Like Magic

Years ago, I had just sat down to dinner at a conference when I noticed a man walking around, greeting people in a random pattern, and eventually making his way to the stage. He was introduced as “Apollo Robbins, Gentleman Thief.”

Robbins is possibly the world’s most advanced student of focus. He’s mastered the art of managing other people’s attention, and he does so in such an unobtrusive manner that he’s able to empty a person’s pockets without them noticing. He’s an expert in perception management and uses sleights of hand to demonstrate how diversions can lead to self-deception. Companies, governments, and organizations of all sorts seek his counsel and expertise.

Robbins rose to fame by pulling off one of the most audacious lifts in the history of pickpocketing. In 2001, he encountered Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail while the former president was having dinner. The New Yorker summarized the encounter as follows:

Robbins struck up a conversation with several of [Jimmy Carter’s] Secret Service men. Within a few minutes, he had emptied the agents’ pockets of pretty much everything but their guns. Robbins brandished a copy of Carter’s itinerary, and when an agent snatched it back he said, “You don’t have authorization to see that!” When the agent felt for his badge, Robbins produced it and handed it back. Then he turned to the head of the detail and handed him his watch, his badge, and the keys to the Carter motorcade.¹

In the years he’s been a full-time entertainer, Robbins has managed to take (and return) an engagement ring from actress Jennifer Garner’s then-boyfriend Ben Affleck, a thick pile of cash from NBA star Charles Barkley’s pocket, and a Patek Philippe watch from former Bear Stearns chairman Ace Greenberg’s wrist. For one trick, he managed to extract a man’s driver’s license from his wallet, replace the wallet, and have the license appear in a sealed bag of M&Ms in his wife’s purse.

Robbins’s skills have not been relegated to mere entertainment; he’s an active educator and regularly shares his perception management insights with audiences, clients, and even the public. He’s produced and cohosted a popular television show with National Geographic called Brain Games. TED organizers have hailed his talk as a revelation of the flaws in human perception. He’s also formed an education and training firm to deliver immersive training in support of experiential learning.

OK, so by now you probably get it. When it comes to picking pockets and other sleights of hand, Apollo Robbins is as close to superhuman as exists on this planet. Having watched him in action, I can say he’s amazing. But you’re probably interested in understanding, as I was, how he does it. What’s his secret?

The key, Robbins told me during a phone conversation, is managing focus.² Robbins is always thinking about where people are channeling their attention. He’s innately aware of the fact that people have a set amount of attention and he uses that to his advantage. In fact, he even describes his methods in that language. When explaining what he does and how he does it, Robbins told me, “I manage the attention kind of like water flow, and I see where it goes, and then I have to move with that.”³ He even talks about cutting up a target’s “attentional pie.” Sound familiar? Robbins actively misdirects what little focus we have, thereby leading us to ignore his efforts to take our wallet, unfasten our watch, or empty our pockets.

Robbins goes further than misdirecting our visual focus. He uses touch and voice to distract, noting: “Because you have to make choices between all your senses—your vision, your hearing—all those are coming in at one spot, if I can tap into your priority system, I can now start hacking to re-prioritize certain things so other things will go under the radar.”⁴

Read that last sentence again. Robbins is thinking about what we ignore and he uses all the tools at his disposal to do so. A touch on the wrist, a tap on the shoulder, moving a target’s body to the left, looking into their eyes. It’s all about focus and ignoring. And the anxiety Robbins produces because people know he’s going to try to pick their pockets actually works to his advantage. It leads people in his presence to expend more focus upon what he does touch, what he does say, what he does do.

The increased intensity of focus leads to larger blind spots. Think of it as asking you to count the number of basketballs being passed left to right and keeping that tally separate from your count of aerial (but not bounced) passes going right to left. Your chances of seeing the gorilla (discussed in chapter 3) will plunge as the exercise takes larger and larger slices of your attention pie. He assaults your sensory systems and controls your attention. As you focus, you drain your attention resevoirs and lose the ability to see unexpected developments.

