CHAPTER1
SWITCHING OFF AUTOPILOT MODE
AUTOPILOT MODE
Right now there's a good chance that you're focused on this book. But how did you get here?
Looking at the books in my own library, I learned about most of them through recommendations from friends, podcast appearances by the author, or having loved a similar book. Most of us don't deliberately plot out which element of our lives we want to improve before settling on a book that will help us address that issue. We often arrive at those reading decisions because of a confluence of events.
Take, for example, the last book I read. One day I was riding in a taxi whose driver had the radio on, and I heard an interview with the author. Later, a friend tweeted about that book twice. This accumulation of mentions led to my eventual decision to buy the book. The process as a whole was anything but deliberate.
Our not plotting out in detail everything we do and every decision we make is, for the most part, a good thing. I made the series of decisions involved in purchasing many of my books in autopilot mode. Autopilot mode enables us to keep up with the demands of our life. For example, imagine if every email response required you to draft your answer in a new Word document. From there, you'd have to reread it several times, send it to your significant other for improvements, and print it once or twice to do line edits, only to arrive several hours later at a final, eloquent "Sure, sounds good!" This might be a productive thing to do for an important project, but for every email? Imagine being just as deliberate buying ketchup, taking out the trash, or brushing your teeth.
Autopilot mode guides us through actions like these. As many as 40 percent of our actions are habits, which shouldn't require conscious deliberation. Unless you're a monk and have the luxury of being able to meditate all day, it's impossible to live intentionally 100 percent of the time.
But some decisions are worth making deliberately. How we manage our attention is one of them.
We typically manage our attention on autopilot. When we receive an email from our boss, we instinctively stop what we're doing to respond to it. When someone has posted a picture of us online, we check to see how we look, then click to read what the poster said about us. When we're talking with a coworker or a loved one, we automatically focus on forming clever responses in our head before she finishes her thought. (One of the most underrated skills: letting other people finish their sentences before starting yours.)
Here's a simple exercise that'll take you thirty seconds. Come up with an honest
answer to this question: throughout the day, how frequently do you choose what to
