Attention first transformed the economy, (~the 1st decade of the 21st century)

It then led to the development of LLMs, (~ the 2nd decade)

And sooner than we all think, it is going to redefine what it means to be human

This manifesto outlines the raison d’etre of this newsletter. This post details my journey, the problems I hope to solve for myself (and hopefully my readers!) through the process of writing this blog, the scope of topics, and finally ways to stay updated with the blog. If you are time-pressed, you can jump to this section for a brief overview of the focus areas of this blog:

Personal Journey:

Tim Ferriss was the human guinea pig for the world, I intend to be the attention guinea pig!

After learning about my neurodivergence in Aug 2023, I have been more attuned to the challenges I have faced all the prior 33 years of my life. I never understood what a “life-changing” diagnosis is. Now, I get it. Even better, I now have a vocabulary for the type of challenges i face – Inability to pay attention, hyperfocus, constant distraction, executive dysfunction, rejection-sensitive dysphoria, and more. As Mark Manson says – your greatest strength is your greatest enemy. For people like me, creativity goes hand in hand with impulsivity, high energy goes with hyperactivity, and with hyperfocus comes distraction/boredom!

I have always loved Socrates for summarizing everything a human needs to know in 2 words: “Know Thyself”. Knowing about my condition, transformed my outlook on everything in life. And this is quite in alignment with Robert Sapolsky’s emphasis on the prefrontal cortex and how it drives almost everything in our lives.

Mark Twain says the two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. The day I was diagnosed was the day I figured out my why. It led me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life – to pay attention to attention.

Prima facie, it might sound a bit ironical, because, how could someone with an attention disorder write about the art and science of paying attention? But allow me to explain:

• Srikanth Bolla learned to see with his mind because he couldn’t see through his eyes
• Jody Stanislaw was invited to the Ted stage to talk about sugar and diabetes, because she had to learn everything about diabetes after she lost all her beta cells to Type 1 diabetes when she was 7
• Jean-Dominique Bauby could dictate the book “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by blinking his left eyelid, because the massive stroke that left him paralyzed with lock-in syndrome, taught him profound insights into the human condition, resilience, and the mind’s power (even when the body fails).

Ever since my diagnosis, I have started experimenting with various adaptations – exercising regularly, improving my diet and supplement intake, timeboxing, mindfulness, and more. This blog is thus an outlet to share my experiences and to meet like-minded humans along this journey.

Before my diagnosis, 2 other strong traits have defined me strongly. Curiosity and my love for stoicism.

My insatiable curiosity about living a meaningful life has led me to philosophers, psychologists, 50+ self-help authors, 100+ books, and numerous newsletters. It ultimately led me to 3 of my life’s most life-changing discoveries: my love for writing, stoicism, and neurodivergence.

My curiosity led me to Alain de Botton, David Perell, and Elizabeth Gilbert whose writing not only saved my life, but taught me how I could thrive

When life was hard and I was struggling personally and professionally, it led me to Derek Sivers, Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday, Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus, who lifted me from the bottomless pits of despair and doom.

And finally, my curiosity led me to act on my brother’s recommendation to read up about ADHD and Gabor Mate, which finally pulled the rug from under my feet.

This blog therefore will focus on 3 things that have shaped my life and continue to shape my life – Attention, Curiosity (for now this will be LLMs), and Stoicism.

The 2 main problems I’m finding answers for through my blog:

Problem 1 – The Attention Problem

The real problem I want to find answers for and help my readers to solve for is the attention problem. As cliched as it sounds, the first step to solve a problem is to acknowledge there is one. To help understand, I will take the help of 3 of the finest attention-focused humans the world has today:

• Gloria Mark (author of Attention Span): She has been measuring human attention spans for more than 20 years now. Her key finding: every 44 seconds on average, we move from one thing to another. And unfortunately enough, this is reducing even further
• Chris Bailey (author of Hyperfocus and the Productivity Project): To fully engage in a particular task, it takes us anywhere between 20-30 minutes. Call it foreplay or warm up, you can’t get your full attention to anything without spending this time. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, Cal Newport’s deep work, and Sophie Leroy’s attention residue – all of these vouch for this)
• Nicholas Carr (author of the Shallows) – If there was one superstar who predicted all of this almost 14 years ago, it is Carr. The crux of his research is that while the internet has tremendously solved the problem of information availability or storage, it has had the equally detrimental effect (or more) of dwarfing our information processing capabilities that are essential for making use of that information. To quote: What’s missing from that sense of our intellect is the fact that gathering information actually is only the first stage in thinking deeply. Once you have the raw material, to think deeply about that you have to stop gathering information, you have to shield yourself from distractions. And when you do that, you can suddenly take in this new information, put it into a broader context, your own personal knowledge. And then that’s when you start making all these connections. And it’s those connections and associations, not the raw little bits of information that really gives depth to our thinking. It’s what allows us to think conceptually, it’s what allows us to think oftentimes, creatively, we’re very good at taking in and spewing out information. But we’re not making the deep connections that are, I think, essential to deep thinkingAnd all of this is happening when the world has moved towards becoming an attention economy.

