Your Attention and Your Desire

Last week, we had a conversation about how attention is not casual but how it is worship. We saw how whatever we behold long enough imprints itself on us until we slowly start to become it.

But attention does not only shape who you are. In many ways, it also shapes what you want.

Your attention is the seedbed of desire.

This is the engine most people never notice:

Repeated exposure → Attention → Desire/longing → Pursuit → Life outcomes.

It is that simple… And that serious.

We do not wake up craving random things.

Desire is taught.

Your mind learns what to want by what it sees again and again. We discussed last week that the brain rewires in the direction of sustained attention. You expose, you attend, you start to long, and before you know it, you are moving.

You want to be wealthy, but your feed is an echo chamber of poverty. Your feed is full of people complaining about how ‘Nigeria is hard’ and mocking those who try to plan. Everyone is mocking wealth, glorifying lack, normalising shortcuts. When all you hear is lack, survival becomes the ceiling. Desire for more can’t grow in that soil

Flood your world/feed with builders, ethical money conversations, simple investing, people who solved problems and got paid. Watch your desire for discipline, skill, and value creation grow.

You want to live healthy but your exposure is food skits and jokes that justify unhealthy eating. That loop starves desire.

To flip the script, follow beginner-friendly trainers, low-impact routines. After two weeks of repeated exposure, notice how your attention starts catching up. It wakes your desire up. Pursuit becomes a walk, then a workout.

You want a healthy relationship, but your inputs are podcasts that glorify contempt, sarcasm, and ‘who will outsmart who’.

Begin to sit under voices that honour kindness, repair, boundaries, and service. Desire for tenderness replaces the thrill of drama.

You want to do world-class work, but you are soaking in ‘bare minimum hacks’. Study craftsmen, behind-the-scenes of ‘the greats’. Watch how your desire for depth overtakes the urge for shortcuts.

Desire does not grow in a vacuum. It grows in the soil of what you keep exposing yourself to.

This is why your environment matters so much. The conversations you sit in. The voices you listen to. The feeds you scroll through. They are planting seeds and watering them until they become longings.

Move if you can. Change your environment physically.

But even if you cannot, you can curate your virtual world. Fill your virtual world with the kind of life you want to live, the kind of person you want to be, the standards you want to rise to.

That is how new desires are born.

Vision boards work for this exact reason. The images you behold again and again create possibility in your mind. Possibility becomes attention. Attention becomes desire. Desire drives pursuit.

Because repeated exposure to new realities makes you see them as possible for you. And once you see possibility, you start paying attention. That attention grows into desire. And desire leads to pursuit.

Most people try to change their life at the level of ‘pursuit’ while leaving ‘exposure’ untouched. That is like planting a rose and watering the weeds.

Try these few tips:

• Audit your feed. Watch your feed for seven days and write down the top ten themes you see. Are they aligned with the future you want? If not, unfollow, mute, or set limits.

• Seed the algorithm. Follow 30 accounts that embody your higher desires like peace, purpose, growth, God, craftsmanship, financial wisdom, service. Save their posts. Search those topics. Your feed will obey your attention.

• Build an exposure shelf. Books, podcasts, sermons, long-form interviews. Keep them reachable. Start and finish small things daily.

• Change the room. If your current circles rehearse scarcity, cynicism, and mockery, intentionally add rooms like online classes, communities, mentors at a distance. Your mind will catch the accent of the room you sit in the longest.

This is also exactly how marketers and social media win. They know you don’t really have to want something at first. They just have to put it in your eyes long enough. Repeated exposure does the rest.

But if they can engineer shallow desires, you can engineer higher ones. This means that desire can be retrained.

Give your steady attention to higher things and watch longing realign.

Before I end this letter, it is important that I add this:

Curate without turning your heart into envy. Exposure should expand you, not shrink you.

If a page/account/profile makes you bitter, replace it with one that teaches you how. Keep your gaze on learning, not longing for someone else’s lane. Anchor this in gratitude and accountability.

So, ask yourself:

What do you keep seeing every day? Who are you listening to on repeat? What realities are you feeding your attention?

Because whether you notice or not, those exposures are training your appetite. They are sculpting your desires. And your desires are quietly steering your life.

If you want new outcomes, you don’t start with willpower. Start with relentless exposure. Feed your eyes and ears with the life you want so much that your heart learns to long for it.

Repeated exposure.
Attention.
Desire.
Pursuit.

That is how your current life is shaped.
And that is how you can shape it back.

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And with this, we wrap up the August series on The Currency of Attention.
It has been such a joy walking with you through the sacredness of and the power of your attention.

Next Sunday, we open a brand new chapter. We will start fresh theme that will guide us through September, and I cannot wait to share it with you.

In the meantime, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to suggest a topic you want us to explore. I just might pick yours.

To your continued becoming,
Chinaza Favour 🌱