The Interplay of Attention and Speech in Learning
Winning the Series of Games
“Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life.” - James Clear
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with discovering what makes people win. I used to think what made someone good at one thing was different than what made them good at another, and while there is some truth to that, I’ve noticed that there are a few things that make people good at everything. It’s almost like a Pareto distribution of skills necessary for winning.
There are a handful of skills and traits that we can learn that can help us get to the top of all the pyramids.
While analyzing the “winners” of our society, I’ve noticed that they all possess certain traits to get to the top of their fields.
What makes a successful professor is different from what makes a successful athlete is different from what makes a successful musician, or businessman, or mother, or soldier, or fashion designer…you get the idea.
Each one of these people has developed themselves in the areas they need to reach the top of their game.
But, life is more than just one game, it’s a series of games.
So that poses the question, what are the traits and skills we need to develop to win the series of games?
In some ways, that’s different from what it takes to win one particular game, but in other ways, it’s also the same. That led to me looking for patterns, not only in successful people of my time but in the heroes of the myths of all cultures.
For generations, even predating written history, people have been trying to figure out this question and share their findings with the ones who inherit their world. They shared these ideas through stories of heroes who would display the traits and ways of being necessary for “winning.”
Here's an example, Hercules is a kind, strong, brave, and persistent young man, and because of that, the story ends well for him. When little boys are told the story of Hercules, they want to emulate his heroic qualities and be one themselves. Adults are happy to tell them this story because they know (subconsciously) that these lessons will help the children win the game of games, and life. The same can be found in religious stories, ancient myths, and popular culture. The Avengers is a perfect example of this. Spider-Man is my personal favorite.
So I started thinking, what if I analyzed what was common among these hero myths?
Will I find the skills needed for success everywhere?
I don’t know exactly what will make someone successful everywhere, but I have compiled some commonalities between the heroes in every story I’ve encountered.
I do not have an exhaustive list of these traits and skills, but they are the ones I’ve found to be most important. This part of the lesson will focus on the power of attention.
The Osirus Myth & Attention
This story has a similar arc to Disney’s famous The Lion King, one of my favorite movies ever. I’ll make various connections to The Lion King and it’s relevance to the modern world throughout the story.
This story is one of the oldest, but most elaborate and influential, myths of the Egyptian Gods. This is the Osiris Myth.
It begins with the god Osiris, the King of Egypt, ruling a fair and prosperous kingdom. Osiris is extremely wise and well-liked by his subjects. He’s harsh with his judgments but fair with his punishments.
Osiris is analogous to Mufasa in The Lion King. They are both a representation of The Wise King archetype.
Osiris was married to Isis, the Goddess of health, marriage, and fertility. They had a good marriage and Isis was lovingly devoted to Osiris. Osiris also had a brother named Set, the God of deserts, disorder, and violence.
Isis seems to be the ancient Egyptian representation of the anima. Set is analogous to Scar from The Lion King. Like Scar and Mufasa, Set’s relationship with Osiris represents “the hostile brothers” archetype.
Set was jealous of Osiris and his power. He wanted to be the King of Egypt. Osiris knew his bother had these feelings but chose not to acknowledge them. Instead, he was willfully blind to his brother’s hostility. Set used his brother’s voluntary ignorance against him and killed Osiris. Set chopped Osiris into little pieces and spread his body parts across Egypt.
These different pieces represented the different districts in ancient Egypt and were believed to be the origins of their old borders.
Mufasa was killed by Scar because Mufasa did not want to see the evil in his brother. He chose to be willfully ignorant. Just like in The Lion King, Set was able to kill Osirus because Osirus didn’t want to see the evil in Set.
This is one of the biggest lessons I took from this story: Willful ignorance is strong enough to take down a good, powerful, and wise leader. Or maybe the ancient Egyptians were trying to say that only willful ignorance is strong enough to take down a wise, powerful, and good leader. Either way, willful ignorance is destructive and the forces working against us will use our ignorance to catch us off guard. Choosing to not see the evil will kill us, maybe when others may need us the most.
Of course, when a king dies it’s big news and Isis shortly finds out. She’s furious and goes around to each district gathering Osiris’s parts. Eventually, she finds his phallus and impregnates herself. While pregnant, she leaves for the underworld to raise her baby, the hero, Horus the Younger, away from the disorder and violence of Set’s reign.
Horus the Younger is commonly depicted as a falcon-headed man because he represents attention. The agent of attention is born from the wise king and the anima. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Horus was raised in the underworld. To the modern Westerner, the underworld has connotations of Hell or other terrible places, but in ancient Egyptian mythology, the underworld was another dimension where the gods could watch the humans from afar.
