We are bombarded all day long by a huge amount of information, by people who want our attention, by emails that we need to answer to, by news feeds, by friends in need, by clients and bosses, by loved ones, by our kids.
While it would be extremely pleasant to be able to offer each of them the attention they want, we don’t have the physical time to do that. This means that we have to distribute our attention, to give more to some and less to others and to ignore the rest.
If you take the time to consider this, we ignore more things than things we offer attention to. The problem is that we become so used to ignoring what’s around us that we will soon start to ignore things we should not.
When bombarded by a million things and under pressure, we tend to ignore everything that’s not of extremely high importance in that second. What this leads to is ignoring the things important in the long run, the things that truly matter to us.
This is why deciding what we ignore and what we focus our attention on should be a continuous process. We should constantly revise our short and long term goals, objectives, important elements and people in our life and how we distribute attention to them.
Ignorance is bliss if done right.