I think about, okay, if I have a certain window of my life that I have to live and there are things that I want to make, there are people that I want to play with, there are experiences that I want to have, right?

The more that I can harness my attention, the more I can be sure that I'm filling my time on the planet

with those things that fill my good life buckets.

So to me, if you think about it, attention is life.

It's that simple.

I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly,

a podcast about pacing yourself, where I explore

how you can avoid burnout, improve your productivity, and activate your creative mind all through

the simple act of slowing down. Now, if there's one theme that has pulsed beneath this

entire first season of Hurry Slowly, it is the topic of attention.

Because it is our attention, perhaps more than any other faculty, that suffers when we live our lives in a rush.

And in today's episode, I tackled the topic of attention with surgical precision in conversation with Jonathan Fields, a man of many talents.

Jonathan is a serial entrepreneur, a writer, a learned student of mindfulness and yogic practice,

and the host of the popular podcast, The Good Life Project, in which he interviews a diverse cast of characters about what makes life worth living.

Jonathan has also been spending a lot of his time of late thinking about a concept that he calls exquisite attention.

And in this interview, we break down the idea of exquisite attention

into its component parts, two complementary states that Jonathan calls focused awareness and open

presence. We also discuss the very practical role that exquisite attention plays in our ability to stumble into

lucky opportunities, as well as to recognize something called emotional bids, a key factor in

sustaining healthy working relationships and romantic partnerships. For context, you should know that

this interview was originally recorded in front of a

live audience at the White Hotel in Brooklyn. Now let's dive in. We're both kind of obsessed with the

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