What It Takes to Stay Focused on Something Hard - Guest Episode with Dr. David Rock
From It's Me. Your Brain. | The mind behind your decisions · 00:35:07
Show by Virginia Palm | Augment Mind
Everything around you is getting faster. AI answers in seconds, messages land before you’ve finished the last one, and the urgent keeps crowding out the important. What gets harder is staying with one thing long enough to finish it.Dr. David Rock calls AI “fast food for your brain”: easy to reach for, and not much to build on. In this conversation, we go back to Your Brain at Work, 17 years on, and ask what attention looks like now. We then follow him through the hardest focus test of all: writing a book when the novelty has worn off.In this episode:— What David would write differently in Your Brain at Work today— Why, in his words, “the more noise in your brain, the more shallow you think”— What AI, urgency and overload do to the part of the brain you think with— Why this book was noticeably harder to focus on than the last, and what an injury had to do with finishing it— The routine and the kind of rest that actually help him focus— Three challenges of being human, and why SCARF, which he started working on in 2001, still sits at the centre of his work— Why he says the answer is to do hard thingsVirginia’s guest is Dr. David Rock - CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, who coined the term “neuroleadership”, and author of Quiet Leadership, Your Brain at Work and, out November 17, Good with Humans: The Neuroscience of What Makes Us Tick and What Ticks Us Off.Articles mentioned in this episode:AI Is Fast Food for the Brain: https://www.fastcompany.com/91606446/ai-is-fast-food-for-the-brainAI FOMO Hangover: What to Do Next (Fortune): https://fortune.com/2026/09/12/ai-fomo-hangover-what-to-do-next-leadership/It’s Me. Your Brain. — the mind behind your decisions.
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