Horus, the agent of attention, is raised in a world separate from the one he will inherit. Similar to how children are raised in environments separate from “the real world.”
This is where the Osiris myth diverges from The Lion King a bit. In The Lion King, Simba (Horus analogous) “grows up” with Timon and Pumba singing Hakuna Matata, whereas Horus was raised in the underworld by Isis. Those are different, but in some ways they are similar. Our heroes are learning in a haven away from the real burden of responsibility.
As Horus gets older, he learns the truth about his father. That Set usurped him and ruled Egypt into the ground. Horus decides to return to Egypt, confront Set, and avenge his father.
This is like when Simba decides to leave Timone and Pumba to go take his rightful place as king. This is the quintessential coming-of-age story (at least for boys), a boy leaves his friends so he can go and answer the calling to be greater. Usually catalyzed by a woman, in Simba’s case, it’s Nala.
When Horus returns, Set tries to win Horus the same way he did with Osiris. But Horus has something his father didn’t, the gift of true attention. With his attention, Horus could see Set for what he was, an agent of betrayal and malevolence. When Horus confronts Set, they have a great battle. Set tears out one of Horus’s eyes, but Horus ultimately defeats him. Since gods cannot truly be killed, Horus banishes Set from the Kingdom.
This is one of my favorite parts of the story because it has so many of the lessons that make this story worthwhile.
Attention is the one thing that will give us a fighting chance against the forces of malevolence.
When we are confronting the forces of malevolence and disorder, we will get hurt seriously.
We’ll never truly destroy the forces working against us, we can only fight them off and make them leave temporarily.
Horus picks up his eye and returns to the underworld, where Isis had kept all the pieces of Osiris. Horus gives Osiris his eye, restores attention to the old corpus of wisdom, and together they rule Egpyt into prosperity and peace.
The ancient Egyptians believed that the pharaoh represented the union between Osiris and Horus. A good ruler needs the wisdom of the past and attention to the present to lead the people into a prosperous future. Horus knew that by giving attention informed by the wisdom of his dead father, he would do what was best for Egypt.
When we combine the attention of the youth with the wisdom of the old, we access profound meaning that runs deep within the soul of every human being. There are so many myths that depict that exact journey. It is not solely attention nor wisdom that will lead us to freedom and prosperity, but the union of both in a way that allows us to recognize and overcome the forces working against us.
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Attention is what brings us to the top of every hierarchy and overcome the forces of evil. This idea has been expressed through archetypal images and myths throughout history and cross-culturally.
What’s at the top?
I think the image on the back of the American dollar bill depicts this perfectly. Attention is the thing that is at the top of the pyramid, but it’s also more than that. Attention transcends the rest of the pyramid as if the ones who are paying attention are no longer part of the rest of the pyramid. (I’ve noticed this to be true in my experiences as well.)
Attention is the thing that will take us to the top of every hierarchy and overcome the forces of evil.
But why? Why does attention sit on top of the hierarchy?
I’m not sure if I’ve come up with the answer to this question, but one of the answers I’ve come up with is that with the power of attention we can:
plan for the unknown
create the future
avoid danger
predict the future.
I believe this is a huge part of the reason why so many internet influencers (and the Kardashians) make so much money. When you harness people’s attention, you have the ultimate power. Our attention is the most powerful thing any of us has to offer. That’s why companies are willing to pay millions of dollars for advertisements and people will dedicate their lives to being famous. Attention is the real currency, everything else is illusory.
Paying attention to where we pay attention is critical for living a powerful and fulfilled life.
When we pay attention to our minds, we can improve our mental health. When we pay attention to our bodies, we can improve our physical health. When we pay attention to anything, we can improve it. What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets improved. Attention is the first step to all of that.
I recommend looking into mindfulness exercises and practices. I use meditation as a way to train myself in paying attention to my mind and myself. There’s so much research that grounds the value of paying attention to ourselves.
Pay attention to where you pay attention. It’s the most valuable thing we have to offer.
Marduk vs. Tiamat & The Significance of Speech
“A problem well put is half-solved.” - John Dewey (1859 – 1952)
An Invisible World
Similar to attention, speech is highly overlooked.
In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, renowned Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari, provides a beautiful timeline of history. It starts with matter and energy appearing marking the dawn of physics and takes us to the present and into a potential future. In this timeline, different human species appear and either evolve or die out. We know how this story ends. We, the homo sapiens, end up dominating the planet.
But why? What makes homo sapiens the dominant human species?
