PDF Summary:The Power of Unwavering Focus, by Dandapani

Throughout your life, parents, teachers, coaches, and employers have probably told you to focus. But has anyone ever taught you how? That's what Dandapani—a Hindu priest and entrepreneur who spent 10 years living in a monastery—aims to do in The Power of Unwavering Focus. Dandapani explains that focus isn't something that just happens—it's a skill that you must cultivate like any other. However, few people understand how to learn this skill and even fewer have put in the effort to master it.

This guide explores Dandapani's advice and the many benefits of a focused life. We'll discuss the importance of finishing tasks you begin, how improved focus can deepen your sense of purpose, and the unexpected benefits of wiggling your toes. Through our commentary, we'll examine the neuroscience behind focus, the Hindu concepts that inform Dandapani's practice, and complementary advice from other focus experts.

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(Shortform note: In Incognito, neuroscientist David Eagleman explains how practicing focus can allow you to use your mind's energy more efficiently. He states that when you repeat an action, it becomes increasingly fixed in your neural circuitry—the pattern of neurons that perform the task. Next time you go to perform the action, your brain can do it more quickly because it’s now using a pre-created, fixed neural circuit instead of needing to build a new one. After repeated use, this allows you to perform the same action using less energy.)

3) Master your skills: Finally, Dandapani explains that improved focus will facilitate greater mastery of any skill. Recall that your energy flows wherever you direct your awareness. Therefore, the more you guide your awareness to the regions involved in using a skill—anything from painting to analyzing a problem at work—the more energy you will invest in those regions. This invested energy grows the strength and capacity of the skill, like exercising a muscle.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin builds on the importance of focus in developing skills. Waitzkin explains that presence—a state of calm awareness and intense focus—is essential for achieving a high level of mastery. Presence not only allows you to stay with a task for longer practice sessions, but it also allows you to respond calmly and thoughtfully to the challenges and frustrations along the way.)

Benefit 2) Overcome Stress and Anxiety

Improved focus also has the power to help you overcome anxiety and fear. Dandapani explains that you experience anxiety because your awareness travels to an imaginary future where things are going poorly. This then causes you stress and anxiety in the present moment. However, you wouldn't be stressed out if your awareness wasn't traveling to an imagined future in the first place. Therefore, Dandapani argues, you can overcome stress and anxiety by guiding your awareness back to the present and away from the distressing imagined future.

(Shortform note: In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman adds an important caveat to Dandapani's view of anxiety. While Goleman agrees that we feel anxious because we imagine future events going poorly, he argues that this process can serve an important purpose. When you anticipate a challenge in the future, your mind begins rehearsing solutions to better prepare you for the situation. However, he does note that this behavior becomes unhealthy when it becomes repetitive and chronic, or if the mind begins catastrophizing—imagining ever worse and worse situations until arriving at totalizing thoughts like, "I'll never be happy in life.")

Benefit 3) Deepen Your Relationships

Dandapani asserts that focus can also deepen your relationships with others. This is because focus allows you to give a friend or loved one your undivided attention. This deepens relationships in two distinct ways.

First, giving someone your undivided attention can make them feel valued. Dandapani states that everyone has a finite amount of time and energy in their lives, making them the most valuable things you can give another person. By giving someone your undivided attention—which requires your time and energy—you show how important they are to you.

Second, by giving someone your undivided attention, you'll notice more about the other person than you would if you were distracted during your interactions. This will enable you to get to know them better than you did before and lead to a deeper, richer relationship.

(Shortform note: In You're Not Listening, Kate Murphy provides a different explanation for why giving someone your undivided attention has so much power to deepen relationships. She states that when someone listens with undivided attention, the brainwaves of the speaker and the listener begin to sync up. This syncing enables feelings of closeness and deep emotional bonding that strengthen the relationship over time.)

Benefit 4) Live With More Purpose

Dandapani states that learning to focus will help you live a more purposeful life. He provides two reasons why.

