Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:03:14: Multitasking and the four costs associated with it
00:07:18: The Hewlett Packard focus study
00:09:16: How to regain your attention as an individual and as a group
00:12:02: The importance of sleep
00:17:08: Having control over your work gives you meaning
00:22:08: Three kinds of attention
00:25:49: Attention is a form of light that we are losing
00:27:30: The impact of Johann's book
00:29:54: Johann's career advice
00:31:24: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis, and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, where every week we talk about a different topic to do with work, and hopefully come up with some ideas for action and tools to try out that will help you to navigate all of the ups and the downs along the way, with maybe a bit more confidence and control.

This week, we're sharing a few episodes all about the topic of finding your focus.  We know it's an area that lots of our listeners, and quite frankly we, would like some ideas on and some help along the way, so we've got a few episodes to share with you.  Helen and I have done one of our normal Tuesday episodes, which is full of practical tools and coach-yourself questions; but today, you're going to hear my conversation with Johann Hari, where we talk about the ideas that he shares in his latest book, Stolen Focus.

Together we explore what stops us from paying attention, how we can take back control of who and what we choose to focus on.  I've been a fan of Johann's work for a long time.  You've probably heard me talk or recommend his book, Lost Connections, before.  And Stolen Focus is very similar to Lost Connections in that, though it's a very different topic, what I really like about Johann's work is that he connects dots in a way that helps me to have a new perspective on something, on a topic that feels, to be honest, like it goes way beyond work.  Though today in our conversation, we do very much focus on work.

I think whenever I finish reading his books, I always re-evaluate my relationship with something.  I re-evaluate how I'm going to spend my time, I think about the changes that I want to make.  It always leaves me with a clear "so what?" in terms of what I'm going to try to do differently.  I think his books do have a really profound impact on me, so I was really excited to get the opportunity to talk to him.

Just before we dive into the conversation, a quick shoutout to the other conversations you can hear in this series.  So, we have Helen talking to Sophie Devonshire and Ben Renshaw all about how you can discover, or perhaps rediscover and reconnect, with the work that you love, so really finding that passion and enjoyment from your work.  And you can also hear me talk to Emma Gannon about her new book, (Dis)connected, where we really talk a bit about how we can reclaim time for ourselves, how we can think about our relationship with technology, and also connect more with the work that we do.  So, I hope you enjoy today's conversation as much as I did.  I'll be back at the end to say bye.

So, Johann, thank you so much for joining us on the Squiggly Careers podcast, I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Johann Hari: I'm so chuffed to be with you, thanks so much.

Sarah Ellis: I thought we would dive in straight to some of the tough stuff, some of the tensions and contradictions that I think you explore so brilliantly in Stolen Focus around, what are these things that impact our ability to pay attention; what's getting in the way; how much can we control those things?  And one thing that really stuck out to me quite early on was, it becomes really clear, or it certainly did to me as a reader, that to do things really well, we need to focus on one thing at once.  And yet, you also mention research that shows that at work, we rarely get an hour of uninterrupted time.

I thought, wow, that feels like on one hand, we know this, we know we need to focus; and on another hand, we're creating a world of work where potentially, that's almost impossible in terms of how we're working.  So, I just wondered if we could start by taking our listeners through why we can't multitask, because I still do sometimes think there's still this myth of, "Well, maybe I can", and how that affects our attention in terms of why we do need to do one thing at once.

Johann Hari: As you know, I've travelled all over the world to meet the leading experts on what causes attention to be good and what causes it to degenerate.  I learnt from them that there are actually 12 factors which have been proven to either boost or trash your attention, and a lot of those factors are rising.  One of the ones that I found most challenging, so I went to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and interviewed one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, an amazing man named Professor Earl Miller.

I remember him saying to me right at the start of our conversation, "You need to understand one thing about the human brain, which is you can only consciously think about one think at a time".  The human brain hasn't changed for 40,000 years, this is just a fundamental aspect that the technology, it isn't changing anytime soon.  And he explained to me that, even though that is a fact, we have fallen for a delusion.  The average teenager now believes they can focus on six or seven things at the same time.