As Robbins manages what we feel, where we look, and what we hear, we literally stop feeling, looking, and hearing. Robbins’s lessons reveal the importance of mindfulness around focus. What we focus on, we are mindful of. What is outside our focus, we are mindless of. Robbins reminds us to focus on focus. Focus is a variable that needs to be managed intentionally, just like time and money. We fail to do this at our own peril, as the examples in this book show. When we’re mindful of our focus, we keep in mind what we’re ignoring, making us prepared for the risks our focus creates and the opportunities it ignores.

Susana Martinez-Conde, a researcher at the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience in Arizona and coauthor of Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Everyday Deceptions, has spent a great deal of time studying Robbins’s approach to focus. Her research confirms that gorillas are everywhere, and Robbins is a master of producing them. “When Apollo gets on stage, he is making [people] look at things, he is talking to them, he is touching their body, he is coming very close to them and producing an emotional response as he is entering their personal space.… It’s complete attentional overload.”⁵

Attentional overload? Remember that attention is merely one side of a coin; the other side is ignoring. We might as well replace the word attentional with ignoring because Robbins is effectively creating ignoring overload. He’s so stressing our sensory processing capabilities that he might as well disconnect our heads from our bodies, which is why so many people feel utterly powerless and are completely befuddled around him.

New York Times science writer George Johnson wrote in 2007 that, “Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of his hand, swung around my attention like a gooseneck lamp, so that it was always pointed in the wrong direction. When he appeared to be reaching for my left pocket he was swiping something from the right.”⁶

Swinging attention like a gooseneck lamp? If that doesn’t capture the essence of Apollo Robbins, I’m not sure what does! It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Warner Brothers retained Robbins as an advisor while it was producing Focus, a 2015 movie starring Will Smith as Nicky, a seasoned and experienced con artist who gets romantically involved with Jess, played by Margot Robbie, a woman who wants to learn his skills.

In one scene, Nicky and Jess step outside onto a snow-filled lawn, where Nicky takes off his jacket and begins a short lesson: “At the end of the day, this is a game of focus.”⁷ At this point, Nicky reveals that he has removed her ring from her finger.

Nicky continues, spinning her like a ballerina: “Now, attention is like a spotlight, and our job is to dance in the darkness.” He then shows her that he has taken her watch off her wrist.

Jess is genuinely impressed, but naively so. While she’s utilizing her limited attention to figure out how he took her watch, Nicky’s on to the next thing.

He continues, “The human brain is slow, and it cannot multitask.” Nicky reveals he has stolen her ring again.

Nicky explains that Jess needs to perceive from the perspective of her victim: “Human behavior is very predictable. If I look at my hand, it naturally pulls your gaze, and allows me to enter your space. But when I look up at you it causes you to look directly at me.” Nicky now reveals that he’s taken her sunglasses.

He then demonstrates the power of sensory focus. Just as visual focus can generate blindness to stuff directly in front of your eyes, so, too, can a person’s focus upon a particular body part numb the feelings in other parts. After touching her shoulder, Nicky says, “I touch you here, I steal from here.” He then hands back the cell phone that was in her pocket. He then taps the left side of her body, noting, “I tap you here, I steal from here” and reveals that he took the keys out of her right pocket.

Nicky wraps up with, “You get their focus, you take whatever you want.” He then hands her back her ring, having lifted it off her finger a third time. She’s laughing while shaking her head and smiling.

When I first watched Focus, I immediately thought of Apollo Robbins and only later learned that he was an advisor to the producers. In fact, Robbins coached Will Smith and Margot Robbie for over three months, teaching them how to do it for real. Smith says he learned from Robbins that misdirection is not looking in one direction while activity happened in the other direction. Instead, “You can be looking straight at it, and if you’re not thinking about it, you won’t process it.”⁸ Sound like the gorilla?

The Dog That Didn’t Bark

To untangle mysteries involving the unexpected, let’s turn to one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories, “Silver Blaze.”⁹ Silver Blaze is a prized racehorse that disappears on the eve of an important race. Its trainer is found dead the next morning. Sherlock Holmes heads to the scene to help with the investigation. Upon arriving, Holmes dismisses the obvious suspect, Fitzroy Simpson, upon whom Inspector Gregory and the police are focused.