First, improved focus has the power to help you better understand your life's purpose. To truly gain a sense of purpose in your life, you must understand your deepest desires and motivations—which you can only achieve by knowing and listening to your mind. If you’re always distracted, you’ll never listen to the regions of your mind that hold your deeper motivations in life.

Second, improved focus will allow you to prioritize the activities, relationships, and skills that contribute to your life's purpose. Recall that one of the benefits of focus is control over your time and energy. This means you’ll be able to invest more time and energy in activities that feel meaningful and give your life a sense of purpose.

Use Focus to Develop Purpose Over Time

In Grit, Angela Duckworth explains that developing a sense of purpose in life is a process that can take years. She identifies three major steps on the journey toward purpose. Here, we’ll describe these steps and how a focused mind might help you with each of them:

1) You’re attracted to an interest or pursuit, often for self-centered reasons—for example, you want to learn an instrument to impress your friends or parents. A focused mind can help you clarify your interests and zero in on a pursuit. You may feel attracted to more pursuits than you can choose, and focus in this early stage can help you choose and commit to a path.

2) You become proficient through practice and discipline. As we've discussed, focus is essential for mastering your skills. A focused mind will aid your journey toward proficiency at this stage.

3) You figure out ways this skill can benefit others and prioritize their needs. Recall that focus gives you the ability to give others your undivided attention. Giving your undivided attention to your community and relationships will help you discover opportunities to use your skills to help others.

Benefit 5) Experience More Joy

Finally, Dandapani reveals that developing the skill of focus will lead to a more joyful life. He stresses that joy isn’t an experience to be chased on its own, but rather a by-product of living purposefully and investing in the people and goals that matter most to you.

Thus, as your focus allows you to understand your motivations and priorities and to direct your energy toward them, you’ll discover that a focused life is a joyful life.

(Shortform note: In The Art of Happiness, the Dalai Lama challenges the view that you shouldn't make happiness a goal. He argues that the purpose of every human life is to seek happiness. However, he defines happiness as more than just a feeling—it’s a state of being deeply content with your life. In contrast to Dandapani, who suggests that contentment is a natural byproduct of focusing on your priorities, the Dalai Lama argues that you achieve contentment by practicing compassion—an essential part of human nature.)

Part 3: How to Become Focused

Now that we understand the benefits of a focused life, we'll explore Dandapani's methods for directing your awareness to focus. We'll also discuss his techniques for creating a plan to practice focus and foster a focused mind over time. Finally, we'll examine his advice on developing willpower, an essential skill for practicing focus.

Direct Your Awareness

Recall that focus consists of intentionally directing your orb of awareness to specific regions of your mind and keeping it there for as long as you need—without letting anything else direct your orb of awareness for you. Here, we'll explore Dandapani's advice on how to direct your awareness and stay in control. We've organized his techniques into three steps.

1) Become Conscious of Your Awareness

Before you can guide your awareness, you have to reflect on its current state: Where is your floating orb right now? What region of your mind has it traveled to? See if you can find out.

(Shortform note: In Mindfulness in Plain English, Henepola Gunaratana writes that being fully conscious of your interior state requires you to be non-judgmental and accepting of what you find. Simply observe your own mind without judgment. Therefore, becoming conscious of your awareness may require you to suspend judgment and observe where your awareness is without yet thinking about where it ought to be.)

2) Redirect Your Awareness from Distractions

If your awareness isn’t where you would like it to be, you must pull it back from whatever is directing your awareness. Dandapani recommends shifting your awareness in a small way, like wiggling your toes.

You can also pull your attention away from a distraction by reframing your interpretation of it. Whenever you find something engrossing, you’re interpreting it in a way that makes it seem worth your awareness. You can redirect your awareness by changing your interpretation so that the distraction is no longer worth paying attention to. For example, if your awareness is absorbed in a game on your phone, remind yourself that you’re only looking at colored lights on a screen.

