Johann Hari

“I don’t know anyone thinking more deeply, or holistically, about the crisis of our collective attention than Johann Hari.”— Naomi Klein, author of No Logo

Our inability to focus is keeping us from living great lives and succeeding at work. We are all pulled by too many forces—phones, social media, the internet. So what do we do? Johann has real solutions. We’re exhausted, so we need to pull back and rest our brains. We can’t read like we used to, so we need to concentrate with our books and remove distractions. We don’t allow ourselves the room to brainstorm, so we need time for the practice of intentional mind-wandering.

What we’ll get in return is the workplace of the future. We’ll be able to connect with other members of our team, come up with great new ideas for projects, and see our long-term goals through to the end. Johann says we need to achieve “the opposite of Facebook—standing perfectly still, looking out toward the ocean, with your palms open.” When we tap into that stillness, our minds will be sharpened to do anything we set them to, and we’ll have workplaces and organizations that are ready to innovate and do great new things.

Johann’s approach is warm, passionate, and truly committed to change. He lays out what he discovered during the epic process of writing Stolen Focus, including grappling with his own inability to focus and what it cost him. He combines stories from his own life with what he learned from different people from around the world, including a favela in Rio where attention spans completely vanished to a New Zealand office that solved their focus crisis in a surprising way. The Washington Post calls Johann’s work a “call to arms” to all of us who are worried about what will happen if we spend all of our time on our phones and stop being able to connect to the real world around us.

Johann has spent his life writing about society’s biggest issues. His New York Times bestseller Chasing the Scream tackled our assumptions about addiction and discovered that so many of them were wrong. He realized that the cure for addiction is in solving issues like isolation and poverty—because making people feel like they belong is key. Chasing the Scream was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” His book Lost Connections was a powerful reevaluation of depression, which Sir Elton John called an “amazing book that will change your life.”

Johann has also written for the New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and Slate. He was twice named ‘National Newspaper Journalist of the Year’ by Amnesty International. He was Gay Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, and was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Political Writing.