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Focus

Over the past sev­eral months one small word has occu­pied much of my atten­tion: focus. It’s been echo­ing in my mind, fol­low­ing my every thought, some­times with a gen­tle smile, other times with a scold­ing expres­sion. It cer­tainly is one of those lit­tle words with a big atti­tude — once it has become part of your con­scious­ness it’s impos­si­ble to ignore. And that is a good thing, a very good thing indeed.

When I think of my child­hood school days, par­tic­u­larly 5th and 6th grade (which used to be called Ori­en­tierungsstufe in Ger­many, from the word ori­en­ta­tion, as kids are eval­u­ated for future edu­ca­tion, at least that was the intent) one thing stands out in my report card: Thorsten is often absent minded, eas­ily dis­tracted and tends to dis­tract other chil­dren. My teach­ers had a dif­fi­cult time rec­on­cil­ing my over­all behav­ior with my learn­ing poten­tial, not­ing a quite pro­nounced dis­crep­ancy: I tended to be an A– stu­dent in music, arts, writ­ing and math­e­mat­ics, if I could focus long enough. How­ever, I was also diag­nosed as being hyper­ac­tive — usu­ally referred to nowa­days as ADHD (though this post will not be about any clin­i­cal condition).

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Emotional Feedback

In my last post I talked about the chal­lenges many cre­atives face in pro­mot­ing their own work, par­tic­u­larly if their core per­son­al­ity type is rather intro­verted (and I include myself in that cat­e­gory). Of all the avenues open for pro­mot­ing the Inter­net is the most acces­si­ble but also often proves to be unex­pect­edly chal­leng­ing and frus­trat­ing, even to the point of being demotivating.

I have spo­ken before about my ini­tial skep­ti­cism and even rejec­tion of the Inter­net when I first came in con­tact with it back in the 90s. Curios­ity and my innate fas­ci­na­tion with tech­nol­ogy over­came such feel­ings rather quickly, only to be greeted with a sense of uncer­tainty and unease inter­act­ing online with oth­ers in the early AOL and cha­t­room days. What was an excit­ing fron­tier of new pos­si­bil­i­ties and instant com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peo­ple from around the world every so often turned sour due to mis­un­der­stand­ings.
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