He said, "When you think you're doing that, your consciousness papers over it.  But what you're really doing is you're juggling.  That comes with four big costs".  So, while I'm talking to you, I'm not doing to do this.  In fact, I've hidden my phone at the other side of the room.  You can well imagine that I might think, "The minute when she's talking, I'll just glance at my text messages.  It's only two seconds, I can do that".  What they discovered was that was called "task switching", it comes with four costs.

The first cost is what's called a "switch cost effect".  It's very simple.  The moment in which I look at my text and I look back at you, my brain has to refocus twice.  It has to go, "What's that text about?  Why is Rob sending me that?  Oh yeah, it's because he's got that problem with this.  Oh right, okay" and then I refocus on you and I'm like, "Wait, what did she just ask me?"  Then of course, if there's a third one, if there's a television in the corner of the room, and then I glance at my Facebook, and then I…  So, that's a switch cost effect.  Your brain has to refocus and that takes up a significant amount of mental power, just to refocus.  You don't feel it, but it does.

The second is what you might call "the screw-up effect".  So, when I refocus, let's say I'm doing my tax return, glance at a text, look back at it, I'm more likely to make a mistake in my tax return, and then I have to go back and correct that.  So, that takes more time, you're fixing mistakes. 

The third is with your creativity.  When you're not jammed up with distractions, your mind will start to wander.  One of the things that happens when your mind wanders is you think back over things people have said to you, things you've read, things you've experienced, and your brain will just start spontaneously to make connections between different things, it will start to make sense of things.  That's where creativity comes from, you connect two things that haven't been created before.  If a huge amount of your mental bandwidth is taken on switching and refocusing all the time, you are significantly less creative.

The fourth is, it affects your memory.  So, it takes mental energy to translate your experiences into memories, it takes energy for your brain to do that.  And if your brain is jammed up with switching and refocusing, "What was it that person just said on WhatsApp?  What's the next person saying on WhatsApp?  What's that on the television?  Oh my God, is there a new variant?  Oh my God, there's an email.  Wait, how did I do this?  I'm just going to read this book for a minute".  If you're jammed up with all of that, your capacity to do all these things diminishes, so your brain is more jammed up, you make more mistakes, you remember less and you're less creative. 

When this was first explained to me, because he said, "It doesn't feel like that when you're doing it.  Your consciousness papers over it to give the illusion of a seamless experience, but you're actually draining yourself".  I thought, "Okay, but you only glance at the text for a second, that must be a small effect".  In fact, this is a huge effect, and there are several studies that show us this.

One is, Hewlett Packard, the people who make printers, printers that always break, in my experience.  But anyway, they did a study, a small study among their workers, and they split the workers into two groups.  The first group was told, "Whatever task you have to do, just do it and you're not going to be interrupted", and the second group was told, "Do your task", but they interrupted them with heavy amounts of email and texting, so a little bit more than normal, but heavy.  Then they gave them IQ tests after this. 

The people who were not distracted scored on average ten IQ points higher than the people who were distracted.  To give you a comparison point, if you or me got stoned now, if we smoked a spliff together, our IQ would drop by about five points.  So, distraction is twice the effect of being stoned, at least in the short term.  So, that means you'd be better off sitting at your desk smoking a fat spliff and only doing one thing, than sitting at your desk, not getting stoned, and just being constantly interrupted with emails and text messages.

Sarah Ellis: Knowing what we now know, from what you've just described, where do we go next?

Johann Hari: That's a really good question and there's two layers to the response.  So, there are lots of things we can do as individuals to improve our ability to focus and pay attention, and I talk a lot about them in the book, and obviously I'm sure we'll talk about some of them.  But also, we've got to be honest with people, exactly as you say, we are living in an environment that is pouring itching powder over us the whole time, a kind of mental itching powder, and that environment is making all of us less able to focus. 