(Shortform note: In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle gives further advice for dislodging your attention from distraction. Tolle recommends that you strive to maintain a sense of presence by turning your attention to your inner body. By observing your inner sensations and focusing on what you’re feeling at this moment, your awareness will naturally detach itself from external distractions.)

3) Set an Intention and Guide Your Awareness

Dandapani writes that to guide your orb of awareness to the proper region of your mind, you must first set a destination. Tell yourself where you want to focus. Then try to gently guide your orb of awareness to the desired region of your mind. Once you arrive there, notice if your awareness is able to settle there, or if it keeps pulling away.

(Shortform note: Some psychologists state that people have a hard time setting and following through with intentions because of competing needs. That is, they have unfulfilled emotional needs and desires in the backs of their minds, competing to direct their intentions. For example, if you're planning to focus on getting some work done but can't stop dwelling on a recent argument with a family member, you may have two different emotional needs competing to direct your intentions. In this situation, psychologists say that simply acknowledging your competing needs can help you prioritize and clarify your intentions, freeing you to guide your awareness as needed.)

Develop Focus Over Time Through Practice

Dandapani stresses that while the methods of directing your awareness are simple, the ability to focus most of the time requires years of practice. Recall that your awareness has the power to slowly reshape your mind by directing your flow of spiritual energy to different regions. Therefore, by focusing your awareness on the ability to focus your awareness, you'll strengthen this ability over time. However, if you frequently allow yourself to fall into distraction, this will also reshape your mind to make you more distractible over time. Dandapani encourages you to think of focus as mastering a sport. The effort will be enormous, the results will be slow, but the rewards will eventually be great.

(Shortform note: Dandapani's strategies for becoming more focused prioritize the importance of developing greater internal control. However, you also may want to consider ways you can control your external environment to eliminate the temptation of distraction. In Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey recommends first creating a plan to remove common distractions from your workstation. This could include putting your phone in another room, deleting distracting apps from your computer, or disconnecting from the internet.)

To get moving on your journey to mastery, Dandapani recommends that you start by making a plan to incorporate focus into the activities you do every single day. Here we’ll discuss his practice plan in four steps.

1) Choose a Daily Activity to Center Your Practice On

Pick an ordinary activity that you do every day. This should be something that you have to do, such as brushing your teeth, getting dressed, or making breakfast. Don't pick something that you feel you ought to do every day but might not get to, like exercising.

2) Practice Focus Every Time You Do This Activity

For example, every time you brush your teeth, move your awareness to the present moment and focus on thoroughly brushing each tooth without letting your mind wander from the task.

(Shortform note: In Atomic Habits, James Clear explains why it’s most effective to practice focus with something you have to do every day. In creating a new habit, he states that it helps to have a specific cue, like: "When X occurs, I will do Y." By doing your desired action on cue, you won't need to invest time and energy into deciding to do it. This will help you exercise the desired behavior regularly and, over time, build it into a habit without drawing on as much mental effort. Dandapani’s suggestions follow this same principle—the daily activity serves as your cue to practice guiding your awareness.)

3) Track Your Progress

Dandapani recommends that you create a grading rubric for yourself. Every day, you’ll grade yourself based on how well you focused during your chosen activity. For example, every time you brush your teeth, you could give yourself a letter grade of A, B, or C. You would give yourself a C if you were completely distracted while performing this task, an A if you were completely focused, and a B if you were somewhere in between. This will keep you accountable and consistent as you can look back at your rubric and see whether you’re growing or slipping in your practice.

(Shortform note: As Clear writes in Atomic Habits, tracking a habit is itself a habit to develop. Therefore, you might also want to plan how and when you'll evaluate your focus practice. For example, you could keep a notebook in your bathroom cabinet and enter a grade immediately after brushing your teeth.)

4) Expand Your Practice

Once you’ve mastered focusing on this activity every day, choose a second activity that you have to do every day, and add this to your practice. However, note that Dandapani suggests that truly mastering the first item on your list should take at least a month, if not several. Recall that mastering focus is like mastering a sport. Start small and work your way up.