Harari argues that is it our unique ability to communicate through complex language. Homo sapiens were the only human species that were capable of communicating on a massive scale. That gives us a huge advantage over the other species. That combined with our unprecedented cognitive abilities makes us the most powerful creatures on earth.
Everything we do on this planet is created by us and our ability to communicate through complex language. Yuval talks about this idea of living in two worlds simultaneously; the real tangible world and the “imaginary” world of conversation. I like to think of this “imaginary” world as the world of conversation, speech, or logos rather than “imaginary.” Referring to this world as imaginary carries implications that it’s not real. If anything, the world of conversation is more real than the tangible world.
From my experience and observations, unless overridden by conscious free will, the human being primarily lives in the world of conversation. We experience our lives as a narrative, a conversation, but we also create things external to us in that conversational world.
Let me explain using business as an example.
Businesses in society are not physical entities, but conversations we are having with one another.
In Sapiens, Harari brings up Google to illustrate this point. If we were to destroy the Google headquarters, would Google disappear? No, it wouldn’t because we could rebuild it.
If we replaced all the people who worked for Google with a whole new batch of people, would Google disappear? No, not really. It might be a different company, but it could still be Google as we know it.
This little thought experiment is fun because it highlights the fallacies in thinking that we live in a purely physical and tangible world. Google exists in the world of conversation and because of that, we could destroy the things that represent Google in the real world, and Google could still exist.
I argue that the conversations we are a part of matter much more than where we are in the physical world. I’ve seen happy people in terrible places and miserable people in beautiful places. What determines their happiness or misery is the conversation they’re in.
People live in conversations.
Businesses are conversations. Relationships are conversations. Jobs are conversations.
Sometimes we add tangible symbols to keep the conversation boundaries clear in the physical world. We see this in things like wedding rings or uniforms. Nothing changes physically when someone gets married, but we all understand that there’s still a huge transformation that takes place. When someone changes from fiance to wife or husband, there’s a transformation in the conversation & the way we act changes along with that conversation. We symbolize that change in the physical world with wedding rings, marriage certificates, and other things.
When my wife and I first started dating, nothing changed physically, but we started changing how we behaved because things have changed in the world of conversation. The same thing happened when we got married.
The same thing happened when I became an EMT. Nothing changed physically, except maybe a few neural pathways. I was physically the same person, but the conversation I participated in was different. The same thing happened when I became a teacher.
We create the world with our language. Change the conversation, change the world.
I know this idea seems a little extreme, but it seems like the Mesopotamians understood this as well.
Tiamat vs. Marduk
This story depicts how the Mesopotamians believed the world came to be and the origins of the first men. It’s one of the oldest stories known to man and it is filled to the brim with powerful and timeless lessons. I’ll be interjecting with some analysis in italics throughout the story.
It begins with Tiamat, the goddess of saltwater, and Apsu, the god of freshwater coming together in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to create the world of Mesopotamia.
Tiamat is more than just the goddess of saltwater, she is also the mother of everything and the goddess of Chaos. Together, Tiamat and Apsu populated Mesopotamia with young gods.
Tiamat is the archetypical representation of the anima. She is the chaos from which life springs and Apsu is the penetrative decisive force necessary to keep them alive. In some ways, Apsu is the archetypical old wise king, the positive masculine, and the animus.
There are also representations of Tiamat and Apsu drawn as serpents wrapped around each other and look eerily similar to DNA. How the Mesopotamians knew that is way beyond me.
As time goes on, the young gods become troublesome and begin to act recklessly. One night, the young gods disturb Apsu while he’s sleeping. In frustration, Apsu tells Tiamat they should destroy the younger gods because they aren't acting properly. Tiamat disagrees with Apsu and urges him to protect the young gods, but it is too late. Ea, (a god of knowledge, mischief, and sweet water) discovers Apsu’s plan to destroy the young gods and sends him into an eternal sleep, death.
Naturally, the younger generations start acting in ways that the judgemental father (animus archetype) does not approve of. Apsu doesn’t believe his creations bring order to the chaos, judges them accordingly, and wants to destroy them. Not surprising considering that the animus archetype either protects or destroys. Of course, like any good mother, Tiamat strives to protect her children (a hallmark anima trait) but in the end, the young gods end up destroying Apsu, the order of the old.
Younger generations are constantly looking to understand the world around them and older generations are constantly working to give them answers. The issue arises when the younger generation doesn’t see the value in the old ways. Perhaps the old ways of doing things are outdated and need change. Perhaps the new ways of doing things aren’t the best and the young people who practice these methods are doomed to repeat mistakes. Either way, there is a mismatch between the young and old and it almost always results in the young destroying the old ways.
