My friend Andy used to be a professional online poker player. He’s good at math. He likes the game. But his main advantage over the fish like me was concentration. When he played, he did so in a darkened room and allowed no outside stimuli other than his own shrieks after a bad beat.
I could never succeed at online poker. After all, it’s played on this box. My whole world (at least for the last decade or so) is on this box. While I play poker, I am checking email, IMing, looking at Facebook, reading blogs, and of course, checking my stats.
This inability to concentrate on anything, even stuff as short as a typical newspaper article, has leaked out from my laptop experience to my whole person. It doesn’t seem good. But I’m guessing I’m not alone.
Can you concentrate? Here’s a test, try to read this article on the science of concentration from start to finish without being in any way distracted. If you even see this as a challenge, your focus ain’t what it used to be.
