What dancing gorilla?
- Justin H
- Oct 28, 2016
- 2 min read
I recently took my son to a hunters education course. He wants to go hunting with me this season and one of the requirements I had for that to happen was he had to take this course, somewhat to determine his resolve, but mostly because I don’t want to get shot while I’m out there with him. One of the topics they covered in this class was something called ‘target fixation’. After reflecting a bit on it, I could see how this common sense task could be applied in life as well as business.
If any of my readers have played a competitive sport at any time, they are taught two competing lessons: Keep your eye on the ball and be aware of your surroundings. This same lesson applies in hunting, except the results of those lessons have much higher stakes if you mess up. Recent studies have shown that it is impossible for your mind to concentrate on two different tasks at the same time. The concept of multi-tasking is better referred to as switch-tasking, given that your brain cannot physically focus on two different things; a ‘good multi-tasker’ is actually someone that is good at turning their attention to another task when something comes up, taking less time than others might to give that new task their complete attention.
There is a now famous video of a group of people passing a basketball between one another. The goal is to count the number of passes the team wearing white makes to one another. Here’s a link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
If you’ve seen the video, you know the punchline. For anyone that hasn’t seen the video, an embarrassingly large number of us can correctly count the number of passes the team makes with the basketball…but we completely miss the dancing gorilla that walks into the middle of the group as passes are being made, dances around and then moonwalks back off the camera. The point illustrated in this video, in the hunting class, in sports and even in sales is this: You cannot get so focused on your target that you lose sight of the objective. If you focus too closely on closing that one account, you might miss an opportunity for three other accounts to capture. If you focus too closely on making that perfect shot to take down your animal, you might miss that just behind the animal is another hunter and you can hurt them if you pull the trigger. If you focus too closely on catching that ball, you might miss that there’s a defender two steps away about to hammer you into the ground and you have no way to protect yourself. All these situations are bad and all depend on our ability to be aware, not just of our surroundings overall, but that we cannot focus too closely on a single thing or we miss obvious things that we would see if we didn’t.
So ask yourself this question: Am I focusing my attention too closely that I can’t see the dancing gorilla in front of me?
Justin Huereña Staff Blogger
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