Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse.

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward. This is not a philosophical or political argument—any oculist will tell you this is true. The wider the span, the longer the continuity, the greater is the sense of duty in individual men and women, each contributing their brief life's work to the preservation and progress of the land in which they live, the society of which they are members, and the world of which they are the servants.

The Internet is the most brutal medium for attention span. The distance from your finger to that "off" -- or "stop" -- is-- it's-- you're holding it right there, while you're watching the thing!

His attention span was not long, shall we say?

People who take a long view of their lives and careers always seem to make much better decisions about their time and activities than people who give very little thought to the future.

So rather than assuming long-term thinkers don’t have to deal with short-term nonsense, ask the question, “How can I endure a never-ending parade of nonsense?” Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might be the opposite: The longer your time horizon, the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience. Baseball player Dan Quisenberry once said, “The future is much like the present, only longer.” Dealing with that reality requires a certain kind of alignment that’s easy to overlook.

[T]he attention span for political affairs in a democracy is a limited one. The fundamental genius of a liberal democracy lies in how it restrains government and permits its citizens to pursue their own interests without unnecessary molestation. So when we must address political or national issues—whether it’s “On to Richmond” or “54-40 or Fight”—we want problems addressed swiftly, so that we can turn back to our private concerns. When that doesn’t happen, we turn back to the private concerns anyway, and the problems and their solutions are left to fester or find their own solutions.

The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.

Well, his attention span was not long, shall we say.

The more we can manage our attention with intention, the more focused, productive, and creative we become.

Most things are not as difficult as they seem—if you focus each day.

However, giving one topic your full attention for an extended period of time is even harder than it seems.

Over a long timeline, the bottleneck is usually attention not ability.

Don’t take an eye on the short term but think long.

Q. Why is it so difficult to control attention? A. Lack of habit. We are too accustomed to letting things happen. When we want to control attention or something else, we find it difficult, just as physical work is difficult if we are not accustomed to it.

The problem is that the attention span of humans as individuals is a year or two. If you have a disaster, you basically have a year or two to try to change human behavior, and then interest fades