Problem 2 – The Meaningful Connections Problem

Ok I must confess something first. I have always been piqued by this intrinsic motivation of mine to go to the rooftops and share some of my most interesting findings about life. People around me somehow don’t seem to share this tendency and hence this is something that makes me unique. After I have read a terrific book, I want to grab everyone I know and tell them to read it. And after I read a visceral quote, I want to put this on every billboard I can. Finally, I somehow have arrived at a good understanding of why this is the case, thanks to Alfred Adler’s insights (lifestyle, social interest and overcoming feelings of inferiority) and the self-determination theory, by Ryan and Deci (relateness, competence and autonomy).

While the internet has led me to many interesting humans to admire and learn from, till date it has been a one way street. I have taken a lot, but haven’t given anything. I have never used social media and hence haven’t really used its power to meet and engage with like minded humans. This I learn is one of the most intrinsic human needs and I have somehow been refusing to engage online due to my hidden biases and unconscious behaviors.

This blog and newsletter therefore will be my window to the world. To meaningfully engage with other human beings on a similar path and to simultaneously share and learn from them. The ultimate objective is to build a community of humans who resonate with my ideas around attention, curiosity and stoicism.

The way I hope to find answers (For the above problems) and more meaningful questions to find answers for

Solution 1 – Writing as a means to learn to pay attention:

William Zinser is one of the masters of non-fiction writing. While he is popular for his book, “On Writing Well”, the work that I love him the most for is “Writing to Learn” . Almost every interesting person that I have met on the internet or physically, shares one common trait – the ability to write well. In fact this blog is a byproduct of this finding. To learn to write better. Zinser and several others today take this even further and say that writing is the way to learn and think. If at all there is one thing we all can agree on, it is that if we stop learning, we will lose relevance. But there isn’t a lot of content around how writing can help us learn. In the book “Writing to Learn”, Zinser talks about how one can even learn subjects like math and chemistry by writing. This blog therefore will stretch this idea further to learn to pay attention by writing.

I have a sense that by writing about my problems and experiments with attention, curiosity, and stoicism, I can learn to get better at each of these traits. This is a hypothesis I would re-evaluate time and again in the future.

Solution 2 – The positive community effects of writing and learning publicly

I admire David Perell & Kunal Shah. Both of them have inspired me to write and learn publicly. They lead by example. Perell has built an online community of folks passionate about writing and Kunal has built interesting companies and continues to generously share his learnings with everyone. While they have amassed a terrific fan following, that is not the purpose of my blog. Through these pages, I hope to find other interesting humans who are as interesting as Perell and Shah (or even more interesting than them). This is to learn from the collective unconscious (as Jung would say) and to build an identity around my personal pursuits.

I recently came across this phenomenal podcast between Ali Abdaal and Simone Stolzoff (a personal hero). Simone highlights how the current generations (Y, Z & Alpha) have started finding meaning through work. Earlier, there was religion and the local community. With the internet (incl. social media) and the rapid developments in science and technology, there has been a void which work has someone forced to fulfill. The peril of this development is the tendency to pour all of our lives into our jobs and to lose our identity beyond work. Like muscle mass provides a good cushion to our bones during a fall, our identities beyond work (our hobbies, family, friends, health clubs {physical and mental}, are a great antidote to a potential job loss or a forced job change. I sincerely wish I find a community of human beings to engage constructively with through this blog.

Solution 3 – Writing to save myself from insanity, to understand me, and to write for my daughter!

This is the ultimate and selfish reason why some of the most interesting writers I know (Charles Bukowski and George Orwell) wrote for.

• To save myself from insanity and to stop myself from the negative emotions of anger and disgust (targeted at me) for being pregnant forever with my ideas and never delivering them to the world.
• For the sheer egoism (aka to be remembered after death), the aesthetic enthusiasm (aka perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement), the historic impulse (aka to find and store facts for the use of posterity) and political purpose (to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after).

Finally, if there was one reason I want to devote my life to this blog and newsletter, it is to make this world a better place for my daughter and to help her understand how the world and her dad/mom were during the first few years of her life. One day, I wish she read this to understand where both of us came from. Because it took me 33 years to understand and accept my parents. I and my wife sincerely wish it doesn’t take this long for her.

Hat tip: Lawrence Yeo, who is my most favorite contemporary writer today. This is one of the finest letters I have ever read from a father to his daughter!

Northstar / The Blog’s Focus Bingo Card:

• Attention → The Attention Economy, the art and science of paying attention, practical ways to improve attention
• Curiosity → LLMs – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude (for now), this will evolve from time to time
• Stoicism → Stoic Philosophy, CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy), Alfred Adler

It is hard to summarize everything that this blog will cover. However, it will focus on topics that mean the most to me and I hope will be helpful for the audience of this blog. Being a consultant makes you think hard about presenting information visually, and so here you go – the bingo card that outlines the focus of this blog:

Ways to Stay Updated / Get In Touch:

The best way to stay updated is through the Attention Curious Stoic newsletter on Substack. Occasionally, you can find my other musings on my personal website “The Attention Curious Stoic”

You can also reach me on thecuriousstoic@gmail.com or through my Twitter or LinkedIn! In case you liked reading this, or have any feedback, please share! I would love to hear from you!