Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
Audible sample Sample
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again Paperback – January 24, 2023
Purchase options and add-ons
“The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction.”—Adam Grant, author of Think Again
“Read this book to save your mind.”—Susan Cain, author of Quiet
WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Post, Mashable, Mindful
In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions—even abandoning his phone for three months—but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention—and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.
Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus—as individuals, and as a society—if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateJanuary 24, 2023
- Dimensions5.2 x 0.74 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-100593138538
- ISBN-13978-0593138533
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.Highlighted by 5,613 Kindle readers
- Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them.Highlighted by 4,718 Kindle readers
- So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.Highlighted by 4,555 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Where other books about our relationship to technology tend to focus on personal responsibility, stressing the importance of self-control, Stolen Focus takes a step back and examines the ecosystem that created the problem. . . . Hari’s writing is incredibly readable.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Big-name websites and apps strive to distract because that’s the key to profitability. When we’re looking at our screens, these companies make money; when we’re not, they don’t. . . . It’s a call to arms, to be sure, and I’m tempted to tell my Twitter followers about it—but I’ve deleted the app from my phone.”—The Washington Post
“If your New Year’s resolution was to be more focused this year, then this is the book for you.[Adam] Grant describes the author as ‘a thoughtful critic of our modern malaise.’”—Inc.
“A gripping analysis of why we’ve lost the capacity to concentrate, and how we might find it again. Stolen Focus . . . will keep you thinking and rethinking long after you’ve finished it.”—Adam Grant
“Johann Hari writes like a dream. He’s both a lyricist and a storyteller—but also an indefatigable investigator of one of the world’s greatest problems: the systematic destruction of our attention. Read this book to save your mind.”—Susan Cain
“I don’t know anyone thinking more deeply, or more holistically, about the crisis of our collective attention than Johann Hari. This book could not be more vital. Please sit with it, and focus.”—Naomi Klein
“Superb . . . Stolen Focus is a beautifully researched and argued exploration of the breakdown of humankind’s ability to pay attention, told with the pace, sparkle, and energy of the best kind of thriller.”—Stephen Fry
“If you want to get your attention and focus back, you need to read this remarkable book. Johann Hari has cracked the code of why we’re in this crisis, and how to get out of it. We all need to hear this message.”—Arianna Huffington
“In his unique voice, Johann Hari tackles the profound dangers facing humanity from information technology and rings the alarm bell for what all of us must do to protect ourselves, our children, and our democracies.”—Hillary Clinton
“A visionary, systemic, revolutionary, and practical guide for creating the new world . . . Through his tireless research and genius insight, Johann Hari certainly snapped me to attention. This is a life-changing book.”—Eve Ensler
“A necessary book, a miracle of clarity and depth, and a resonant, deeply researched warning followed by a truly inspiring clarion call to action . . . Read it and weep, then dry your eyes and join in.”—Emma Thompson
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering
I don’t understand what you’re asking for,” the man in Target in Boston kept saying to me. “These are the cheapest phones we got. They have super-slow internet. That’s what you want, right?” No, I said. I want a phone that can’t access the internet at all. He studied the back of the box, looking confused. “This would be really slow. You could probably get your email but you wouldn’t—” Email is still the internet, I said. I am going away for three months, specifically so I can be totally offline.
My friend Imtiaz had already given me his old, broken laptop, one that had lost the ability to get online years before. It looked like it came from the set of the original Star Trek, a remnant from some aborted vision of the future. I was going to use it, I had resolved, to finally write the novel I had been planning for years. Now what I needed was a phone where I could be called in emergencies by the six people I was going to give the number to. I needed it to have no internet option of any kind, so that if I woke up at 3 a.m. and my resolve cracked and I tried to get online, I wouldn’t be able to do it, no matter how hard I tried.
When I explained to people what I was planning, I would get one of three responses. The first was just like that of this man in Target: they couldn’t seem to process what I was saying. They thought I was saying that I was going to cut back on my internet use. The idea of going offline completely seemed to them so bizarre that I had to explain it again and again. “So you want a phone that can’t go online at all?” he said. “Why would you want that?”
The second response—which this man offered next—was a kind of low-level panic on my behalf. “What will you do in an emergency?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem right.” I asked—what emergency will require me to get online? What’s going to happen? I’m not the president of the United States—I don’t have to issue orders if Russia invades Ukraine. “Anything,” he said. “Anything could happen.” I kept explaining to the people my age—I was thirty-nine at the time—that we had spent half our lives without phones, so it shouldn’t be so hard to picture returning to the way we had lived for so long. Nobody seemed to find this persuasive.
And the third response was envy. People began to fantasize about what they would do with all the time they spent on their phones if it was all suddenly freed up. They started by listing the number of hours that Apple’s Screen Time option told them they spent on their phones every day. For the average American, it’s three hours and fifteen minutes. We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours. Sometimes they would wistfully mention something they loved and had abandoned—playing the piano, say—and stare off into the distance.