So, if you're in that situation, it's not your fault that your attention has got worse.  The average American teenager now focuses on any one task for 65 seconds, and the average office worker for 3 minutes.  So, that's happened to almost everyone, so that's not on you.  This is one of the things that I learned that was really challenging.  It's not that your attention collapsed, it's that your attention has been stolen from you; it's been stolen from you by some very big forces.

Now, as isolated individuals, there are things we can do to resist those forces, but we also, if we want to fully regain our attention, have to band together and take on those forces and challenge the forces that are ruining our attention.  That can sound very fancy, so I want to give you a very practical example of a place that did that with really powerful effects, a place very close to us in fact.

So, in France in 2016, they were having a lot of problems with Le burnout, which I don't think your listeners need me to translate!  It turned out 35% of French people felt they could never unplug, their work required them to constantly have their phones on.  When I was a kid, the only people who were on call were doctors and the Prime Minister.  Now, half the economy is on call.  A lot of people at the moment feel they can't do the things they know they need to do.  There's lots of things they don't know yet they need to do, but there's lots of things they do.

So, the French Government faced with this crisis of people just being exhausted, their attention atrophying, decided to introduce a simple law.  It's called "the right to disconnect".  Very simple, everyone has a legal right to have defined work hours from their employer, and everyone has the legal right to not have to check email or take work calls outside those work hours, so it just gives people back the time to spend with their children, to sleep, to properly switch off.

I spent time in Paris; this has really improved people's lives, so that's an example of individually, there are things you can do to reduce the amount you switch.  I don't know if you can see it, but in the corner of my room, I've got a little white plastic K safe.  A K safe is a plastic safe with a little lid that you can remove.  You put your phone in it, or whatever, it could be cookies if you've got a problem with eating that, whatever it could be.  You put the lid back on, you turn the dial and you can set it to lock your phone away for anything from between five minutes and a week.  So, at least three hours a day, I put my phone in that thing, and I put an app, called Freedom, on my laptop, which cuts me off from the internet, and that gives me back my ability to pay attention at an individual level.

A lot of people will listen and go, "Well, I can't do that.  I'll get fired if I do that.  I can't just say I'm not going to look at Slack", or whatever it might be.  So, that's why we need to have both an individual response and a social response, and that social response can happen if enough of us band together and demand it and fight for it.

Sarah Ellis: I think this can feel both overwhelming and out of our control.  If you're listening to this now individually and thinking, "I completely understand that logic that Johann's talked me through and I buy the argument", from your experience is it about your phone; is the phone the first place to start?  Is it about your work notifications?  Are there certain things that you have found that just seem to work pretty well to get us started almost redefining our relationship with own attention?

Johann Hari: That's a really important question.  Because there are these 12 factors, different people will have different things, but I'll give you an example of one that the vast majority of people are having a problem with: sleep.  So I interviewed the leading experts in the world on sleep, and the figures on this are extraordinary.  Only 15% of people wake up feeling refreshed in the morning, and I had a real epiphany about this.

So, I spent three months completely off the internet with no smartphone for research for the book, and I went to this place called Provincetown, which is in Cape Cod, a little place by the beach, and I didn't have any devices.  I found myself going to sleep much earlier, because I would read a physical book because, as we know, glowing devices wake you up, although you don't realise it.  And I found myself going to sleep when it got dark and waking up when the sun came up, which I had never done since I was a baby, I don't think, or since I was a small child.

One morning, about a month into it, I remember I had woken up and I was standing in the kitchen and I said to myself, "I feel really strange.  What is this feeling?"  I couldn't place it and I was standing for about a minute.  I realised I had woken up and I wasn't tired, I'd woken up and I didn't want any caffeine.  I was refreshed.  I genuinely don't remember having ever experienced that before.  I must have experienced it as a kid, but I don't remember that.

