Command Your Attention

A young man who cannot command his attention will eventually have trouble commanding anything else.

We do not have an information problem. We have an attention problem.

Young men today are surrounded by more information, entertainment, opinion and interruption than any generation before them. Most of it is noise.

Noise is not simply something loud. It is anything that demands your attention without deserving it.

A boy can wake up, reach for his phone and within minutes be pulled into somebody else’s argument, somebody else’s joke, somebody else’s outrage and somebody else’s life. All of this can happen before he has done a single useful thing, thought his own thought, prayed, worked or decided what kind of day he intends to have.

That matters because attention is not neutral. Whatever repeatedly captures a young man’s attention begins to train him.

The Problem Is Not Boredom

People often say young men need to learn to tolerate boredom. That does not go far enough.

There is almost always something worth doing, noticing, learning or improving. Even the mundane has purpose when a man brings himself fully to it.

Booker T. Washington understood this. In Up from Slavery, he described teaching students to see not only the usefulness of labor, but its beauty and dignity. Work did not need to be glamorous. The man needed to refuse to treat useful work as beneath him. (Washington’s account of Tuskegee’s building program)

Wash the dishes well. Sweep the floor completely. Mow a straight line. Repair something instead of replacing it. Walk without headphones. Finish what you started.

The ordinary moment is not dead time. It is training ground.

A young man who constantly needs to be entertained is being trained to believe that ordinary life is beneath him. It is not. Ordinary life is where most character is built.

This is one of the central ideas behind The Formation Protocol: character, competence and self-command are formed through repeated action, not merely understood as ideas.

Constant Stimulation Makes Weak Demands Feel Urgent

The phone vibrates. A notification appears. Someone posts something. A video begins and another follows.

None of these things may matter, but they all make the same demand:

Give me your attention.

If a young man obeys that demand hundreds of times a day, we should not be surprised when sustained attention becomes difficult. Homework feels unbearable. Ten pages of reading feels slow. A conversation without a screen feels empty. Physical work needs entertainment in the background. Prayer becomes difficult. Silence feels strange.

There is evidence behind the obvious experience. Studies have found that even cellphone notification sounds can disrupt attention and task performance, with particularly noticeable effects among adolescents. (a study of notification alerts and attention)

But the problem is not merely that time is being wasted. Something more important is happening.

The young man is practicing surrender.

Again and again, something outside him demands his attention and he gives it. That is the opposite of self-command.

Learn to Recognize the Signal

Signal is what actually deserves your attention.

It is the work that needs doing, the truth that needs facing, the person standing in front of you, the skill you need to learn, the promise you made, the book worth struggling through and the weakness you know needs work.

It is the prayer you keep avoiding, the difficult conversation and the responsibility that belongs to you whether you feel like carrying it or not.

These things rarely arrive with flashing lights. They do not have algorithms designed to keep you engaged. They simply wait.

The world has become extraordinarily good at producing noise. A man must become extraordinarily good at protecting the signal.

The Men Around Him Have to Live This Too

This cannot become another lecture adults give young men while checking their own phones.

If a father, coach or mentor tells a boy to disconnect while remaining constantly connected himself, he has already weakened the argument. Formation requires example.

Put the device down. Become unreachable for a while.

Nothing terrible happens. The world continues turning. The news can wait. The text can wait. The score can wait. The email can wait.

Most things can wait.

Immediacy is not importance. We have allowed one to impersonate the other.

Parents and mentors who want to help young men develop this kind of self-command can find more practical formation ideas in the Formation articles.

Try an Amish Hour: One Hour Without Screens

Start small.

Take one hour and call it an Amish Hour. The name is only a name. You are not joining a church. You are putting the machine down.

For sixty minutes, technology goes away. Not just for the young man. For the adults too.

No phone. No social media. No streaming. No video. No headphones feeding noise directly into your head.

Start once a week. Sunday is a good place to begin.

Do not make it punishment and do not turn it into a speech about screen addiction. Just live.

Go for a walk and leave the phone at home. Read. Pray. Talk. Cook. Build something. Fix something. Work in the yard. Take one idea worth discussing, then walk and think about it.

Sixty minutes is enough.

The goal is not to make a young man suffer through an hour without technology so an adult can prove a point. The goal is discovery.

His mind begins to settle. Conversation has room to develop. Thoughts stop arriving in fragments. He notices things. He finishes ideas. He begins to understand that every quiet moment does not need to be filled by someone else’s content.

Most importantly, he learns something about himself:

I do not have to respond every time something asks for my attention.

That is one of the first things a young man must learn to govern. Before money, a household, employees, children or leadership, he must first learn to govern himself.

Use the Moment

Stop demanding that every moment entertain you. Use the moment.

Work. Think. Observe. Pray. Create. Practice. Serve. Rest deliberately.

A young man does not need a constant stream of stimulation to make life interesting. He needs the capacity to make something of the life in front of him.

That is competence. That is discipline. That is self-mastery.

The Phone Is a Tool Until It Isn’t

Young men are going to live and work in a technological world. They should understand technology, use it well, build with it, create with it, earn with it and communicate through it.

There is an enormous difference between using a tool and being trained by one.

The question is not whether you own a phone. The question is whether the phone owns your attention.

That is where the battle is.

Learn what deserves your attention and what does not. Learn to ignore what flashes merely because it flashes. Learn to give sustained attention to something difficult. Learn to do ordinary work well. Learn to walk without needing entertainment.

Learn to be unreachable for a while. Learn to hear yourself think. Learn to listen for God. Learn to protect what matters from what merely demands.

The world will provide endless noise.

Your job is to find the signal.