The New Attention Economy

Scene: It’s late July in the tiniest kitchen in the world, which also happens to be located on the Upper West Side. There’s a mom at work, a two-year-old tugging at her leg, and a four-year-old immersed in a pointillist masterpiece on the whiteboard just outside the nook. It’s twenty minutes before dinnertime, and nerves are running hot.

I turn from my position cutting mushrooms at the counter and glance toward the whiteboard art behind me, then back toward Lydia, my beaming four-year-old.

“Looks great, honey,"

“What are we going to eat?” she asks.

“Beef stir fry,” I respond, drily.

“But I don’t LIKE stir fry…!”

I ignore her comment as I cut three more mushrooms, my mind drifting to the blog post I published earlier that day about pivoting skills and creating new learning experiences across different work contexts. I wonder: Is there more to it than that?

“Mom!” she interrupts my train of thought. “What color?”

“Sorry, sorry,” I acknowledge. “What color for what, honey?”

“For the next dots? What color dots should I color next for my drawing?’

“Oh, I see. How about purple?” I suggest.

“Okay!” she cheerfully replies, and fetches the whiteboard marker.

I shuffle into the kitchen, put the heat on high, add olive oil and onion to the wok, then open the package of sliced flank steak I’d picked up earlier.

I check the recipe instructions on my phone, then glance at my calendar for tomorrow and remember that I’m meeting with a leader of an educational institution. I wonder if I should introduce any of these ideas in that meeting, if there’s either a program or a business idea out of helping people level up enough in a new domain while carrying over skills from their old domain. Is it so unusual to understand how to learn outside of a traditional classroom context, as an adult? Could this be helpful to other people too?

I back toward the counter and notice Sydney my two-year-old has climbed up onto a chair and is reaching precariously over my cutting board for a mushroom at the far end.

“Watch out!” I shout, moving the large knife out of view.

Behind me Lydia is struggling to remove the cap from the whiteboard marker.

“MOM! I need help!”

I yank the top off the pen, hand Sydney a couple of mushrooms, and sit her back in her chair.

Lydia goes back to making dot art on the wall.

Sydney, meanwhile, has abandoned the mushrooms. She’s dunked her entire arm into the bowl of soy sauce and sesame oil I’d just started prepping. She pulls her arm out, staring curiously at the brown drips now covering her pants, the table, and the uncut veggies on the cutting board.

To the bathroom!

I pull the stool to the sink and get Sydney started with hand-washing.

“Mommy, look!” calls Lydia, from her position on the whiteboard. “I made 5 dots!”

“That’s great, dear,” I distractedly say while trying to add cornstarch to my soy sauce mixture.

“Mommy, COME SEE.”

I glance toward the board, which is now covered with both purple and red dots.

“BEAUTIFUL!” I encourage her. “What a great artist.”

My mind drifts back to a conversation last week with a friend who’s eager to leave her steady role at a big company and try fractional work. Like a lot of people, she was looking for advice on how to make the pivot. I've noticed that people are often impressed (and frankly, confused) by how frequently I pivot across fields. They assume it’s because I have an attention problem. Maybe that’s part of it, but maybe I like to think it's also because I’m trying to uncover the patterns behind career changes.

Even the most senior people in my network get stuck when they want to get out of a role. Every week, two or three more people reach out asking me to help think through a new career possibility, one that might seem invisible to them right now. I wonder how long it's been since the traditional 9-to-5 has met our needs, and worry how much the accelerated pace of new technology will augment all of the work we do. After all, what can you do for work tomorrow, when you’re only equipped with the skills from yesterday?

“Ewwwwwww….!” I hear a loud giggle from the kitchen.

Sydney has pulled her stool into the kitchen and is currently standing palm-deep with both hands laid into the plate of squishy, raw meat.

She wiggles her fingers and plays with the red juices rolling across her palms.

Back to the sink. More hand-washing. 

“What color now mom?” shouts Lydia.

On the stove in the kitchen the onions are starting to burn. Shit, shit shit.

I turn down the heat.

“Um…. blue!”

I add the beef to the wok and line it, then set a timer for three minutes on my phone, then return back to the counter to cut more veggies.

