About
Taken or Given starts from one distinction: attention that's taken and attention that's given feel nothing alike, and most people are a different person depending on which one they're standing in. The book sorts that into four types — the Spark, electric when there's something to win; the Natural, who reads the room and switches on purpose; the Slow Burn, quiet in the scramble and transformed once handed the floor; and the Dark Horse, whose fire is real but hasn't found its room yet. The two-minute test on this site is the fastest way to find yours.
Clint Miller is the creator of Conferral Theory, a framework for the two kinds of attention that shape who we become in every room: attention that is taken, and attention that is given. He is the author of Taken or Given, the framework's short introduction.
His path to the theory was unusually hands-on. He left Yale to record an album on which he played more than a dozen instruments, then took it on the road. He finished his education in philosophy at Harvard, where he won the Artist Development Fellowship, and later led his own EEG research lab in the psychology department at Zhengzhou University in China, publishing peer-reviewed research on auditory perception and group wisdom. He has spent decades on both sides of the divide he writes about — as an internationally touring multi-instrumentalist who has performed original music on five continents, where attention must be taken, and as an educator and adviser whose work has always run on attention freely given. His philosophy and poetry have been published by Cambridge Scholars in the UK; his historical drama by Samuel French and Baker's Plays.
The free two-minute type test lives at takenorgiven.com; the deeper research and the business applications live at grantedattention.com. He publishes through his independent company, Ambitco.
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