How craving attention makes you less creative

There's this TedTalk by one of our favourite actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who spoke about the powerful feelings we get from "getting attention" and "paying attention". The talk, titled "How Craving Attention Makes You Less Creative", explores the idea of how being creative as a means to get attention fundamentally makes the work less creative.

In this talk, he explored how the world around us, especially those with jobs in marketing, revolves around getting attention. Social media marketing or even general marketing revolves around seeking attention and how we become addicted to it. We then spend countless amount of time and energy creating marketing plans or campaigns that essentially try to achieve that end — and that end is to rack up likes, gain followers, get attention. And to be honest, sometimes it's about seeking self-attention, sometimes without the work having any real impact.

Gordon-Levitt cautions against that, in short, pointing out that "if your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you are never going to be creatively fulfilled."

Instead, what he seeks is the complete opposite: paying attention. The ability to just focus on one thing. Turns out that it's backed by the science behind it, with a study into a phenomenon called Flow, "which is this thing that happens in the human brain when someone pays attention to just one thing, like something creative, and manages not to get distracted by anything else. And some say the more regularly you do this, the happier you'll be."

"The more I go after that powerful feeling of paying attention, the happier I am. But the more I go after the powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am."

The entire talk is worth watching over here:

Once done with that, what do you say? What will you focus on today?

Where will you pay more attention?

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