Good Mornin’

It’s a refreshing morning, back after a week away at the beach with kids and good friends. Solid summer days of sun, sand, and surf – and the most disconnected I’ve been in years!

I have my team to thank for that, thanks team! They are, without exaggeration, the best in the business. Knowing everything was in their hands gave me the rare chance to step back fully. No half-presence, no constant check-ins.

Just space.

And that’s what got me thinking about the market of attention.

Markets never sleep. Headlines pour in like a flood, algorithms flash like lightning, and the noise is endless. But beneath it all, there’s another market at work…one without a ticker, but with stakes just as high.

It’s the market of attention.

Like capital, attention is finite. It flows toward what feels scarce or urgent. But unlike capital, most of us don’t protect it. We scatter it. We spend it carelessly, like gamblers spreading chips across every table, hoping something pays off. In investing, that’s not diversification…. it’s dilution. Attention works the same way.

The Attention Economy

This isn’t just metaphor. We now live in what’s called the attention economy, a system designed to hijack our focus. Tristan Harris saw it from the inside. Once a design ethicist at Google, he realized that the true currency wasn’t data, or even dollars, it was human attention. Platforms weren’t competing for innovation; they were competing for eyeballs, minutes, and dopamine hits. Harris walked away to sound the alarm: if we don’t reclaim our attention, someone else will invest it for us.

Sacred Idleness

But the warning isn’t new. More than a century earlier, Henri Poincaré, the French mathematician often called the “last universalist” before Einstein, he understood the same truth in a different form. His peers thought him distracted, even odd. He would stop mid-sentence, eyes drifting to some invisible horizon. But he wasn’t absentminded, he was allocating. Poincaré practiced what he called “sacred idleness,” deliberately stepping away from noise so he could concentrate attention like us investing capital in a high-conviction position. Out of that discipline came breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and philosophy that still ripple through the world today.

Poincaré’s genius wasn’t just in his intellect, it was in how he invested his attention.

Lessons from the Lighthouse

And so it is with us. Attention is the beam of a lighthouse, not the scatter of a flashlight. What we choose to illuminate shapes our direction. The paradox is simple: what we give attention to eventually defines us.

In markets, capital builds wealth. In life, attention builds meaning. If we’re not intentional, our portfolios may look robust while our days feel bankrupt.

This is why allocation matters. In finance, allocation determines outcomes. In life, the same principle applies. Do you allocate attention toward the assets that truly compound…. relationships, health, meaningful work…or do you speculate in the attention economy, letting headlines, notifications, and endless feeds drain your account?

Presence is the rarest currency. And like capital, attention compounds. The minutes you invest today in listening, strengthening, or deepening your craft multiply into a fortune no index can measure.

Wealth is not measured by how much we earn, but how deeply we attend.

As we cruise into the week, give some thought to how you are allocating your attention, maybe ask:

Where is my attention trading?

Because capital compounds in markets.

Attention compounds in life.

And both demand discipline.

 

Be well and enjoy the moments,

Derek Henderson