I think it was around 2018 when I gave friends and family Rapt by Winifred Gallagher as a Christmas present. I discovered the book through a quote in Deep Work. To be honest, on my first read I didn’t take away a fully coherent framework from it. Over the last week, though, I revisited all the chapters, took notes, and summarized them with Grok. That helped the core idea click:
A large part of who you are—your temperament and personality, your capabilities, your “gifts”—is bound up with how your attention works. If that’s true, then attention isn’t something you can simply and easily reshape at will. You can’t just decide to have strong focus. You have to train it.
Two life paths stand out as powerful training grounds:
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A job with adequate complexity and challenge.
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Raising children with a well-matched partner.
Both experiences can deepen your mind and your life in ways that hobbies alone rarely match—although hobbies still matter.
I’d add one more point: in both work and leisure, aim to be a serial obsessor. Don’t spread yourself across too many projects at once. When you limit parallel commitments, you become more aware of their opportunity costs and naturally choose better, more meaningful obsessions. I spread myself far too thin in the past, and looking back, that wasn’t a wise approach.
So the distilled advice is:
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Choose work that challenges you.
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Build a family — the responsibility for children can widen and deepen your mind in unexpected ways.
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Cultivate some good hobbies.
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Focus on one, or at most a few, obsessions at a time — for example, stick to a single book in the evenings for a week.
In my view, that combination does more to build real focus than anything else. And for me, that’s the lasting takeaway from Rapt—at least as it emerged through my own reflections while reading it.
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I’ll reread my notes and post a longer book review soon.
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