Target had nothing for me. Ironically, I had to go online to order what seemed to be the last remaining cellphone in the United States that can’t access the web. It’s called the Jitterbug. It’s designed for extremely old people, and it doubles as a medical emergency device. I opened the box and smiled at its giant buttons and told myself that there’s an added bonus: if I fall over, it will automatically connect me to the nearest hospital.
I laid out on the hotel bed everything I was taking with me. I had gone through all the routine things I normally use my iPhone for, and bought objects to replace each one. So for the first time since I was a teenager, I bought a watch. I got an alarm clock. I dug out my old iPod and loaded it with audiobooks and podcasts, and I ran my finger along its screen, thinking about how futuristic this gadget seemed to me when I bought it twelve years ago; now it looked like something that Noah might have carried onto the Ark. I had Imtiaz’s broken laptop—now rendered, effectively, into a 1990s-style word processor—and next to it I had a pile of classic novels I had been meaning to read for decades, with War and Peace at the top.
I took an Uber so I could hand over my iPhone and my MacBook to a friend who lived in Boston. I hesitated before putting them on the table in her house. Quickly, I pushed a button on my phone to summon a car to take me to the ferry terminal, and then I switched it off and walked away from it fast, like it might come running after me. I felt a twinge of panic. I’m not ready for this, I thought. Then somewhere, from the back of my mind, I remembered something the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset said: “We cannot put off living until we are ready . . . Life is fired at us point-blank.” If you don’t do this now, I told myself, you’ll never do it, and you’ll be lying on your deathbed seeing how many likes you got on Instagram. I climbed into the car and refused to look back.
I had learned years before from social scientists that when it comes to beating any kind of destructive habit, one of the most effective tools we have is called “pre-commitment.” It’s right there in one of the oldest surviving human stories, Homer’s Odyssey. Homer tells of how there was once a patch of sea that sailors would always die in, for a strange reason: living in the ocean, there were two sirens—a uniquely hot blend of woman and fish—who would sing to the sailors to join them in the ocean. Then, when they clambered in for some sexy fish-based action, they’d drown. But then, one day, the hero of the story—Ulysses—figured out how to beat these temptresses. Before the ship approached the sirens’ stretch of sea, he got his crew members to tie him to the mast, hard, hand and foot. He couldn’t move. When he heard the sirens, no matter how much Ulysses yearned to dive in, he couldn’t.
I had used this technique before when I was trying to lose weight. I used to buy loads of carbs and tell myself I would be strong enough to eat them slowly and in moderation, but then I would guzzle them at 2 a.m. So I stopped buying them. At 2 a.m., I wasn’t going to haul myself to a store to buy Pringles. The you that exists in the present—right now—wants to pursue your deeper goals, and wants to be a better person. But you know you’re fallible and likely to crack in the face of temptation. So you bind the future version of you. You narrow your choices. You tie yourself to the mast.
There has been a small range of scientific experiments to see if this really works, at least in the short term. For example, in 2013 a professor of psychology named Molly Crockett—who I interviewed at Yale—got a bunch of men into a lab and split them into two groups. All of them were going to face a challenge. They were told that they could see a slightly sexy picture right away if they wanted to, but if they were able to wait and do nothing for a little while, they would get to see a super-sexy picture. The first group was told to use their willpower, and discipline themselves in the moment. But the second group was given a chance, before they went into the lab, to “pre-commit”—to resolve, out loud, that they were going to stop and wait so they could see the sexier picture. The scientists wanted to know—would the men who made a pre-commitment hold out more often, and longer, than the men who didn’t? It turned out pre-commitment was strikingly successful—resolving clearly to do something, and making a pledge that they’d stick to it, made the men significantly better at holding out. In the years since, scientists have shown the same effect in a broad range of experiments.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown (January 24, 2023)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593138538
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593138533
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.74 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Videos
Videos for this product
2:19
Click to play video
Stolen Focus Book Review #fitness #adhd #focus #selfhelp
Rishfits
About the author
Johann Hari is the New York Times best-selling author of 'Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs', and one of the top-rated TED talkers of all time.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Do you feel it? I sure do. It predates COVID-19, but like many things, the pandemic just shoved us forward, abruptly, on a path we were already headed down.
It should not surprise you that there's no single factor, but a multitutde, each with their own pernicious effect. Hari's effort here is so broad that many times I would think "hold up, I want an entire book about THIS"--and I'm sure that was a struggle for him, giving cursory mention to whole swaths of scientific research on a certain aspect. Hari is nothing if not thorough, by nature. But the scope of this necessitated that, and those end notes are the breadcrumb trails, should you choose to follow them.
The most important part about this book, in my opinion, is the framework he provides: our focus has been *stolen* and there's no easy fix. It is a collective problem with massive individual impact. He's careful to point out that there are *many* things an individual can do to make it better (or worse)--and you should absolutely attempt those things--but those things are accessible primarily to the privileged. And it's an insult to pretend otherwise. Worse, intentional efforts are made (by corporations or other parties who benefit) to blame individuals for the very problems the corporations created (and continue to profit from). Victim-blaming is real, and culturally, we're well-primed to blame the individual for everything--from blaming women who can't carry an endless unpaid care-labor burden for their difficulty in focusing to blaming kids with stressful lives for not being able to focus in a testing-obsessed educational system.
