Focus

A common recommendation for anyone with lots of interests is to “just pick one” and specialize. To focus. Funny thing about focus, though – an image can be fully in focus whether it’s an extreme close-up or a panoramic wide-angle view. The difference isn’t focus; it’s how much is in the frame.

Photographers choose their lenses with the job in mind. There’s a lens for getting in close and another for capturing the wider view. With a zoom lens, you change focal length as needed, adjusting both field of view and magnification. Its flexibility is its strength, and it doesn’t compete with single-purpose lenses.

Remembering that this is a metaphor, details and the big picture are both essential. We change lenses to suit the task, but some of us change more easily. When someone says focus, this is my response. My natural zoomed-out view keeps more things in the frame, maintaining awareness of the broader context. When the situation calls for a narrower, more detailed view, I zoom in.

I’ve been thinking about this metaphor of attention as a lens, and specifically as a zoom lens. It’s part of a project that’s meant to bring some long-simmering ideas into public – I’m finally getting into the challenge to organizations to know more about what matters. Zooming in and out to explore both the details and the big picture is a major component. We need both, and there are opportunities in pushing our view farther in each direction.

SDMU – Deep uncertainty sounds like something my futurist friends would like.

The Anti-Futures Triangle – Exploring the opposite of an existing framework.

Thinking—Fast, Slow, and Artificial – When using “AI” leads to cognitive surrender.

Deceptive by Design – That scammer in your inbox isn’t even human. Criminal networks adopting automation and AI for scale.

The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA – The OSS book got me into the history of OSINT; this seems relevant, too.

Why Buildings Stand Up / Why Buildings Fall Down – No math but already changing how I look at some structures.

“Games are physics simulators disguised as entertainment.” – Howard Yu on WeChat, but this is a familiar concept from Daniel Suarez’s 2006 novel, Daemon.

Photo by David Hurley on Unsplash