So, it was really interesting later to go and interview all these leading experts on sleep.  They discovered, we now sleep on average an hour less than people did in 1942.  Children sleep 80 minutes less, and children particularly need sleep.  I interviewed this amazing man, named Doctor Charles Czeisler, who's the leading expert on sleep.  He did this experiment that really haunted me.  He combined these two technologies.  He combined a technology that can scan your eyes to see what you're looking at, with a technology that scans your brain to see what's happening in your brain, so it's looking at it at the same time.

What he discovered is, when you're tired, it doesn't have to be much, 19 hours of staying awake, that doesn't feel that much, you can be awake and talking and looking around you, but the brain scan shows that parts of your brain have literally gone to sleep.  You look awake, you look as awake as you and I do now, but literally half of your brain can be asleep.  I thought, "Wow!"  This is why, if you stay awake for 19 hours, your attention is as bad as if you had got drunk.  Even if you don't stay awake for 19 hours, if you get 6 hours a night for two weeks, you're at a level again where it's equivalent to if you were legally drunk.

Again, I can say to people, "Sleep more, put more of a priority and sleeping more, and discipline yourself.  Don't have any devices in your room", there's all sorts of things that we can do that I go through in the book.  Those things are really important, so I would again marry for everything that I'm talking about, I think there's both an individual solution and a bigger social solution.

So, the individual solution is, of course, put a higher priority on sleep; I do that now.  Don't drink caffeine after 4.00pm, make sure your room is a little bit cold when you go to sleep, because your core needs to cool down in order to get you to sleep.  I used to have the heating on too high.  Don't look at any screens for three hours before you go to sleep, because the light sends a signal to your brain to wake you up.

I also think there's bigger things.  I went to a place that made it possible for people to sleep much more.  In New Zealand, I went to a business named Perpetual Guardian, it's run by an amazing man, named Andrew Barnes.  And they decided all of their staff were going to move from a five-day week to a four-day week on the same pay, because Andrew noticed that his staff were exhausted, they were knackered, and he had this idea that maybe they'll be more productive if they get time to sleep and rest.

In fact, it turned out, and this was monitored by Doctor Helen Delaney at the University of Auckland Business School, they achieved more in four days than they had in five, and this is something that a huge number of businesses that I write about experienced.  I remember thinking, "That feels a bit counterintuitive".  Then I went to interview a man, named Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, and he said to me, "Look, if you want to understand this, it's not difficult.  Ask anyone who supports a sports team, 'Do you want your team to walk onto the pitch exhausted?'  No, you want them to walk onto the pitch well rested and refreshed.  Why would it be any different for anything else?"

So, that's a big change, a four-day week.  I think it would benefit all of us.  I think COVID has shown us how much work can change very rapidly.  So, I would marry the individual advice -- by the way, one of the things that changed at Perpetual Guardian, that company, one of the things people did with their extra time is they slept much more, they were less tightly wound.  If you get time to rest, you don't go to sleep all hunched up thinking, "What was that that I should have done today?  Oh no, I didn't answer that email.  What was this, what was that?"  Giving people space to relax creates space for them to sleep more, and do the other things that we know we need to do. 

We live in that gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.  We have to close that gap.  Some of that is individual action about your priorities.  Maybe you want to watch Netflix for an hour less and sleep an hour more.  There's a whole range of things we can do as individuals, and it's really important to stress that.  But we can also band together as citizens and fight for something better as well.

Sarah Ellis: In this sense of the always-on culture, where you feel like you couldn't possibly maybe not look at your phone in an evening, where you do feel like your boundaries have got really blurred, obviously those things will then impact our attention negatively.  Have you seen or come across anything, or even experienced anything for yourself, because it sounds to me like you work pretty hard, I would say?  I was like, "This sounds like he works pretty hard, or certainly has worked pretty hard and quite long hours".  Anything that's worked really well for you in terms of putting some of those boundaries in place to help you to then do better work when you are at work?

Johann Hari: I want to be honest about that.  There were lots of changes I was able to make in my life as a result of what I learnt, and there were some changes where I thought, "I should make this change", and I tried and I couldn't do it.  So, one was improving how I ate.  I've tried and I'm just too junk-food addicted.  There's literally in the corner of the room, you can't see it --

Sarah Ellis: You've got your Coke Zero, that's not too bad, is it?

