You can tell who's mentally present from their eyes

You often hear people talk about the eyes as a window to the soul.

“The eyes chico, they never lie”, etc, etc. This always went over my head and I never gave it much thought. Until recently.

A few weeks ago, a cashier made small talk with me at a store, and made an assumption that was devoid of sense, nonsensical but in an innocent way.

I was slightly confused in the moment, but what is still drilled into my mind weeks later, is her eyes.

She had unfocused eyes.

As I left the store and got into my car, I scribbled something about it on my phone. As I write this I still haven’t re-read what I wrote that day, but if you’ve read my other articles, you’d know I have tied the ability to focus to what we externally see as intelligence several times in the past.

When people get drunk, look at the eyes. In many, that’s the first thing that changes.

Because when we get drunk or high, the brain becomes unfocused, the eyes take this fatigued look, like something has been switched off. That’s because we’re literally unfocused, everything is faster, we’re in the present and there are no focused thoughts behind our eyes.

When you look at some people, you notice they have the eyes of a drunk or high person naturally, when sober, on a random Thursday morning.

This is what I’ve been thinking about these past weeks.

These people are unfocused, their attention is not activated. They are not using their brains at the fullest of its capacities, which makes them often clumsy or say the first thing that comes to their mind.

Now let me be clear with what I’m saying here, I’m not calling these people dumb. What I mean is that their attention is off (=unfocused) in that moment, that’s a different thing.

Related to this, I am reminded of Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Which in our case, would turn to the deeper rung: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by lack of focus.”

Unfocused and dumb produce the exact same results, in a conversation, at a job, on any test, and from the outside you can’t tell them apart. I’ve written about this at length: intelligence is both hardware and software, hardware is your raw capacity and focus is part of the software. I have no claim about their hardware, I choose to attribute their unfocused eyes to their software.

The difference is that dumb is permanent and unfocused is not. Turn the focus on and the same person stops being slow.

So when you look at someone that is clumsy, drops stuff all the time, bumps into people in the street, etc etc. What you’re looking at is someone that is either dumb (but we chose to discard this option for most people), tired, high, drunk, maybe socially anxious, on medication, or even mind-wandering about something else.

Yes, that’s the point: we don’t know, the external result is the same, they’re clumsy, they drop stuff, have no social awarness, ask questions where the answer is obvious if they had given it a second of thought, so on and so forth.

But there is only one reason for them all: being unfocused. All of the above cause the mind to drift into a state that is: unfocused, not sharp, attentionless.

And to be clear, this has happened to ALL of us, nobody can be focused all the damn time. An easy example is in the gym, when I’m doing heavy sets and getting tired, I start tripping over stuff on the floor: my focus is fatigued and I have less spacial awarness as a result.

I believe we humans know the difference even subconsciously, we look at the eyes and make an assumption on someone based on it. How people see us will define how they act with us, and in turn how we react to them and the world.

To develop your eyes into those of a hunter.

The opposite of the unfocused eyes is what I call the eyes of a hunter. Those are focused eyes. I wouldn’t really know how to describe them besides comparing them to those of a predator. If you look at tigers, lions on the hunt, they have something, look at your cat and he has it too.

And for dogs? look at goofy little dogs, they always have these bulbous eyes and look around like they’ve just been recently dropped off here from an UFO. But look at intelligent breeds of dogs, and even more starkly wolves, completely different eyes.

Anyway… this led me to an experiment these past weeks: when I was waking up or felt especially tired, I would switch my eyes in this hunter mode.

Now I don’t know if it was the thought process behind making an effort, or the eyes really changing your brain state, but it didn’t really matter for my use case.

It worked.

Every time I do it something shifts very fast and cognitive function starts firing immediately. I become awake and focused.

So whether it’s one or the other, honestly it doesn’t really matter. Thinking about how your eyes look is a simple shift that will give you the habit of being more focused in general, which is something to use and abuse as much as possible.

Not that studies matter here, as an empiricist myself, but I looked if someone already talked about this. The “quiet-eye” research keeps finding the same pattern: people who lock a longer, more stable gaze on the target outperform those who don’t, and they’ve found that training the gaze improves the output.

Your reality happens when you are focused, so if thinking about how your eyes look, training them to be sharper in the mirror, and being self conscious about them will wake up your focus as a side effect, it means you’re going to be more present in your life and remember it more fully in the long term. The people you interract with will also see the change, even subconsciously.

This leaves you with a very practical easy tool to use every day: develop the eyes of a hunter, or… a Conqueror.

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Win Violently Using Compartmentalization

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Feb 3

“When I wish to interrupt one occupation, I shut its drawer and open another. They do not mix and when I am busy with one I am not importuned or tired by the other. When I want to sleep, I shut all the drawers and I am fast asleep.”