Time & Perspective Quote by Daniel Goleman

Mindfulness gets marketed as a lifestyle product, but Goleman snaps it back to mechanics: it is not incense, posture, or a vibe. It is attention, trained on purpose. The line is almost tautological, and that is the point. By sounding obvious, it punctures the common fantasy that meditation is something done to you (by an app voice, a retreat, a technique) rather than something you do with a scarce cognitive resource.

The intent is quietly corrective. Goleman, best known for popularizing emotional intelligence, has spent decades translating contemplative practices into the language of psychology and performance. Here he’s smuggling a scientific framing into a spiritual space: mindfulness as attentional control, the mind’s steering wheel. That matters because attention is measurable, trainable, and exhaustible. If your focus drifts, the practice isn’t “ruined”; the drift is the data, and the returning is the workout.

The subtext is a gentle demystification of enlightenment culture. Mindfulness isn’t a special state reserved for the calm and disciplined; it’s the act of repeatedly noticing what’s happening now, even when “now” includes boredom, irritation, or the impulse to check your phone. In a distracted economy that profits from your fragmented focus, Goleman’s phrasing reads like a small act of resistance: reclaim the moment by reclaiming the faculty that makes any moment available in the first place.