Johann Hari: Well, there's also a McDonald's bag in the corner from lunchtime!  I want to be honest with people about that.  And there's another one which is about work, which is about part of it, I think, is all of us explaining to each other and to our employers, "If you want people who can pay attention, we can't do it like this".  The single best thing anyone can bring to their work is their ability to pay attention to it.

If we're working in a way that destroys our attention, that isn't good for anyone.  That's obviously not good for the worker, and that's obviously not good for the employer.  Some of that is the hours we work, there are lots of other factors: the amount of control you have over your work increases the amount of attention you can pay to your work.  The more people are given control over their work, the better able they are to pay attention; the more meaningful your work is to you, the better you can pay attention.

There's lots of evidence about this.  Attention is tied to meaning, for obvious reasons.  If something is meaningless to you, your attention will slip and slide off of it.  When people have control over their work, they can create meaning out of it.  There's lots of examples of that.  There's a really interesting example with NHS cleaners after privatisation. 

So, before NHS cleaning services were privatised, obviously a cleaner's job in a hospital is to clean the hospital.  But cleaners also were like an extra pair of eyes and ears just in the wards.  So, the odd person might go, "Could you get me a glass of water?" and the cleaner would go and get them a glass of water.  The cleaners saw it as part of their job to joke with people, cheer them up, all sorts of things, but hugely beneficial both to the cleaner, and more importantly to the patients.

Then, cleaning services were privatised and outsourced, so the cleaner was no longer employed by the hospital, they were employed by a private company.  This happened in the late 1990s.  Then cleaners were told, "Stop doing all this irrelevant stuff, don't fetch them glasses of water, that's not your job.  Don't make jokes with them, get on with the cleaning, do it, do it".  And actually, when they had less control over their work, firstly cleaners started to hate their jobs.  When they had some agency, they could identify things that people needed, "That person needs a glass of water.  She looks a bit down today, I'll tell her a joke".

Suddenly, if you lose that control, you can't identify the problems around you and solve them, and you feel much worse and your attention gets much worse.  You make many more mistakes, the actual cleaning got worse, because they hated their job.

Sarah Ellis: They don't care as much.

Johann Hari: Exactly.  And you think sometimes this can sound like you're talking about fancy jobs, meaning control.  It doesn't matter what your job is, when you've got control over it, you can find things that are meaningful and you want to pay attention.  When control is stripped away from you, it's hard to create meaning.  So, I would say that's a really important element of this, and it's partly about changing the culture.

Just to go back to myself, narcissistically, for a really long time, and I think still this is in my head very much, we think of a day when you've done a good day's work is a day when you get to the end of it and you're exhausted and wiped out.  I get like that.  This is in our head, this is so deep in our culture, that overwork is hard work.  And I feel that still when I've had a day like today.  I'm doing six interviews.  I'll get to the end of the day, and there'll be a little bit of me that will feel this puritan, "Good for you".

Sarah Ellis: "Well done!"

Johann Hari: You've worked to the point where you can't sleep anymore.

Sarah Ellis: Oh no, now I feel awful, I'm contributing to your lack of attention!

Johann Hari: No, but this idea is implanted in us by the culture, which is we're taught that working yourself to the point of exhaustion is work, and it's not.  Even though intellectually, I know all these things I'm explaining to you that co-exist in my head with these deep ideas that have been implanted in us, so this is constantly a process for all of us are challenging these ideas in the culture, "Actually, that's not good work.  Tomorrow my interviews won't be as good, because I've done too many".  I know that, and yet this idea still drives us. 

So, I think there's a lot of these things we have to challenge in ourselves, in the culture and in our workplaces and just in society more generally, and they're all interacting with each other, these different things we need to challenge.

Sarah Ellis: Towards the end of the book, you describe the different layers of attention, which I think you had spoken to someone who'd done lots of work on attention, and then you also added based on your own perspective.  So, I wonder if you could just talk that through for us?