I hear the unmistakable sound of a stool being dragged across the floor yet again. Sydney is lining her stool up right next to the stove, which is currently splattering bits of oil all over the place from the beef.

“SYDNEY NO!” I shout. “Too hot! Come down! Not today.”

She immediately bursts into tears. I grab her and pull away the stool. She starts stomping and screaming.

“I know you want to help, honey, it’s just too hot.”

More tears.

“Can you go get Bun-Bun and play for a bit?”

She feebly walks back toward the bedroom. I flip the beef to the other side and set my phone timer for another three minutes.

“Look mommy, look! A rainbow!”  

“That’s great honey,” I say, while trying to ignore the crying from the bedroom.

I prep the rest of the veggies and bring them to the stove to get ready to transfer the meat onto a side plate.

“But you didn’t even look! I made you a rainbow! See?”

I come out of the kitchen, look toward the whiteboard and give her a knowing smile of encouragement. Rainbows are a relatively new skill in her artist's toolkit. 

I wonder: Would adults pay to learn how to transfer their skills into something new? Would companies invest in leveling up their new hires? Would managers pay to have someone else train their longtime employees in a fresh skill set? Is there a way you could fractionally quit by learning something new on the side? What percent of those people might ultimately come back to the same workplace, reenergized after learning somewhere else? Is there anything here?

Sydney wanders out of her bedroom and into the kitchen, dragging her bunny by the ears.

“Eat, eat, eat!” she starts saying, pointing her fingers toward her mouth, looking stressed beyond belief.

“I know kids, we’re going to eat. Soon. I promise."

“Mommy what color now?” asks Lydia. 

“Orange," I reply.

Sydney starts crying again.

"EAT! EAT!"

I hear shuffling of markers in a cup. And then:

“Mom! We don’t have orange! What else?”

The three-minute timer goes off in the kitchen. I grab the tongs.

“Me help, me help!” interjects Sydney and starts pulling aggressively on my leg. I finally relent and just scoop her up, bunny and all, while I remove beef from the wok.

“MOM!” shouts Lydia from the whiteboard. 

I remove four more pieces of beef from the wok onto a plate.

“MOM!!” she continues to shout to me. “MOMMY!!”

“Honey I just need to get this beef off the pan before it burns.”

I finish removing the beef, and put Sydney down to add some extra oil, along with all the veggies. Sydney immediately starts crying again.

“MOMMY!!!” Lydia attempt yet again to get my attention.

I pick up Sydney again, who promptly stops crying. With her in one hand and the tongs in the other, I finally turn back to Lydia.

“What is it, hon?” I ask wearily.

I stop in my tracks, thrown by the sudden shift. I turn to face her.

“What?” I ask, softening my voice. “Who told you that?”

“You.”

I feel myself melt a little and set down my cooking tongs.

“I said that? When?”

“You don’t remember?”

I shift Sydney from one hip to the other as I wrack my brains, but I come up short.

“Um…well that certainly sounds like something I would say...”

“So why?” she presses, looking at me with serious eyes. “Why in our family don’t we give up?”

I lean over, giving her a small hug, and try to gather the right words for this moment.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I guess it’s because we think it means an awful lot to keep trying.”

She tilts her head, considering this, and then nods as if it all makes sense. I watch her turn back to her rainbow of dots, now focused and content, like she’s just unlocked some secret code. For a moment, the kitchen falls quiet. 

I let Sydney back down to the ground and she shuffled over to sit down next to the whiteboard, in sudden awe of her big sissy’s art project. 

I return to the stove, feeling a small, unexpected surge of pride. It surprises me, despite all the chaos, how some things apparently still break through and catch their attention.

That’s when I notice the learning paradigm unfolding right in front of me, in my own home. Lydia’s constant questions and her need for encouragement remind me of so many job-seekers I talk to—navigating pivots, seeking validation as they brace themselves to launch into something new. And Sydney, with her messy curiosity and drive to help, oddly captures the essence of that raw, unfiltered energy required to try something new, and just make it work.

As I stand there, watching them at the whiteboard, I wonder what else might be breaking through in the midst of today’s chaotic attention economy that I just haven’t noticed yet.