So what happens when we destroy what our predecessors have given us?
Chaos reigns.
Tiamat hears of Apsu’s death and is furious. She creates an army of monsters to destroy the young gods in retribution for the death of Apsu. She places Qingu, one of the few gods she trusts, as head of the army and gives him the Tablet of Destinies to wear as a breastplate. The Tablet of Destinies was the story of the world and what was written on the tablet is what happened. Because of this, the tablet gave Qingu immense power.
Tiamat’s rage echoes themes of flood myths. In most cultures, you can find a myth of a great flood wiping out the world. In this story, Tiamat doesn’t necessarily drown the world but she is the goddess of chaos and saltwater and her will is to destroy the world because it has become too corrupt.
The young gods are terrified of Tiamat’s wrath and know they cannot defeat her despite their powers, so they elect a champion, Marduk, to fight. Marduk had eyes all around his head and could speak magic words. He was the only god brave and strong enough to take on this battle. He made a deal with the younger gods and told them that if he defeated Tiamat, they must make him king of the gods and give him the Tablet of Destinies.
Marduk, the hero of the gods, the only opportunity to overcome chaos, harnesses the power of attention and speech.
I think this idea is so powerful. The only way we can have a fighting chance to triumph over chaos is through our attention and speech.
Also, the younger gods want to give him the Tablet of Destinies if he can defeat chaos. How cool? The hero that uses their powers of attention and speech to overcome chaos, will determine what happens in the world. The hero's will can surpass the will of the gods. The hero will no longer be under the influence of the gods and can create the world in his image.
So Marduk went to war. He armed himself with a net and a sword. The battle was long and difficult. The more Marduk would attack Tiamat the stronger she became. She grew more monstrous with every swing of his sword. Tiamat becomes a dragon and destroys everything around her, but Marduk doesn’t quit. Eventually, he catches Tiamat in his net and chops her into pieces.
From her body, Marduk creates the sky and the earth. From her blood, he created the first man tasked to serve the gods who had a responsibility to maintain order and keep chaos at bay.
So Marduk, the hero, confronts chaos with his net and his sword. This is particularly interesting because this is similar to how we psychologically grasp the unknown. When we are confronted with something that we don’t know, we grab a general understanding (the net) and learn the details in pieces (the sword).
I like to use this idea to study better. We can create a general knowledge frame to understand something new, then learn the details second. This makes learning complicated concepts much more manageable.
When Marduk went to war with Tiamat she grew stronger with every attempt to contain her and eventually began destroying everything around her. When we confront chaos, it will get ugly and things will be destroyed, but persistence will be the only way to victory. Finding the balance between tolerable destruction and irreparable damage is difficult, but we can find solace by expecting things to get ugly.
Notice how humans are created from Tiamat (life; the anima) and the thing that harnesses attention and speech. I think this shows that the Mesopotamians noticed that a part of us, human beings, had powers like Marduk but was placed in bodies created from Tiamat.
I’ve also heard versions where the people were created from the blood of Qingu. I think that’s an interesting take on the story and also carries wisdom, but I’m not going to dive too deep into that here.
Not only were we created from the same thing that created everything else, but we were also tasked to serve the gods and mediate between chaos and order. This gave the Mesopotamians an understanding of why we felt controlled by things beyond us at times. Like jealousy or lust. The Mesopotamian gods represent what modern people would call emotional states. Carl Jung said when we stopped believing in the gods, we put them inside us.
It is also our job to be like Marduk and maintain chaos and order. If we do, we get to be like Marduk. Access to the Tablet of Destinies and be king of the gods. This is an idea I think the Mesopotamians captured well: the hero who maintains a proper balance between chaos and order will determine what happens in the world and will not unwillingly fall to the influence of their emotions or primal instincts.
Similar to Marduk, human beings speak magic words. We use our speech to craft the world around us and it’s truly magical how it happens. What we say has a very real impact on the world as we know it. From the story, we know that the hero who harnesses speech and attention and willingly confronts chaos gets to determine what happens. This is a powerful lesson, but that leaves us with an important question:
What does it mean to harness speech?
I don’t have a clear answer, but I think it’s something like understanding that there is immense power in what we say, but to take it further and use that power to confront potential and bring about our will.
Harnessing speech requires us to focus our attention on our language.
How we phrase things is how we understand them.
Harnessing speech involves practicing multiple iterations of phrasing ideas while refining the meaning more accurately each time.
Harnessing speech involves practicing specificity.
From my experience, whenever I’ve experienced frustration or irritation, it comes from a lack of specificity or too much generality. For example, when I was first working on my YouTube channel I was frequently frustrated because there were so many little decisions to make. I had no idea where to start.
