Friday Flow #48

Appreciating attention

What’s up?

I’ve spent this week preoccupied with Apple’s WWDC—their annual software event targeted at developers. And one thing that’s been interesting to see is how many pundits have described it as underwhelming because it didn’t live up to what they had expected to be announced.

We do that a lot, don’t we? We assess others by what we think they should be doing rather than by what they’re actually doing, and in so doing we miss what’s right before our eyes. And interestingly we are far better placed to think about what could be when we recognise what is. In others as much as in ourselves.

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Appreciating attention

This week, I wrote about what it means to practice appreciation and how that is a matter of our attention, and ultimately of the quality of our lives.

Here’s the excerpt:

We are wired to remember bad experiences and normalise good ones.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a review of Apple’s MacBooks that launched late last year. They contained the M1, Apple’s first desktop-class chip based on a decade of custom chips for their “smaller” devices from iPhones to AirPods. These chips that let them achieve increasingly wild performance at minimum cost to battery: two things that until then were mutually exclusive, like if Big Macs suddenly helped with weight loss.

You can read the rest of the essay here: How we go from surviving to thriving

Eyes on (Yoruba proverb)

Speaking of attention:

Keep your eye on whatever you can’t take their eyes off.

If something takes up a lot of your attention you may well be in danger from it—you want to keep your eye on it in the sense that you want to not lose sight of that danger.

Talk soon,

Doc Ayomide

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