‘Stolen Focus’ by Johann Hari – Book Review & Notes

Posted on: June 20, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

Book Review

Stolen Focus is a great book.

I have read books for my own personal and professional development over the past couple of years, most of them being fitting more in the “self-help” category, but this is no self-help book.

From a high level, Stolen Focus leverages a broad range of studies and interviews with neuroscientists and social scientists to examine the external (systematic) forces that rob us of our ability to effectively pay attention. And Hari blends these insights well with easy-to-understand explanations and key messages, and captivating storytelling.

For the first half of the book, we get coverage on the topics that most people would expect from a book called ‘Stolen Focus’: technological distractions and social media. Reading this part of the book truly felt like a deep dive into technology and social media, as it featured interviews with ex-Google and ex-Facebook employees, particularly tech designers.

For the second half of the book, Hari dives into stress, attention problems (namely ADHD), and the education system – to name a few topics. I have read some reviews saying that the book gets controversial in this later half of the book and “loses its focus”. However, while the topics are not as relevant, I still found these chapters an interesting and insightful read.

If you’re expecting Stolen Focus to focus mainly on technological distractions and social media, this might not be the book for you. And if you’re expecting Stolen Focus to mainly present and explain facts alone, this might not be the book for you. The book does interleave findings from studies and insights from interviews with his own personal anecdotes, but I found the book engaging and informative nonetheless. In terms of whether Hari creates an unbiased view of the subject matters, I can not say for sure, but he does acknowledge limitations of some research/studies used and references all the 200 or so studies at the back of the book.

Overall, I resonated well with the recurring idea of a collective struggle to pay attention – that we are all struggling more and more to focus for extended periods of time. I also particularly enjoyed reading his learning journey when interviewing Tristan, and his analogy likening social media to magic – that social media, like magic, exploits fundamental limitations of the human mind (to keep them hooked).

While Stolen Focus is not a self-help book, reading it changed my relationship with technological distractions and social media. Stolen Focus does a great job at highlighting studies and insights from interviews with tech designers to put the issue into perspective. For this part of the book, I highly commend it, and I am really grateful that I have read it. For the other parts of the book, I also found them really insightful, but keep in mind that the reception can be mixed.

If you would like to learn more about the book, click here.