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Organizing Your
Mind
Chapter 8 Multiply Your Output by the Habit of Concentration As car manufacturers need to streamline their vehicles to cut down resistance we need to streamline our minds. Harry Lorayne believes we need to get rid of resistance to get to the heart of a problem by the art of concentration. Concentration is an art that has to be learned. The dictionary says that concentration is: exclusive attention on one object. Believe it or not, it is not easy to concentrate on one thing for any length of time. It takes practice and Lorayne says that if you want to get rid of a bad habit, replace it with the habit of concentration. Exclusive attention: No other thought, no matter how trivial, can be allowed to enter your mind. We may think, 'well this shouldn't be all that hard!' Pick an object and try to give it your exclusive attention. That means no other thought can enter your mind except anything to do with that object. Take a pencil, not too much to concentrate on, so try to keep only that pencil and it's characteristics in your mind. Doesn't take long before some other thought enters your mind now does it? Lorayne says that someone who practises Yoga would understand completely how much practise it takes to give your exclusive attention to one subject. You must practise and practise and practise and then you must practise some more. An Olympian athlete would understand this concept as well. Another way to excercise your mind in practising concentration is counting. When first using this method, Lorayne says he would be surprised that we could get to the number five before some other thought flitted across our minds. In practising, as soon as any unrelated thought enters your mind you must stop and start the practise over again. Loryane understands it isn't the object or the counting that matters, it is the ablility to keep your mind exclusively on a problem or goal that we want to achieve. Say you are taking the bus to work and you have a problem to solve, can you stay concentrated on that problem, or will you still have it when you get to work? How easily are you distracted? How much time or money would you be able to save if you could stay concentrated on a problem until it was solved? If we don't concentrate on a problem we won't necessarily get to the root of the problem. We may see certain parts of it that we could fix, but do you find that the main cause of it just flits around at the edge of consciousness. Quite possibly the reason some are constantly tired, tense and neurotic is because they haven't taken the time to dig into the root of a problem. Many will say that someone had a nervous breakdown because they were trying to do too much. Lorayne believes the saying, "Hard work never killed anyone" , it is the lack of solving a person's personal problems that causes the trouble. If a person took the time to concentrate, he feels that it would, "enable you to look directly at the heart of a problem so that you can decide the exact steps to take to overcome it." He suggests writing down that problem on a piece of paper so that it becomes more concrete. It will then be something that you can picture rather than a vague thought. All the incidentals around that problem can be eliminated and you can just concentrate directly on the problem. "Most problems well organized and defined are already partially solved." Now "list all the obstacles standing in the way of the solution. Beside each obstacle list any and all solutions that come to mind." Don't worry if some seem ridiculous, just write them down, one or two of them will be the solution. The more often you do this the happier you will be and you will also have more time for other things. I think we would be astounded by the time we waste worrying about something rather than taking action and getting the problem out of the way. Like it or not, solving problems is a life time job. Harry Lorayne doesn't suggest this way will solve all your problems but it will give you more time and make it easier to solve the more difficult problems. Writing out your problems and the possible solutions to those problems will teach you the 'art of concentration' and thus will enable you to take action. Benjamin Disraeli: "Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." Patricia Downing |