(Shortform note: Behavioral research supports Dandapani's view that it can take months to develop a new habit. One study found that people take anywhere from 18 to 254 days to turn a behavior into a consistent habit. The average time was 66 days. Therefore, adding a new habit to the first after just one month might be difficult.)

Develop Your Willpower

What if you try to redirect your focus, but instead of settling in the desired region, it keeps pulling away? To deal with this, you need the complementary tool of willpower: a source of mental strength you can call on when a task requires more effort. Much like focus, willpower is a capacity that you can develop through practice—or weaken if you habitually don’t use it. In this section, we'll first explore Dandapani's daily exercises for developing willpower. Then we'll look at his suggestions for long-term willpower development.

(Shortform note: Dandapani focuses primarily on developing willpower through practice. However, as Kelly McGonigal writes in The Willpower Instinct, your physical health can impact your willpower as well. A healthy diet, frequent exercise, and regular sleep all improve your willpower. On the other hand, a poor sleep schedule, unhealthy diet, and sedentary lifestyle can all reduce your willpower.)

Develop Willpower Through Daily Exercises

Dandapani recommends that you improve your willpower with daily practice. He suggests incorporating the following principles into daily focus practice.

1) Finish the tasks you begin. Dandapani explains that every time you start a task, you begin with a burst of enthusiasm, excited by the possibility of achievement. However, as you get tired or frustrated, the initial burst will wear off and you'll have to call on your willpower to complete the task. If you allow yourself to abandon tasks before you complete them, you’ll weaken your willpower, but if you practice finishing them, you’ll strengthen it.

2) Always do the job well, no matter how long it takes. Putting in the extra effort to do a thorough job will strengthen your willpower. Conversely, rushing carelessly through a task will weaken it, because you won't need to call on your willpower as much as if you did a thorough job. For example, if you're cleaning a cupboard, take the time to get all of the hard-to-reach places.

3) Do slightly more than you planned. When you've almost completed the task, come up with an additional finishing touch that you didn't plan on when starting out. Dandapani explains that by calling on your willpower one last time before completing each task, you’ll continue growing this capacity. For example, if you’re changing your bicycle tire, you could also take a minute to lubricate your chain and gears or test the pressure on your other tire.

Developing Willpower by Overcoming “Pain Points”

Charles Duhigg's arguments in The Power of Habit shed light on how Dandapani's principles exercise your willpower. Duhigg explains that every difficult activity involves "pain points": specific moments of difficulty we experience while carrying out a task, and where we’re most likely to bail. He writes that predicting a task's pain points can allow you to plan ahead and think about how you’ll push through them.

Dandapani's techniques offer a plan for dealing with common pain points. His first principle suggests that you will likely encounter a pain point after your initial burst of enthusiasm for a task wears off. In his second principle, he cautions against responding to the pain point by trying to rush through the rest of the task instead of calling on your willpower to finish it at a focused pace. Finally, his last principle suggests that you may encounter a pain point right when you're almost done with the task—anticipating the relief of being finished. Therefore, he asks you to call on your willpower one more time and do just slightly more than you planned.

Develop Willpower Through a Long-Term Exercise

Dandapani also recommends a long-term exercise to develop your willpower:

1) Make a list of five things you began in recent years but didn't finish, or things you told people you were going to do but didn't complete. These could be hobbies, home improvement projects, or other personal goals, but they need to be things that you can still achieve.

2) In your spare time, complete the items on your list one by one. For each one, use Dandapani's three daily willpower-developing principles: Finish tasks you begin; always do the job well, no matter how long it takes; and do slightly more than you planned.

(Shortform note: In Can't Hurt Me, David Goggins elaborates on the value of returning to past failures for personal growth. He writes that every failure has lessons to teach you about what you could do differently. As you develop your willpower by picking up abandoned projects that you wish you’d finished, consider reflecting on why you never finished them. What got in your way, and what could you do differently next time? Goggins recommends reflecting on these past failures by journaling. He also encourages you to share your successes with others when you finally succeed.)