Even though Simpson appeared near the stables the night of the crime inquiring about the horse’s capabilities (he was wagering on the race), and his jacket and scarf were found near the trainer’s dead body, Holmes notes that Simpson could easily have killed or injured the animal in its stall. There’s no reason he would have had to take the horse to the moor to hurt it. And the fact that the horse is nowhere to be seen doesn’t support the case against Simpson. Where and why would he hide it?

The police had searched all neighboring stables, but had not found the horse. When Holmes finds the horse, it is in a nearby stable, with its white forehead concealed with dye. Inspector Gregory and the police were so focused on finding the white forehead that they failed to see the otherwise striking resemblance to the missing animal. The color became their basketball passes. The horse was their gorilla.

Holmes then turns to the matter of the dead trainer. The stable boy who was on duty that night had been drugged with powdered opium mixed into his dinner. The meal he ate that night was curried mutton, a spicy dish that concealed the otherwise notable taste of opium. Simpson couldn’t have chosen the meal, so Holmes quickly suspects the trainer and his wife.

But there were other anomalies. Rather than hone in on how the trainer had died, Holmes instead looks broadly. He found the trainer had been living lavishly and had a surgical knife in his pocket. There was also the seemingly irrelevant fact that three sheep had gone lame in the prior weeks.

But it was “the curious incident of the dog in the night time”¹⁰ that enabled Holmes to crack the case. You see, the dog didn’t bark in the middle of the night, a nonfact that all had overlooked. Inspector Gregory and the police had focused on the unusual events and were thereby blinded to nonunusual events of significance. The dog didn’t bark because it must have been the trainer who took Silver Blaze from the stable; for were it not the case, the dog would surely have made noise.

Holmes concludes the trainer had planned to surgically tear some of the horse’s muscles in a manner that would impair his racing abilities but would remain concealed from all observers. The trainer must have practiced on the sheep, which is why three of them were lame. And the trainer’s wife was wearing expensive dresses atypical for a family of their means. As the trainer was about to maim the horse in the middle of the night, it got spooked and kicked him in the head, killing him instantly.

The short story is a wonderful example of a mystery that is solved by managing focus. The police inspectors can’t solve the case, because they are too focused on certain things. They don’t have any attention left to expend on topics like the lame sheep, the expensive dresses, or the non-barking dog at night. The police are blind to these developments because they are focused elsewhere. They can’t see the gorilla.

It takes an independent, external, and less-focused perspective to connect the dots in a conclusive way. In fact, throughout the story, Holmes praises the police investigator as an extremely competent officer but one who lacks imagination. If imagination is the ability to think broadly, letting the mind wander as it creates possible scenarios, then it’s probably not a big jump to suggest that Holmes is really criticizing Inspector Gregory for being too focused. Inspector Gregory didn’t have the bandwidth to connect the dots because he was so busy digging deeper to generate new dots. He should have unfocused, zooming out and seeing the bigger picture.

Once Inspector Gregory expended his attention on Simpson, the head injury that killed the trainer, and the missing horse’s white forehead, he had none left to deploy toward the lame sheep, the curried mutton, or the nonbarking dog. The inspector was blinded by focus.

Held Hostage by Focus

While focus management is always important, it is absolutely essential in situations involving life and death. Take hostage negotiation, for example. Perhaps more than any other profession besides a professional pickpocket, the hostage negotiator needs to be a master of managing focus. Some negotiators focus widely on the overarching mission of resolution and hostage recovery. Others mechanically follow textbook procedures, narrowly focused on rehearsed steps to negotiate releases.

Consider Michael Schneider, a professional hostage negotiator working for the Antioch Police Department. In July 1993, Officer Schneider was summoned to a situation in which a man had taken his two kids hostage, holding them at gunpoint. Schneider spoke with the man for hours, convincing him to hand over some guns and asking him to take his shirt off as a sign of surrender. He remained committed to securing the release of the children, however long it took. Schneider’s captain, though, focused intensely on timing. He pressured Schneider to impose a deadline.¹¹

Officer Schneider convinced the captain to give him more time, but ultimately the captain’s focus on timing prevailed. He imposed a ten-minute deadline. Nine minutes later the man had killed his children and himself. He was found with his shirt off, suggesting that he had in fact resigned to surrender but changed his mind when rushed. The captain was fixated on controlling the situation and imposing a strict deadline, while Officer Schneider had been committed to a peaceful resolution, no matter how long it took. Time-based tunnel vision may have contributed to unnecessary, tragic deaths.¹²

