The one lever in this issue: Stop optimizing for spotlight focus — the kind your inner critic loves — and protect a window for the scattered, distracted, slightly intoxicated kind.
Two things worth your time this week:
Judith Dada's essays on creativity and raising children in an AI-dominated future
Michael Pollan's interview in the NYT on the nature of broad and narrow consciousness
The Story: A Pool Mantra and a Contradiction
My daughter Zoe is learning to swim. In style with her wondrous mind, she gets distracted — a lot. The other week, I found myself paddling backwards in front of her, repeating the same thing over and over: focus on your arms, focus on your legs. It's become a pool mantra.
And somewhere in that quasi-meditative state, while I'm admonishing her to focus, the dots connected. Dada. Pollan. The pool. Zoe's wandering eyes.
I was performing focus while accidentally entering a completely different kind of it.
The Insight: Spotlight vs. Streetlight
Pollan talks about two modes of consciousness in his recent interview with the NYT. Spotlight focus: narrow, directed, productive. The kind we celebrate, optimize for, and call discipline. It's how adults get things done.
Then there's streetlight, or lantern consciousness — scattered, wide, associative. It's how kids perceive the world. It's also how we perceive it under certain psychedelics, which Pollan knows a thing or two about.
I know it from a different context: Songwriting late at night or when I'm hungover, when traditional discipline is too tired to show up. My best songs tend to come from exactly those windows. My inner critic seems to suffer most from sleep deprivation and intoxication. (Maybe he's connected to my liver.)
Here's what struck me in the pool: we've built an entire school system — and a professional culture — around training the streetlight out of children. Sit still. Pay attention. Stay on task. We reward the spotlight and pathologize the wandering. And we're doing this at exactly the moment in history when narrow, linear, output-focused thinking is becoming the thing AI does better than us.
Scattered focus — distracted, curious, inspired, a little all over the place — is not a bug. It's where the connections happen that nobody programmed.
Zoe wasn't failing at swimming. She was succeeding at something else. I was just too focused to see it. Until I “lost” track myself.
Your Quick Win: Schedule Your Streetlight Window
You probably already protect time for deep work. Try protecting one window this week for the opposite.
Pick a low-willpower moment — late evening, early morning before coffee kicks in, a slow Sunday. When your inner critic is tired. If not, add some wine.
Remove the output expectation — no deliverable, no agenda. This is not a brainstorming session. It's closer to a wander.
Give it a loose prompt — one question, one problem, one thing you're curious about. Then let your attention drift around it rather than drilling into it.
Capture without editing — voice memo, notebook, whatever. Don't judge what surfaces. Your critic will want to. Let him sleep, or drink.
Do it for 20 minutes — that's enough. Lantern consciousness doesn't need long windows. It needs undefended ones.
We, the getting-things-done, celebrating-our-work-ethic people, tend to focus on the wrong skill. Deep work has a scheduling philosophy, a genre of books, and a productivity cult. Creative, scattered, wide-open focus has none of that.
Maybe it doesn't need one. Maybe it just needs a window.
Yours,
Julius Bachmann
At Bachmann Catalyst, we help CEOs of scaling companies (100-1,000 employees) navigate complexity with clarity – integrating strategy, leadership architecture, and personal mastery to build businesses that matter without burning out.
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