But then I started writing down the issues one by one. What’s the font for my brand? What is my logo? What are the structures of the beats? What are my upload days? What genre of music am I making?
Slowly, the task became less and less frustrating.
I had to focus and articulate the chaos into something small and actionable.
Once I started doing that, there was another layer of specificity. What font size should I use? What are my brand colors? What are the titles of the videos I’m uploading? What time am I uploading?
I was reminded of Marduk throughout the process — slowly cutting the chaos into smaller and smaller pieces using my speech.
We overcome chaos by using our language to break up the overwhelming monster into manageable pieces.
So this poses the question: if the Meopotampians meant this, then why didn’t they just say it?
This is not a perfect answer, but I think it’s because language development is a long and difficult process. The Mesopotamians saw this lesson. They knew it to be true. But they could not say it outright because we, as a human race, did not have enough iterations to spell out that message. Today, we can because we’ve had thousands of years to be able to retell the story, refining the message with every rep.
This also mirrors the battle between Marduk and Tiamat. The battle was long, but after a while, Marduk was able to capture the Tiamat (chaos, the unknown) and chop it up. The Meopotampians captured this idea, so to speak, but we have been able to chop it up and understand it on a deeper and clearer level.
Over time, messages from the great myths become clearer and clearer, provided that the ones confronting the unknown are harnessing their powers of attention and speech responsibly and constructively.
I’ve seen this to be true in writing too. The age-old phrase that I’m learning to accept captures it perfectly — writing is rewriting. I used to think that writers just wrote down whatever they wanted to write the first time through, but I’m starting to see that there are significant differences between the first and second iterations... the 10th....and the 20th.
I try to embrace this principle and use it to write my ideas. I usually write something that barely makes any sense at first, then I try to make it clearer with each rewrite.
This lesson started as “Mesopotamian God Story – the being that confronts chaos is the thing that chooses the destiny – articulation – logos – speech.” As you can see, I’ve fleshed it out a bit more.
Another place I’ve seen this idea is in Napoleon Hill’s fantastic book, Outwitting the Devil. In his book, he talks about the importance of definitive purpose and how it's what separates the drifters from the non-drifters: those who act on purpose from those who act on accident.
The act of defining purpose is a form of harnessing speech.
Defining purpose requires us to use language to carve out exactly what we want from the unknown. Creating or defining purpose is a great way to get people to consciously grab hold and actively participate in the world of conversation, especially if they don’t have the vocabulary to do so.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that our brains have systems for dealing with environments that we don’t understand. These systems in our brains are primarily associated with negative emotions. We experience negative emotions when we find ourselves in places that we don’t know how to navigate (chaotic environments). When we’re in predictable environments, we experience positive emotions. Like the humans created in the story, we manage the balance between chaos and order. We get access to positive emotion from confronting the chaos and turning it into order through harnessing speech and focused articulation.
This is something that I try to actively practice, especially in highly stressful or overwhelming times. Believe it or not, one great way to practice this is to create checklists. Whenever I feel like a challenge is too much to overcome, I emulate Marduk and chop the great dragon into little actionable tasks. This simplifies the situation, instead of trying to control for all the variables, my task becomes one easy thing — cross things off the list.
I recommend checking out The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. It’s a beautifully written piece on the hidden (and extremely underrated) powers of checklists. It’s cool to see how using checklists can completely eradicate mistakes and move projects along faster. He also goes over what makes checklists effective and what makes them more trouble than their worth. Using checklists to practice harnessing speech is so powerful. More accurate articulation comes from multiple reps, your first checklists aren’t going to be very good.
When it comes to being an effective student, determining what you need to get accomplished or what you need to learn is a fantastic way to practice harnessing speech.
What we say creates who we are. We see this in jobs and our relationships with people. I try to make this known to my students — the only reason they see me as a teacher is that we agree that in the world of conversation, I am a teacher. There is nothing that’s physically different between me and them (except a few neural pathways). I find that this helps them feel like they could learn the material too, despite their failures in the past. It also humanizes me and makes me more relatable. When I’m teaching, things run smoother if my student sees me as similar to them rather than some “science guy” who knows the answer all the time.
Our language plays such a huge role in the world we participate in. I don’t like to write about what people ought to do, but we should treat our powers of speech with respect and use them to build a better place for everyone.
“Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.” - Tim Ferriss (1977 – )
Learning to make ourselves articulate in writing, thinking, and speaking makes us powerful and gives us a defense against the tragedy of life. We can create strategies, communicate them with others, and act them out in the world. The most articulate person always rises above the rest.