A similar dynamic was at play in one of the most famous hostage negotiations in recent American history. In 1993, FBI hostage negotiator Gary Noesner was notified through his beeper of an escalating hostage situation at an isolated compound near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians, a religious cult led by an authoritarian leader named David Koresh, had secured the grounds with illegal weapons and were supposedly abusing children. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had tried to raid the compound on a Sunday, believing that the cult members would be vulnerable, with their weapons locked away on the Sabbath. But the agents had lost the element of surprise after a news crew unwittingly tipped off Koresh’s brother-in-law while asking for directions.¹³

ATF officials found out that their plan had been discovered, thanks to an undercover agent who was in the compound when Koresh’s brother-in-law rushed to inform the leader of the impending raid. Despite knowing that the Davidians were prepared, the ATF leaders chose to focus stubbornly on the plan they had, rather than adapting to the new circumstances. Unsurprisingly, the raid set off a skirmish, resulting in deaths on both sides. Hostage negotiations began in earnest after bullets flew.

That evening, Noesner took over negotiating with Koresh. He immediately set out to understand Koresh’s perspective. Noesner aimed to gain Koresh’s trust, in part by exploiting the fact that he was angry with ATF agents and not so much at the FBI, the organization for which Noesner worked. He patiently chatted with Koresh, never implying any bad faith. He tried to empathize with Koresh, and when he understood that no “grand surrender” was in sight, Noesner started to focus on the release of more and more children (and, ultimately, adults). He called this the “trickle, flow, gush” strategy. It began to work, with twenty-one children released in the first five days after this approach was adopted.

But because Noesner was part of the negotiation team, a group that was distinct and different than the hostage rescue team, he was unable to control the actions of the more aggressive agents. The heavy weaponry the Branch Davidians possessed alarmed this other team. They wanted to use a show of force to demonstrate to the cultists that their position was hopeless. As Noesner put it, “While negotiators tried to show understanding and find common ground, the tactical people couldn’t help but present a warlike image that heightened tension. An empathetic voice over the phone can only do so much to offset the powerful impression available to the subject’s own eyes.”¹⁴

Noesner’s job was to manage Koresh’s focus, but he was undermined by the tactical team’s actions on the ground. It was hard to command the focus of the Branch Davidians when the rescue team was competing with Noesner using armored vehicles. Eventually, Koresh agreed to surrender in exchange for a sermon of his being broadcast on television. When the negotiators followed through, Koresh stalled and finally refused to surrender, claiming later that God had told him to wait.

According to Noesner, his superiors outside of the negotiating team, Dick Rogers and Jeff Jamar, were annoyed with what they believed to be Koresh’s intentional deception, deciding then and there that they wanted to punish him. As Noesner explained, their desire to retaliate violated “a core principle of the FBI negotiation program: never confuse getting even with getting what you want.”¹⁵ They moved the armored vehicles toward the compound.

This upset the Davidians, who claimed they had not broken any promises. In their minds, they still planned to surrender; God had just told them to wait. Noesner’s empathy allowed him to see that those in the compound likely believed Koresh’s clearly self-serving pronouncements. It only confused things to assume they were acting in bad faith. Still, Noesner persisted in empathetically communicating with Koresh. When he heard on the radio a story about a guitar-shaped nebula, he suggested to Koresh, a guitar player himself, that this might be a sign for him to come out.

Then, inexplicably, the rescue team approved an action to cut off all power to the compound—just as Noesner felt his team had been gaining traction with the cultists, most recently having delivered much-needed milk to the compound. Without power, the milk started going bad shortly after its arrival. This pattern continued, with Noesner making emotional in-roads, and being undermined by the rescue team’s aggressive tactics. They continued to cut off their power periodically, installed glaring lights pointed toward the compound, and authorized the blaring of loud music into it. Every such action was focused on accelerating and antagonizing; all the while, Noesner was focused on empathizing.

In the most poignant example of this dynamic, Jamar ordered heavy armored vehicles once again to move forward, but this time they accidentally severed the phone line that the negotiator was using to communicate. After that, feeling pressure to produce results, the rescue team ordered agents to dismantle and remove machinery from around the compound—destroying the cultists’ property at a time when the negotiator was trying to establish trust.

