Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Attention in Reading & Thinking
Apply sustained, analytic attention to text and to ideas — translating each thought into your own words and ‘boring into’ a subject from every angle.
Reading: interrogate title, author, preface; take the first sentence to its bones and restate it in your own words; next day, write the paragraph from memory; master a chapter then reconstruct it from memory; read biased authors interrogatively. Thinking: hold one truth and question it from every side; “bombard” a sentence or fact with how/why/which/when/where; arrange the answers; then speak your thoughts aloud to an imagined audience. Always paraphrase, never parrot. Months, daily.
What it is
Two consecutive chapters that turn directed attention onto language and ideas. Haddock’s complaint is that “true reading is almost a lost art” — most reading is lazy skimming of “whole but vague pictures of groups of ideas.” His remedy is brutally active: take a book apart with attention, and “always translate the author’s thoughts into your own language.
Do not memorise, but THINK.” Its twin, Attention in Thinking, applies the same will to a bare subject — “bombard it” with every question until it gives up its contents, then arrange the answers and even speak them aloud to an imagined audience.
The governing maxim is Bacon’s: “Read not to contradict. but to weigh and consider.” This is the applied, real-world payoff of the inward attention drill — concentration aimed at understanding and decision.
The Method
Reading (Ch. XIX).
- Interrogate before you read (Ex. 1-4). Read the title with care and state exactly what it means; look up every word. Read the author’s name and “memorize an outline of his life.” Read the table of contents for “the general drift.” Read the introduction and preface, then ask “Why has he said this?” Read the first twenty-five pages and judge if anything new or valuable surfaces.
- Read the first sentence to its bones (Ex. 5). Find subject, predicate, object; the meaning of each word; “If it is an object-thought, stop now, and, closing the eyes, call up a mental picture of the object.” Restate the whole in your own language. Proceed sentence by sentence; then “state in your own manner the connected chain of thought.” The next day, write the substance of that first paragraph from memory.
- Master a chapter, then reconstruct it (Ex. 5-7). Read analytically through a chapter; “put aside all writings. and from memory write a connected statement of the substance of that chapter.” Mark and number the points; build your own index on the rear fly-leaf.
- Listen and note (Ex. 8-9). While a friend reads aloud, “practice mental noting of the points. retaining them for a given number of pages,” then state them while the reader corrects you.
- The interrogative attitude (Ex. 10). For a biased author, “Compel him to ‘make his case’ fairly. Verify his alleged facts. Detect flaws in his arguments. Be not hasty to contradict, nor to surrender.” Thinking (Ch. XX).
- Hold one great truth (Ex. 1). Take a simple statement — his example, “Man is immortal” — and “Concentrate attention upon this truth, absolutely excluding every other thought. Think of man in every conceivable way as being immortal,” questioning body, mind, moral consciousness in turn. Repeat daily with a new sentence, “indefinitely.”
- Bore into an observation (Ex. 2). Looking at a landscape, ask “What is the beautiful?. What is a landscape?. How might this landscape be improved?” — “By such a process you may become absorbed in a deliberate and controlled train of thought.”
- Bombard a sentence / a fact (Ex. 3-5). Strip a sentence to a skeleton (“Success — depends — purpose — effort”), then “bombard the statement” with how, why, which, when, where, whose, writing each answer in full; arrange logically; write a short essay. Apply the same to any fact (“the law of gravitation”): “Turn it about. Look at it from every side. Ravel it out.”
- Think it, then speak it (Ex. 6). Memorize the thoughts (never the words) of your synopsis, then “speak all your thoughts in order to an imaginary gathering of people. Have the audience before you. Be in earnest. Get excited. Make gestures.”
- Audit your own thinking (Ex. 7). “Study unceasingly to detect errors in your own thinking. Make sure of your facts!” Throughout, hold the sentence: “I am conscious of the sense of Will.” Continue the thinking drills “six months at least.”
Source & Lineage
Power of Will (1907), Chapters XIX “Attention in Reading” and XX “Attention in Thinking,” Part III “Mental Regime.” Haddock weaves in Bacon’s essay “On Studies” (“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”) and Hill’s Elements of Psychology on resolving a single image into words.
Frank Channing Haddock (1853-1915). → (haddock frank channing).
Common refinements
Memorizing words, not thoughts. “Do not memorise, but THINK” — paraphrase is the active ingredient.
- Skimming the wholes. The point is to “break up these wholes” into clear parts; vague gestalts defeat it.
- Skipping the from-memory summary. Reconstructing the chapter the next day is the retrieval rep; don’t omit it.
- Reverie. “Do not fall into reverie. This is downright work.”
- Expecting it easy. “Tedious at first,” then “more and more easy and delightful.” Persist.