Look Where You Want to Go

Riders are taught one thing before they are taught anything else. The bike goes where your eyes go. A rider who fixes on the gravel at the outside of a corner rides into the gravel, at speed, while trying with his entire body not to.

Motorcycling has a name for it: target fixation. Nobody tells you the same thing about attention, so you spend the day staring at gravel and filing it under staying informed.

Three moves.

Name the hazard you are monitoring. Attention with nowhere to land goes to whatever is most threatening, and threat is extremely good at passing for information.

To be concrete: write down the thing you check more than twice a day that you cannot act on. The competitor, the layoff thread, the number that has not moved. One line, and name the specific number.

Give it a slot, and give your attention a target. A hazard checked on a schedule is monitoring. A hazard checked on impulse is steering.

To be concrete: ten minutes, once, at a fixed time. The attention it was eating goes to the single output that would make the hazard matter less, and you name that output before you close the tab.

Audit what your inputs point at. Your feed is a set of eyes whose direction you did not choose.

To be concrete: take the last twenty things you read or watched and mark each one target or hazard. Over half hazard means your eyes are on the wall, and the wall is closing.

The impulse checks will come back during the first bad week. They always do. Rate is the thing to watch rather than streak, and going from thirty checks a day to four is the entire win, even though four still feels like failure.

The rider who comes out of that corner clean did not avoid the gravel. He never looked at it. Avoidance is a maneuver you attempt after your eyes have already committed the bike, and by then you are only choosing how you arrive.