Shortly thereafter, Noesner was taken off the case. After that, the situation deteriorated rapidly. His replacement, a devout Christian, tried to argue theology with Koresh rather than trying to understand his perspective. Soon, Noesner’s former superiors staged an intervention into the compound. Agents filled the compound with tear gas, smashing holes into the walls to allow people to escape. Within minutes, the Davidians set fire to the compound and committed suicide. Seventy-six died.

Noesner had a radically different focus from Jamar and Rogers. Although all wanted to end the standoff, the latter were concerned with eliciting reactions and accelerating conflict. A rapid ending of the standoff was their primary focus. Noesner, by contrast, tried to understand the perspective of the cultists and take them at their word, believing a slow and steady approach would result in a trickle of innocents out of the compound. His primary focus was a peaceful de-escalation and freeing of the hostages. While it’s unclear if Noesner’s approach would ultimately have succeeded, it did appear to be making progress. Could it be that the shift to focusing on time was partially responsible for dozens of deaths?

Broken Theories

The power of zooming out is also useful in the domain of policy to understand what policies are driving what behaviors. Think of the focus management act as an iterative process by which each new cycle generates greater and greater insight. Let’s turn to the topic of crime and policing policies.

Take New York City, a city that many felt typified the problem of urban crime in the early 1990s. As a kid who grew up in New Jersey not far from the city, I believed New York was not safe and best to be avoided at night. And so when I had the unique opportunity, during high school, to work at Bear Stearns, the (in)famous New York investment bank, my parents were a bit worried. Despite their concerns, I convinced them to allow me to take the internship, which entailed a two-hour commute each way, involving a bus to the city and a walk down Forty-Second Street to Park Avenue.

If my parents had known about this last leg of my commute, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have let me take the job. The twenty-minute walk passed numerous adult entertainment shops, at least five to ten street-side drug vendors, and what I remain convinced were several organized crime fronts pretending to be convenience stores. The word that comes to mind today when I reflect on the Forty-Second Street of 1990 is seedy. It’s not the type of place you’d send a sixteen year old from the ’burbs. Somehow, I survived.

And I remember in 1993, as a college student, that the candidate for NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani, ran a campaign that focused on making NYC safe. As a former prosecutor, Giuliani made crime the defining issue of the campaign and he seemed well-credentialed to clean up the city. As difficult as it is to imagine today, New Yorkers in the early 1990s felt like the city was under siege by criminals, drug traffickers, prostitutes, and other nefarious influences. And these impressions were backed up by hard facts: between the 1960s and the early 1990s, rape rates had risen nearly 400 percent, murder rates were up 500 percent and robbery had gone up more than fourteen-fold.¹⁶ It was in the midst of this environment that the tough-on-crime mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani rode to victory.

Shortly after winning the election, Giuliani installed Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the commissioner of the New York Police Department. Bratton and Giuliani aggressively pursued “broken windows” policing, a crime-fighting strategy based on a theory described in a March 1982 Atlantic magazine article written by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling.¹⁷ The approach was later made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s description in the Tipping Point.¹⁸ The practice focused on stopping petty crimes to create an environment in which little infractions were penalized, telegraphing messages to potential criminals that absolutely no crime was going to be tolerated. Fix broken windows, and the message was clear: people cared. Stop small crimes, and big crimes would not happen.

In addition to punishing robbers and violent criminals, Bratton spearheaded an effort that cracked down on turnstile-jumpers and panhandlers in subway stations, drunks and drug pushers on the streets, and even the window-washing squeegee men who would, without asking, clean drivers’ windows and expect tips in return. Crime rates plunged.

Between 1993 and 1996, NYC rape rates dropped by 17 percent, assault by 27 percent, robbery by 42 percent, and murder by almost 50 percent.¹⁹ The Wilson-Kelling theory, put into practice by Giuliani and Bratton, seemed to work. A huge success, right?

