Read the full transcript of entrepreneur and author Saj Shah’s talk titled “Why this is the Moment to Invest Your Attention Wisely” at TEDxSwansea, Feb 3, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
Saj Shah: Imagine this. I offer you a deal. I give you this hundred pounds, it’s yours, but there’s a catch. I ask you to invest it in something, knowing full well that when you do, you’re never going to see that money again. No return, no benefit. In fact, you might end up losing more in the long run, leaving you drained and bankrupt. How many of you would take that deal? Not many. That’s right.
Well, here’s a surprising fact. Many of us, myself included, are making that kind of a deal every single day. Not with our money, but with something far more valuable: our attention. We often invest our attention unwisely, pouring it into distractions that increase our stress, drain our energy, erode our joy, and disconnect us from the moments that truly matter.
A Father’s Legacy and the Dash That Defined His Life
Now, let me take you back to a moment where I chose to take back control about where I invest my attention. My childhood was fueled by many moments of joy, thanks to my father’s playfulness, creativity, and humor. But in my adult working life, I became that serious, significant, corporate somebody, chasing successes and achievements and accomplishments. I wore stress and busyness like a badge of honor, and I started missing many moments that truly mattered, like seeing the joy on my son’s face the moment he scored his first goal in a football match. I was there. I missed the moment because I was mentally crafting a response to an annoying email I’d received from work the day before.
Now, in 2013, I unexpectedly lose my father while he’s on holiday with my mother in Kenya.
And at his funeral, I heard story after story about how my father had inspired joy in people’s lives. And as I stood there, this image of him was projected behind me, showing his birth year and his death year with a dash in between. That dash represented the real measure of his life, not the years he’d lived, but the moments he’d invested his attention in sparking joy in others.
So from that day on, I took on a journey of exploration of my own to discover novel ways to fill my dash with more joy-fueled moments than stress-filled ones. And sometimes it’s like a journey on a mountain with no top, but the distinction and the difference is where I invest my attention.
The Power of Attention: What You Focus On Gets Amplified
Attention shapes our experience of the world. It determines what’s important by placing a spotlight on one thing and fading everything else in the background. So right now, I’m hoping that most of your attention is on me and what I’m saying, hopefully. You’re not thinking about your big toe on your left foot. It’s there, but you don’t register it until now. Suddenly, when you divert your attention to your left big toe, it’s real, it’s significant, it’s within your experience, and that’s the power of attention.
Whether we realize it or not, we’re always constantly investing our attention somewhere. Sometimes we’re fully present to where we’re investing our attention, and other times not, because we’re in mental time travel through time and space. But here’s the key. Whatever you focus on and invest your attention on is amplified. It’s bigger, louder, and more important than everything else.
Now, let me show you this with this illusion by cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Peter Ulrich Sey. I want you all to focus on the white dot in the middle, and as you’re focusing on the white dot, keeping your eyes there, just let your attention drift to one of the surrounding circles, and you can move it around, and you might notice something, that whichever circle your attention drifts to becomes darker. See, our brain actively suppresses the things we don’t focus on, so it highlights and makes more salient the things that we do actually focus on.
Why Investing Attention Wisely Matters More Than Ever
So learning to invest our attention wisely is now more important than ever before. Why? Well, we’re all swimming in a world overflowing with more data and information than we can possibly gather. Now, the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Wouldn’t you agree that that’s our time right now?
Attention is our most valuable currency. Every digital app, every notification, every piece of media is competing to grab a piece of your attention. Even in the world of artificial intelligence, attention is key. In 2017, Google published a groundbreaking paper called “Attention is All You Need,” and it introduced AI models that power systems like ChatGPT, and guess what the key secret ingredient was? Attending to the most important information and filtering out distractions.
So just like AI, what if we could train our own attention mechanisms to be more intentional in where we invest our attention?
The Hidden Cost of Distractions
Now, when we think about investment, we normally think about money, putting it into something and expecting a high positive return, right? Well, what about your attention? Are you getting a high positive return on where you’re investing your attention? Wherever you invest your attention, if there are distractions, that will erode most of your returns.
Distractions are any actions that pull you away from the present moment of what you’re meant to be doing. Now, research by Professor Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the book “Attention Span,” found that it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus after a distraction on a task. So that means that if you have three distractions, when you’re doing a task, you’re losing an hour, almost an hour of productive work, which increases stress, frustration, effort. It’s like paying an invisible tax that erodes joy and energy.
