The primary commodity in the world is attention. This is the resource whose scarcity matters most–every day, and as it adds up, in your life, in the lives of everyone you know, in the history of the world, in the world itself. The question then becomes: what should you focus your attention on? What issues or problems or features of the world are most worth your attention? You should train yourself to only pay attention to things that matter and things where your attention will pay off and things where your attention will luxuriate and amplify and be drawn to other things that you now realize matter.

We should teach this to children. To pay attention to how you pay attention and what it feels like. Teach them and ourselves how to decide what things are worth paying attention to.

Maybe some people are lucky enough to already be paying attention to only those things and other people need training in how to find those things interesting–because the eventual goal is to narrow the focus of your world until the only things you notice–the only things that still hold your interest at all–are the things that matter.