Well, it’s actually not clear. For one thing, as noted by an article in Mother Jones, violent crime had peaked in NYC in 1990, years before the Giuliani and Bretton team had taken control. And, the article continues, “Far more puzzling … in city after city, violent crime peaked in the early ’90s and then began a steady and spectacular decline.”²⁰ Plenty of other cities didn’t practice the broken windows approach to policing, and their crime rates plunged alongside that of NYC. Washington, DC, had seen violent crime fall by more than half, Dallas by 70 percent, Newark by almost 75 percent, and Los Angeles, 78 percent.²¹

Plenty of alternative theories emerged, ranging from economic explanations (the economic boom of the 1990s created new jobs and reduced the motivation for crime) to demographic logics (fewer young men = fewer criminals). In one particularly famous explanation for the plunge in violent crime, Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner suggested that the drop in crime might have been due to legalized abortion (Roe v. Wade was the landmark 1973 decision to legalize abortion) and the prevention of unwanted babies that would grow up without attention or role models.²² It made sense that seventeen to twenty years after this ruling that crime would drop, right? But all of these things happened at the same time, making it unclear what actually caused what.

In a persuasive piece of investigative journalism, Kevin Drum analyzed all of the studies relating to these and other theories about why violent crime had fallen.²³ And the dots he connected resembled nothing like the ideas I just reviewed with you. In trying to disentangle the spaghetti-like connections between crime and its causes, he began with guidance from Karl Smith, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who studies epidemics. Drum summarizes the rules of thumb that Smith gave him to understand epidemics:

If it spreads along the lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it’s everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the 60s and 70s and the fall of crime in the 90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.²⁴

What?! A molecule? Yup. In fact, Drum goes on to review numerous studies that have linked one specific material—lead—to violent crime, reduced IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. Drum shows how Rick Nevin, a consultant for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, demonstrated how lead poisoning had produced all sorts of problems in children, but he also showed that 90 percent of the changes in violent crime in America could be explained by changes of lead emissions from automobiles. Did the 1970 Clean Air Act, which very specifically targeted the environment, unintentionally and powerfully impact crime rates as it spurred automobile companies to shift from leaded toward unleaded fuels?

While it’s still unclear if all the dots to connect are in fact connected, tracing the evolution of our understanding demonstrates how dot connecting can and should be iterative. With each cycle of triangulation, our insights grow. The key in the case of crime was for policymakers to connect health studies with social studies and econometric analysis to cross the silos of understanding.

Bull Magic

We must gain an understanding of what we know—and, more importantly, what we don’t. We spend a large portion of our waking hours at work. Following meaningful personal relationships, our jobs are the most significant potential contributors to life satisfaction. It should come as no surprise that careful focus management is an important factor in success at work. And yet few make a deliberate effort to consider just how overfocus hinders work and how active attention management can unleash potential and success.

One of the most respected coaches in basketball history, Phil Jackson was a master of focus management. He led the Chicago Bulls to six championships in the 1990s and the Los Angeles Lakers to five in the 2000s. His success as a coach relied heavily on his ability to guide attention (both his own as well as his players’) in ways that other coaches couldn’t.

In his book Eleven Rings, Jackson describes his deliberate and direct efforts to manage his players away from tunnel vision.²⁵ By looking broadly and widely, the players he coached developed a mission-oriented, big-picture appreciation for the context of their actions. They were better suited to navigate the inherent ups and downs of professional basketball than their peers. He taught them to zoom out.

To do this, Jackson forced himself to adopt a broader perspective than that of his rival coaches. While most of his competitors focused on the “Xs and Os” of tactics, Jackson concentrated on fine-tuning the mindsets of his players—developing in them what he calls “the spiritual nature of the game.”²⁶ He taught his players to be mindful.

While most coaches tried to deliver the most exciting pump-up speeches before games, Jackson found that this approach made players lose control of their focus. Instead, he “developed a number of strategies to help them quiet their minds and build awareness so they could go into battle poised and in control.”²⁷ This included having players engage in ten minutes of Zen meditation before games. By helping players to stay in the moment and be mindfully aware of their own thoughts, he encouraged subservience of the me to the we on his teams. And given how star-studded his teams were, this was a major differentiator.

