Per Winroth's Library tagged Outliers → View Popular

30 Dec 08

olumnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell's latest book called "Outliers," made a statement as profound as it was accurate: "Control of attention is the ultimate individual power," he wrote. "People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them."
The need for "attention," rather than "hard work," as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we've gone from a total separation of "work" from "non-work" to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.
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- In a world in which entire industries bet their businesses on gaining access to our attention, which value leads to better personal success: hard work or the ability to control attention?