Johann Hari: Yeah, this is an amazing guy, called Doctor James Williams, who I interviewed in Moscow.  So, James was a Google engineer for many years, and now he left and became one of the leader philosophers of attention.  You should also have him on, he's great.  James argued that there are essentially three kinds of attention.

So, the first is your spotlight.  Your spotlight is when you want to do an immediate task so, "I want to go to the fridge and get a Diet Coke.  I want to finish reading this book.  I want to go to the shops and get a pint of milk", whatever it might be, so it's immediate.  And your spotlight, that's the dominant form of attention that we think about.  When we think about being distracted, we think, "Oh God, I want to finish this book, but my phone keeps pinging.  I want to play with my son, but my boss keeps messaging me", whatever it might be.

Sarah Ellis: Kind of the in the now, is that right, like what you want to do now?

Johann Hari: Exactly.  It's an immediate task, and when your spotlight is disrupted, you can't do that immediate task.  The second layer is what he calls your starlight, which is your medium- or longer-term goals.  So it's not, "I want to go to the shops and get a pint of milk", it's, "I want to set up a business, I want to be a good dad".  It's called starlight, because when you're lost in the desert, you look to the stars and see what direction you're travelling in.  So, your starlight are your longer-term goals. 

I think at the moment, a lot of our starlight is being disrupted, so if you're on social media all the time, you find yourself being hijacked by petty goals like, "I want more likes on Instagram, I want more followers", and life where your spotlight is disrupted, where you can't do short-term things, ends up disrupting your starlight; because if your life just breaks down into these chunks, where also if you're jammed up and you never get time to think, it's much harder to achieve your medium- and long-term goals.

Actually, when you start not being able to achieve those goals, it's very easy to just go, "Oh fuck it, I'll just do some more tweets".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, "I'll do the easy thing", the dopamine hit thing.

Johann Hari: Exactly, it just feeds on itself.  The third layer is your daylight.  Your daylight is how you know what your long-term goals even are.  So, it's when a room is flooded with daylight that you can see everything clearly.  So think about, you want to be a good dad; how do you know what it is to be a good dad?  You want to set up a business; well, how do you know what the business you want to set up is?  You want to write a book; well, how do you know what book you want to write?  Again, it's a kind of longer-term focus. 

But if you're disrupted and jammed up all the time, you lose your ability.  It's not just that you lose your ability to do an immediate task, it's not even that you lose your ability to do a longer-term task, like set up a business; at some level, you lose your sense of who you are.  You lose your sense of where you want to be, what kind of person you want to be.  If your life is just broken into 65-second and 3-minute chunks, where do you get the mental space to know who you are, to know what your story is, to tell a story about yourself and the kind of person you want to be?

I would argue there's a fourth layer of focus.  I'm going beyond what James says now, although I know he's sympathetic to what I say in this.  And I would call them the stadium lights, which are ability to see each other in society.  Because, we don't just pay attention as individuals, we pay attention as a society to things.  You can really see that that is breaking down now, that capacity for us to sensibly pay attention to collective problems, think about solutions and solve them.

I think a lot about, for example, when I was a kid, there was a crisis, a very serious global crisis.  It was discovered that in hairsprays and fridges, there was something called CFCs, a kind of chemical, that was destroying the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from the Sun's rays.  There was a huge hole in the ozone layer forming above the Arctic and it was going to melt the Arctic.  I remember having nightmares about this when I was like seven.

What happened was, the science was explained to ordinary people, ordinary people understood the science, they distinguished it from lies, and together we pressured our politicians to act.  They banned CFCs, we kept up the pressure for years until they banned the CFCs, and now the ozone layer is healing.  It's a really good model of how you can respond to science.

Today, if exactly the same crisis happened, you would be flooded with nonsense on social media saying, "Does the ozone layer even exist?" then we would tribalise, some people would start wearing a little symbol that represented the ozone layer to show how virtuous they are, and some other people would start filming themselves spraying hairsprays into the sky to anger the people wearing those.  We would just tribalise and it would break down.

