I’d like to say that I have introspective powers of deduction and could feel the progress I was making in the moment. I don’t. And I couldn’t. In some sense, the process of logging my time seems remarkably similar to tracking my expenses. On any given day, I had no idea whether I was doing better or worse at saving money, or spending my practice time well. The narrow focus on the day-to-day was not giving me insight, nor was it motivating me.
However, after having stitched together the trajectory of my experiences over the course of this month, I felt encouraged in ways that I hadn’t before. Stepping back and looking at the change in my experience across a longer swath of time was inspiring. From one day to the next, with incremental progress or the few steps back anyone can experience after a few steps forward, it can be challenging to detect forward momentum. But when we take a step back, patterns become clearer. The arc of the experience takes form when we look more broadly at the choices we make. And at least for me, when I looked holistically, and opened up my focus to reflect on my progress over the course of one month rather than one day, I could see that I wasn’t still scrambling to get my footing. I had real traction and was well on my way up the mountain. It’s only by stepping back to view a wide expanse of actions, and considering our choices juxtaposed against one another, that patterns emerge and we feel the motivational impact.
Turning Film on Its Head
I’m not the first to realize the impact of a wide bracket; and the idea of it, arguably, was not invented by psychologists. In fact, the idea of a wide bracket might date back to 1928, and might be attributable to nineteen-year-old Robert Burks. Back then, Burks was starting his first job inside the special-effects department at Warner Bros. Pictures. He joined the team at an interesting time. Rightfully situated among its brethren, Warner Bros. resided on Poverty Row in Hollywood, a section of town populated by studios near financial ruin, dotted with tough-guy extras and silver-screen cowboys languishing on street corners, awaiting casting calls for westerns that might not ever make it to the theater.
But, the studio was at the precipice of a transformation. Sam Warner had just convinced his brothers to think beyond silent pictures and produce The Jazz Singer, the first film in the industry to include speaking actors and synchronized singing. Though Sam Warner died the night before the opening and his brothers couldn’t attend the premiere, it was with this film that Warner Bros. left Poverty Row. Now flush with cash, the studio grew quickly from there on out. Its prospects were on the rise—as was Burks’s career trajectory. Within his first year on the job, he was promoted to assistant cameraman. And by ten years, he had honed his craft and was leading the special-effects cinematography team. At the age of forty, Burks was promoted to director of photography—the youngest fully accredited person in this position within the industry to date.
In his late forties and fifties, Burks became the darling of Alfred Hitchcock, leading the director’s cinematography team for twelve productions. It was with To Catch a Thief that Burks became a legend. This film was the first of five that Burks shot using VistaVision, a brand-new form of cinematography that literally turned film on its head. Burks put the film into his cameras horizontally rather than vertically, and shot with a wide-angle lens. By doing this, he could capture far more on the film’s negative than any cameraman had before. The effect was a crisp image that could portray the entire field of vision—including the foreground, the middle distance, and the far background—all at once, with sharp focus. Before, cameramen for movies like Casablanca struggled to clearly depict the fez on the head of the patron at the back of the bar as well as Humphrey Bogart up front, next to the piano. But with the wide bracket, audiences for To Catch a Thief could clearly make out the sunbathers on the beaches of the French Riviera in the background, even as the camera placed Grace Kelly and Cary Grant speeding along the cliffs by the Mediterranean Sea in the foreground. For his use of this revolutionary technological advance and cinematographic effect, Burks won his first Academy Award.
Even though we don’t load film into our minds literally, our eyes and brains have the capacity to create the experience of VistaVision figuratively—to see the world through a wide bracket when it serves us well. To do this, we need to give as much weight to what lies in the periphery of our field of vision as we do to the things that fall right in the center. We can look at the world as if through a wide-angle lens, composing an image that includes all the elements of the surrounding scene. As it was for Robert Burks when shooting a film for Hitchcock, a wide bracket is all about taking note of everything that surrounds you.
Here’s an example of what I mean. Think of paintings created by the artist Chuck Close. He lives with a neurological disorder, called prosopagnosia, that leaves him unable to recognize people based on how they look; nonetheless, Close achieved international acclaim by painting portraits of people’s faces.
Close found a unique way to work around his prosopagnosia. He deconstructs his canvas into a grid. Each square on the canvas coincides with a square cell on the photograph of the person he uses as a referent for the work. He taught himself to narrow his visual attention onto the shadows, contours, and colors that reside within each tiny square on the referent. He looks intently at the skin between a nose and an eye, for example. This may take up six adjacent cells on the referent photograph, and inside each appear several rings of concentric squares of alternating shades of pink and tan. Or, when narrowly focusing his gaze on an upturned corner of a mouth, he might see small circles, triangles, bean-shaped areas of light and dark, color and the absence of it. He reproduces what he sees in these referent cells onto the canvas in larger form. What he paints is a patchwork quilt of tiny shapes and figures. But the image comes together for us the audience only when we take a step back and look at the big picture, and see with a wide bracket.
The Right Tool for the Job
It’s not meant as a contradiction to have earlier explained the benefits of a narrow focus, only to say now that this might prove problematic. It’s not meant to confuse you to have first suggested you zoom in on what you want, only to now suggest you should expand your breadth of attention. We need diversity in the tools we use, because there are situations when one will work better than another, as I have mentioned before. An artist’s palette includes more than one color. A chef’s knife block includes more than just cleavers. A good wine cellar is stocked with more than just rosé from the South of France. Narrowed attention, like all of the strategies in this book, may be more effective some of the time, and a wide bracket at other times. The key is knowing when the right time to use either may be. Indeed, a narrow focus can inspire us when we are nearing the end of our journey, but a wide bracket may motivate us better when we’re just starting out.
Take the following study, for example. Dutch students played a boring word game, but they could win money for pushing through the monotony. The more questions they got right, the more money they could make. I remember my college days, living hand to mouth; I would have happily jumped on this gravy train. It seems these students felt the same, since they all played along to some degree or another. But what the researchers actually measured in this study (though the students didn’t know it) was how quickly the students moved through the different stages of the game. The researchers knew from their previous studies that players took shorter breaks when they were motivated. Here, the researchers tested to see if focusing the students’ attention on how much they had left to go before the game was over would foster greater motivation and encourage them to work faster.