A drawing pin works because the pressure we apply to a large surface becomes focused into one tiny pinpoint.

A torch, with a tiny battery, is able to light our way through a forest because it focuses its beam on the path in front of us rather than trying to light the whole forest.

A laser is an even more concentrated form of light that can read your CDs or cut through mental.

Just like the above examples, our minds contain immense power; but if we don’t concentrate it properly that power becomes defused and weakened. Without solid concentration, we try to do many things at once, and achieve very little. By improving concentration, we can take that same brain and use it to achieve incredible things.

So how to we set about improving it?

The first thing you should realise is that you already have the ability to concentrate intently. There will have been times in your life when you were concentrating so intently, you didn’t even realise you were concentrating. Typical examples include reading an engrossing book, playing a game (especially when the stakes are high!), or getting to know a friend.

It is this ability, which you already have, that needs to be transferred to other activities in your life. We need to find this power to concentrate, and take control of it.

The reason you find the things that you concentrate on so engrossing is that they are more important to you than anything else at that time. Your brain will bring to focus what it deems to be the most important thing for you to concentrate on. If you force yourself to concentrate on something that isn’t the most important you will constantly become distracted.

So, in order for you to remain concentrated on something, you must have the inner belief that what you are doing now is more important than doing anything else – at this time. If not, distractions will creep in.

The biggest distractions are the fulfilment of your needs. If you’re hungry, cold, tired, et cetera, you should really attend to them. Your brain is a survival mechanism and it will always attend to what is most important; so if you’re hungry you become distracted by the need to eat – if you weren’t, you’d starve. If you’re cold, you seek a warmer environment – if you didn’t, you’d freeze. And if you have a deadline tomorrow, you get distracted to get on with your work – because if you didn’t, you’d be fired.

The simplest way to improve concentration then, is to deal with the distractions. Before you start a task make sure that you are well fed, that you’re at a comfortable temperature and that you shouldn’t be doing your homework. When the most important things are taken care of, they will lose all importance and won’t distract you.

However, the highly evolved modern human is usually of the belief that these things shouldn’t control them; that they can override the basic need to eat, or sleep, so that we can get on with making that deadline.

To a certain extent we can. We can put these things off, but eventually they become more and more important until we can think of nothing else. If we didn’t we’d die.

The way that we put these things off is simply by making what we are doing the most important thing for us to be doing at that time. It makes very little difference if we eat now, or in half an hour; and so all we have to do is tell ourselves that we’ll eat after we are finished. In this way, finishing the chapter we’re reading isn’t more important than eating, but it is the most important thing to be doing now.

By agreeing with ourselves to deal with a more important task at a later date, we lower that activities importance for the time being.

The more important the distraction is, however, the more difficult it is to make what you’re trying to concentrate on more important – and usually it isn’t worth the torture.

There are many tasks that we find it practically impossible to keep concentrating on even though they are very important. For example filing tax returns, tidying up, or doing school work are all things that need to be done, but the thought of watching TV or going down the pub breaks concentration. In these cases, the other activity is more important to you in the short term. To make yourself stick to the task, rather than going out, you have to keep reminding yourself that in the long-term you’ll be better off if you stick with it.

This is usually associated with the word willpower.

Willpower or self-discipline is often cited as a worthy trait, but it is rarely analysed more closely. It is usually associated with doing what you think you should be doing even when you don’t want to, but it is in this form that it is at its weakest. At its most powerful it is not torturous or difficult, but, rather, it is so easy you won’t even notice you’re applying it.

Half of this is motivation: the ability to get yourself started on what it is you need to do; this will be covered in another section. The other half is to keep going once you have started; and we will cover that now.

As stated a few paragraphs above, going to the pub can seem more important in the short term because your enjoyment is the most important thing to you after your survival. However, our long-term enjoyment is built on doing some boring things in the short term. In order to keep on track we usually keep reminding ourselves of the long-term benefits, but every time we have to do this we are being distracted.

We cannot concentrate on doing our task, if we have to keep thinking about how it is of a future benefit to us – that is a distraction in itself. Once we are concentrating on a task we need to remain in the present. The problem is, keeping in the present on a lot of these activities is boring; and our brain doesn’t think boring things are important.

So in order to stop this distraction we have to make our current activity more interesting. This is the art of willpower: the ability to take any activity and make it interesting. In everything you have to do, there are ways of making it more interesting, but I can’t go into them because every activity and person is unique.

I can tell you a general principle though. Things are most interesting when you are being challenged, when you’re learning, when you’re being creative… In order to keep things interesting you need to look for things that make it more interesting. Boredom is simply doing a task over and over until it becomes so easy that your conscious mind has nothing to occupy it. In these cases you can simply daydream. But in many cases you can’t do that because you are given miniscule challenges every now and again that distract you from your daydreaming.

Filling in routine forms, for example, is an activity that is easy, but requires intermittent periods of attention. When asked for your previous address, for example, you may have to take a moment to access the information from your brain; but once you begin writing it, you turn to autopilot. However, there is no time here to really daydream because you’re soon have to think about the next question.

In this case you have to find some challenge that will take the same time as the boring activity. You may, for example, want to see how neat you can make your handwriting. These kinds of activities may seem boring in themselves, but for brief intervals they are actually very engaging.

Thinking of things to occupy your mind in these boring moments is something that will require practice. This may be difficult at first, but as you practice it more and more, you will find that it becomes easier.