I believe, because of how the business models that drive social media work, which are based on invading and hacking your attention and making us angry, because that makes money for the social media companies, we've lost our ability to use those stadium lights to see each other clearly to solve our problems.  So, attention is a form of light, and I think in those four ways, we are losing our light.  But that doesn't have to happen.  There are all these practical ways, individually and collectively, we can get that light back.

Sarah Ellis: This is perhaps an unfair question.  If you were to fast-forward to this time next year, if you were thinking about something that you would love to be true, because of the research that you have brought together on Stolen Focus, and the way that you have shared that work in a way that's very practical and accessible for everybody, what do you hope the impact is that the book will have made?

Johann Hari: It's funny, because one of the things I've learned with my previous books is that very often, the most moving thing is something that comes totally out of left field that I couldn't have at all predicted.  So for example, I wrote a book called Chasing the Scream, which is we had a lot of addiction in my family and I wrote this book about what causes addiction, and how the way we're currently responding with punishment and shame is a disaster, and actually places that have put in solutions based on love and compassion reduce addiction.

I'm a left-wing gay atheist and two years after the book came out, I got contacted by this woman, called Christina Dent, who is an evangelical Christian in Mississippi.  And Christina is so passionately opposed to abortion, which is very difficult to my politics, I'm sure you can guess, that she believes you've got to put your money where your mouth is.  So, she fosters children in the Mississippi foster care system.  She's like, "If you're going to tell people to have their babies, you've got to actually help the babies", which is an honourable position, although I don't agree with her view on abortion.

In Mississippi, most of the women who have their children taken away from them have addiction problems, so she gets to know all these women with addiction problems, all these mothers, and she's like, "Why didn't anyone help these women years ago?"  She then starts to read about it, she saw a TED talk that I gave, and then she read my book. 

Christina has now set up a group, called End It For Good, of evangelical Christians in Mississippi, who fight to decriminalise drugs and end the war on drugs, and use the money instead to help people with addiction problems.  Now, Christina is as far from what I pictured when I wrote my book as you can possibly imagine, and she's a wonderful person and we've become good friends. 

So, I guess the honest answer is, I'm hoping there's someone like Christina out there, who I can't even picture right now, who will come completely out of left field and say, "There was this thing in the book that I connected with that helped me to do this".  So, I think about just the crazy mixture of people who've responded to my previous books.

Sarah Ellis: And, if you could share with everyone just one piece of advice, it might be career advice or life advice, what would that be?  It could be just your own advice, something you found really useful to guide your career, or perhaps some advice that someone else has given you that's just really stayed with you.

Johann Hari: There's loads of examples, but in terms of careers, there's an American writer called David Brooks, who I really like, who gave a really good piece of career advice, or just advice generally actually.  There are two ways you can think about the stuff you do in your life, and he says, "You can think about CV values, or eulogy values". 

So I want you to picture two things, factors to decide whether to do something.  One way you can picture it is you can picture it on your CV, "Will this look good on my CV?" and that has value of course.  Another way you can think about it is, "How will this sound in my eulogy?"  So you picture you're dead, what do you want people to say about you at your eulogy, and that's quite different to what you'll do for your CV.

There'll be some things that will overlap.  Maybe you want to go and trek the Amazon Jungle, and that looks good on your CV and it looks good in your eulogy.

Sarah Ellis: Win win!

Johann Hari: Yeah.  There's a lot of things.  I mean actually, often we end up making decisions that look good neither on the CV, nor in the eulogy.  But I think it really helps to think, to pull back and think in terms of the longer arc of your life, what kind of life do you want to have.

Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to my conversation with Johann today.  I hope it helps you to find more focus and to pay attention to the things that matter to you.  If you do get a moment to rate, review and share the podcast with other people, we always really appreciate it.  We read every review and it helps us to continue to share Squiggly with more people in more places, so thank you.

That's everything for today's episode, and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.