounds.

This Week’s Challenge

Attention is fragile, but we can train it. Here’s the exercise:

At least once today, catch yourself in the act of having your attention seized. A ping, a scroll, a wandering tab. Pause and name it: seized, not sustained.

Then, ask: Is this where I want my attention to be?
If yes, choose it. If no, release it.

That single moment of recognition is the muscle. Practice it, and your attention becomes less a commodity to be sold—and more a resource you own.

Closing Thought

Attention is finite, fragile, and fought over. But it’s also the foundation of learning, growth, and every meaningful connection we have.

We can’t control every attempt to seize it. But we can choose, again and again, where to sustain it.

And that choice, more than anything else, determines what we become.

About the Author Matt Starolis is the founder of Engineering Confidence, a transformative mentorship practice built on over 3,000 hours of one-to-one mentorship and nearly 1,000 hours of AI-driven analysis. His work is dedicated to helping ambitious learners—and their families—build lives defined by clarity, resilience, and earned confidence.