I spy attention bias

On creativity & how we can use selective attention bias to our advantage.

The best article I read this weekend was an article detailing how James Clear is writing his next book.

While talking about positioning, and the importance of giving that process time, James Clear says:

I’m not smart enough to come up with a really good idea right away in the first hour of day one. I need to sit with ideas for a long time.

I will spend what might seem to others like an unreasonable amount of time doing this. A lot of people might be like, ‘OK, we worked on positioning for a week—let’s move on and start executing!’ But I will sit with it for six months or a year—however long it takes for the idea to feel like it’s fully formed.

Here’s why giving this process time works so well: you know how if you’re playing a game of I Spy, and someone says, ‘I spy the blue thing’—it seems like every blue thing in the room instantly starts to light up to you?

When you have a big concept in the back of your mind, it becomes a filter that everything you experience runs through. Now, you’re not simply having experiences throughout the year—you’re having a whole year’s worth of experiences that all get related to the concepts you’re thinking about and working on.

That really helps not just with the details and with fleshing out chapters. It also helps you see how the idea interfaces with everyday life. You start to see the connections between the idea you want to write about and the world around you.

This pattern-matching process that Clear describes is not only an essential element of creativity but how our brains are naturally wired. We can only pay attention to so much, so naturally, it's helpful if our brain is able to pay attention to the most important thing for our survival at any one moment. This is a form of attention bias, and it's essentially the "filter" that Clear describes. Once we've primed our brain for something, our brain starts to subconsciously pattern-match all of our experiences against it.

In a 1996 issue of Wired magazine. Steve Jobs expressed something similar.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it; they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

This "priming the filter" technique was also one of the secrets behind Richard Feynman's ability to be so prolific and why he excelled at many leisure activities.

In a 1996 lecture, MIT mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota shared:

Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large, they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while, there will be a hit, and people will say: ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’

So, how can we use this in practice?

Start by getting clear on the problems in your life you're trying to solve. Write them down somewhere.
Have a place (notes app, obsidian, notebook, whatever) where you can quickly jot down any notes/ideas that come to you throughout the day.
Enjoy your life, go for walks, and pursue high-quality leisure activities and materials throughout the day.
Occasionally revisit your problems list and see if any of your notes/ideas shed light on it in some way.