But Jackson didn’t hold them to a single hyperfocused process. He was too sensitive to the blinding power of over-focus. As he put it:

To strengthen the players’ awareness, I liked to keep them guessing about what was coming next. During one practice, they looked so lackadaisical I decided to turn out the lights and have them play in the dark—not an easy task when you’re trying to catch a rocket pass from Michael Jordan. Another time, after an embarrassing defeat, I had them go through a whole practice without saying a word. Other coaches thought I was nuts. What mattered to me was getting the players to wake up, if only for a moment, and see the unseen, hear the unheard.²⁸

Jackson also made sure to expose his players to a variety of perspectives. For example, he would have “experts come in and teach the players yoga, tai chi, and other mind-body techniques.” But the outside insights were not confined to Eastern mindfulness practices. He would invite all sorts of guest speakers to provide new perspectives, including “a nutritionist, an undercover detective, and a prison warden.”²⁹

He’d also gift players books that he thought would help widen their focus, selecting them based on what he knew about each individual and what he felt might specifically help expand their individual horizons. One year’s recommendations included Song of Solomon (for Michael Jordan), Things Fall Apart (Bill Cartwright), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (John Paxson), The Ways of White Folks (Scottie Pippen), Joshua: A Parable for Today (Horace Grant), Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (B. J. Armstrong), Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Craig Hodges), On the Road (Will Perdue), and Beavis and Butt-Head: This Book Sucks (Stacey King).³⁰

Jackson also took advantage of the team’s vigorous travel schedule to expose his players to new thinking. Sometimes when they were traveling short distances—between Houston and San Antonio, for instance—he’d load everybody onto a bus to give them a chance to see what the world looked like beyond airport waiting rooms. Once, after a hard loss in a playoff series with the Knicks, Jackson surprised everyone by taking the team on a ferry ride to Staten Island rather than making them go through another round of interviews with the media.³¹

But Jackson didn’t constrain his perspective-broadening endeavors to sightseeing. He insisted they meet people from all walks of life and learn to appreciate them all. On one trip, Jackson took his team to visit US Senator Bill Bradley, a former basketball player, in his Washington, DC, office.³² Senator Bradley shared his thoughts about race, politics, and basketball with the team—shortly after he had just delivered a rousing speech on the floor of the US Senate to highlight issues raised by the Rodney King events. He showed the team how he kept a photo in his office of the jump shot he missed in game seven of the 1971 Eastern Conference finals that basically ended the Knicks’ hope of a championship that year. As Jackson said, “Bill kept it there as a reminder of his own fallibility.”³³ The message was not lost on the players.

Jackson was keenly aware of how overfocus mixed with personal ambition in confident players to produce a toxic cocktail of hubris and narrowness of thought. Consider that Jackson himself was hyperfocused on individual stats, wanting to break as many individual records as he could. But Jackson understood the risks of this individualistic approach; simply put, it would not lead to championships.

The fundamental problem with employing help to make decisions—regardless of whether it is from focused experts, algorithms embedded in technology, or bureaucratic rules—is that we tend to mindlessly adhere to the guidance of these focus managers. This is a subtle and often hidden way through which we stop thinking for ourselves. Managing focus is a critical role that should be done with intention and full awareness of the constraints facing those upon whom you may be dependent.

Imagine you find yourself on the street in the pitch black and completely lost. Along come experts and technologies wielding a much needed flashlight, but a light that only they operate. By looking at the spots where they shine the light, we gain a view of the terrain and may even find our way. But by controlling the spotlight, they’re controlling where we focus—which is not by itself bad. It has the potential to mislead, however, if we blindly assume the spotlight is shining in the optimal spot.

Questions to Ask Yourself

• Are you focused on the right topics?  Think about your focus and how technologies and experts may be influencing where you pay attention. Is where you focus actually an expression of your interests?
• What might you see if you moved the spotlight elsewhere? Are there options to consider beyond the ones you’ve been offered?  Remember that attention is limited and the very act of focusing is also an act of filtering and ignoring. Use caution to not filter out the most useful potential options.
• What is it that experts and technologies do not (or cannot) know about the context that may change your focus?  Recall that experts and technologies, by nature, are only looking within their area of focus and fail to see the complete picture that you are facing. How might these constraints bias their well-intentioned guidance?
• Do you have the right level of zoom?  Often our level of zoom may not reflect the optimal degree of focus. Consider zooming out to see a bigger view, and then determine the correct level of analysis to help you address the challenge at hand.