Dave Beck

Deep Life Dave Beck

Who do you want to be? And how do you want to feel?

Attention is what gets you there.

What do you want to have?

Control of your attention multiplies your other capabilities.




A Deep Life is one in which you spend most of your time immersed. It involves developing an effortless skill at the art of living how you want to live. Finding the secure knowledge that without thinking too much, you'll live and act in a way that is aligned with who you want to be. You'll make the right decisions, by your own standards, intuitively. And simply live, at peace, immersed, present.




Dave lives like this. He did while he was an academic. And does so now, while living on a yacht with his wife and three young boys, working 15-20 hours a week as a cognitive coach, and now author and educator. This book offers a guide to getting there: not the yacht, but the deeper life. Whatever that might look like for you.




The book is grounded in Dave's experience as a cognitive coach, and extensive thinking about attention. Dave twice nearly-wrote an academic book on attention, and draws on his notes from hundreds of sources. But this is not an academic book. It's a guide. A guide to reclaiming, and then using, your attention to become your aspirational self. The person you want to be.




How you attend shapes who you are, which shapes how you attend tomorrow. It's a self-reinforcing cycle: the easy path is to just follow it. Add in factors like how busy and over-stimulated people are today (which vastly reduces attention control), and the number of well-designed efforts to manipulate your attention, and it's easy to see why most people don't step out of the cycle.




But, the harder path, of taking control of your attention and shifting who you are, also leads to a self-reinforcing cycle. One in which your attention naturally directs itself to what is good for you, reinforcing the attributes in yourself you value, and helping you live the life you want.




To get there, first you need to strip away the things that pull your attention in unaligned directions. Once you pay less attention to the wrong things for you, finding the depth in your life is far easier. And your bodymind can start to help you. Then, you can use your attention to manage your self. How you attend and what you put your focus on can change your personality, your capabilities, and how you think about your own life. It can remake you or lead you further down the path you want to walk. It has certainly had both effects for Dave.