The pandemic shone a spotlight (a FOCUS) on the fact that the system doesn't work for most people, hasn't worked for some time, and is actively getting worse.
We were all collectively suffering, and some of us are starting to realize this is not an *individual* problem.
In some ways, this is a depressing, challenging book. There are no easy answers--just a whole bunch of really difficult ones. But it's a terribly important book. Because it gives a framework (a FOCUS) to the problem, which is a vital first step. We'll need to work collectively to solve this problem of focus--just like the climate crisis, just like the erosion of democracy--and I don't know if we will. We're *capable* of it, that's certain. But I don't know if we'll make that choice.
I'll leave you with a couple quotes from Hari, to get a flavor of what he's attempting, but if it's not clear: I think everyone *needs* to read this book. Addressing this problem is foundational to fixing *every* problem.
"Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them."
"Imagine that one day you are attacked by a bear. You will stop paying attention to your normal concerns—what you’re going to eat tonight, or how you will pay the rent. You become vigilant. Your attention flips to scanning for unexpected dangers all around you. For days and weeks afterward, you will find it harder to focus on more everyday concerns. This isn’t limited to bears. These sites make you feel that you are in an environment full of anger and hostility, so you become more vigilant—a situation where more of your attention shifts to searching for dangers, and less and less is available for slower forms of focus like reading a book or playing with your kids."
The author says, "There's going to be a class of people that are very aware of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more ."
In time, I had overcome my habit of frequently checking emails/SMS/social media feeds, etc. So, I initially rejected the claims made in this book. It wasn't fair to say big tech is to blame for our stolen focus. We, as individuals, have a responsibility to guard our focus.
I felt I had read enough. We need to have more self-control.
I realized my resistance to accepting the author's claims stemmed from a delusion that I controlled my life, thoughts, feelings, ambitions, etc. Like me, if you continue reading the book, the author calls this mental state - cruel optimism. And this state of mind is on the rise collectively. The question one needs to begin asking here is whether - the problems that society is facing right now are to be resolved at an individual or societal level.
Imagine you are working on a numerical problem, and whenever you are about to finish summing up those numbers, someone around you comes and starts telling you about their day. You could ask them to stop interrupting you. They are your family and respect your wishes. How many people can interrupt you on social media?
A term that stuck with me is "surveillance capitalism." It is a business model that wants to maximize our screen time, not life time." If you enjoy hate, the algorithms prioritize hate in your feed, and if you enjoy attention, you begin to bond with likes/retweets, etc.
The author makes a few recommendations for breaking away from "surveillance capitalism." He also cites a few examples from the past where perceived advances collectively led to deterioration in the quality of life for individuals.
An analogy from this book that struck a giant cord with me:
"Your ability to develop deep focus is, I have come to believe, like a plant. To grow and flourish to its full potential, your focus needs certain things to be present: play for children and flow states for adults, to read books, to discover meaningful activities that you want to focus on, to have space to let your mind wander so you can make sense of your life, to exercise, to sleep properly, to eat nutritious food that makes it possible for you to develop a healthy brain, and to have a sense of safety. And there are certain things you need to protect your attention from because they will sicken or stunt it: too much speed, too much switching, too many stimuli, intrusive technology designed to hack and hook you, stress, exhaustion, processed food pumped with dyes that amp you up........"
Like most people, I have problems focusing and staying on task at times. The ubiquitous allure of social media being just a click away is an ever-present temptation that often becomes a self-imposed distraction. I fight it, but I often lose the battle.
In this incredibly researched, yet easy to read, book, author and journalist Johann Hari explains many of the reasons almost all of society is struggling with this issue. Along the way I learned a few new terms like "switch cost effect" and "surveillance capitalism" that will help me improve my focus.
Some of his solutions seem a bit extreme to me (and even scary - no way I want the government taking over Facebook!) but he throws them out for consideration and to get the reader thinking about this issue and how we can individually, and even collectively, reclaim our attention. I specifically like how he tied our problems with focusing on fixing climate change with our attention crisis. In that, I think Hari makes his best points.
I'd recommend this book to anyone who'd like to reclaim some of their focus. And I'd urge any parent with young children (or anyone dreaming of becoming a parent one day) to give this a read as he spends a lot of time on ADHD and ways we can improve children's attention without drugs.
Hari quotes someone as saying "You don't get what you don't fight for" and in that I think we can all agree. Whether or not you think fighting for your attention (and for society to regain its ability to focus) is up to you. I'd encourage you to read this book before deciding either way.
Top reviews from other countries
Infelizmente, a exposição em si dessas ideias é muito simplista. O autor tem o hábito de simplificar excessivamente questões complexas numa narrativa bonita, artística (sem dúvida relacionada a sua profissão como jornalista), porém superficial e desprovida de nuances. Nessa busca por uma história bonita, ele frequentemente fala coisas inclusive terrivelmente erradas em alguns capítulos. De qualquer forma, é um bom livro como introdução ao assunto.