But we might be living in a world of attention-grabbing technology distractions. But here’s the thing, maybe, just maybe, the biggest distraction doesn’t come from our digital world. Maybe the biggest distraction comes from what I like to call the mind bandit. The mind bandit is that negative internal dialogue that pulls us away, grips our attention, and throws it away from the present moment into the past or into the future. And that incessant, ruminative voice of the mind bandit is there when it’s most stressful, bored, or overwhelmed.
Well-known research by Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that an average person about 47 percent, almost half of their time, is spent thinking about things other than what they’re doing. And this type of mind-wandering actually leads to stress and unhappiness. And this is where the mind bandit is most focused. This is where the mind bandit wants to pull your attention to the past and into the future.
Now let me tell you about how to loosen the grip of the mind bandit. It’s as simple as noticing. Noticing when your mind is drifting. Noticing, simply noticing, actually creates a space between your attention and the thoughts, emotions, and reactions that actually follow. When the mind bandit is there gripping your attention, suddenly your thoughts and your emotions become so real they become your experience. So separating the thought, the emotion, from the attention loosens the grip of the mind bandit.
Three Keys to Loosening the Grip of Your Mind Bandit
Now I want to share with you three keys to loosening the grip of your mind bandit, where it gives you some space in creating a new transformed joyful existence.
So number one, notice your breath. My mum was by my father’s side the day he passed away. And there she said her most vivid memory of his last moments were when he just had an exhale out breath. And that reminded me of the moment when my son was born. And he was born not breathing and silent. And suddenly the resuscitation team came in, flicked the left sole of his foot, and suddenly there was this gasp of air in and a cry out. And it made me think, is life just a series of moments strung together by breaths? On average we breathe 23,000 times a day. And each one of those is a moment that we can bring and invest our attention into the present moment.
Number two, invest in play. When my sons were young we had many moments of play, creative play. Making Ferraris out of boxes or painting the moment that they could grab paintbrushes. We would splash colours. Every year this canvas would come out. Except when I became so busy at work that I deprioritized quality family time and it stopped. Six months after my father passed away, paintbrushes came back out. And now on the right hand side that painting is an 18-year-old masterpiece that actually sits in my home office as a reminder to invest in play, fun and creativity.
Number three, cultivate awe and wonder. How many of you remember the last time you experienced awe and wonder? These are the moments that quieten the mind bandit and connect you to something far greater. Now awe doesn’t have to be grand. It can be found in the simple listening to music, moving music, hearing shared laughter or looking up at the night sky.
A Story of Transformed Attention in the Face of Adversity
Now let me tell you about my father-in-law. My father-in-law was like a second father to me and he appreciated life with an adventurous zest. And very recently he was diagnosed in July with a rare form of cancer, leukemia. Now after the initial shock he said something really profound. He said “Now that I know my time is limited it’s really funny but I feel freed up to express my love and my joy in the moment instead of putting it off.”
And he did. He became this avid reader and this incredible hugger that he’d never been before. And he started savoring the moments and investing his attention in savoring the moments that really truly matter. On his walks noticing flowers, birds, shared laughter, listening for those smiles in people. Even his own doctor was so amused by his new found positive experience of life living with cancer they took him aside and hugged him and shared with him “You are going to be treated like my own father.” And two treatment cycles later the same doctor shared some miraculous news that my father-in-law’s leukemia was under control.
Living as if Everything is a Miracle
Now as Albert Einstein said “There are two ways to live. You can live as if nothing is a miracle or you can live as if everything is a miracle.”
And I want to leave you with this one image illustration by Sydney Smith in a book called “Sidewalk Flowers” by John Arnaud Lawson. It’s a wordless story about a little girl walking home with her distracted father glued on the phone and she picks up little flowers and leaves them as gifts for people. A homeless man, birds and her family. Each flower is a symbol of a gift of love, appreciation, noticing, being present and spreading joy.
Attention is our most valuable currency and now is the moment to invest it wisely. So as you go about your day-to-day demands I want you to take a pause and ask yourself: Am I investing my attention wisely? What am I attending to right now and is it worthy of my attention? Thank you.
