About
Taken or Given starts from one distinction: attention that's taken and attention that's given feel nothing alike, and many 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.
He came to the idea from both sides of that divide. He left Yale to record an album on which he played more than a dozen instruments, then took it on the road. He has since performed original music on five continents, where attention has to be won. He went on to Harvard College, where he won the Artist Development Fellowship in 2009 and graduated in 2011 with a concentration in philosophy.
In 2012 he was invited to Zhengzhou University in China, where he set up and led his own EEG lab in the psychology department. With a team of postgraduate researchers, he designed original experiments on time perception, group judgment, language learning and focus, recorded more than a hundred student volunteers, and developed a portable EEG method. Schools then asked him to bring it into their classrooms, with permission and consent arranged in advance, so teachers and students could watch live brainwave feedback on screen. The method went on to reach schools in three provinces.
Much of his working life has run on attention freely given. At Harvard he independently advised undergraduates and graduate students who were building companies, organizations, research and creative projects, helping them find what made their work distinct. He also tutored graduate students through theses and publications. In 2013 he co-founded an education consultancy, and for more than a decade he has advised students and young founders around the world on businesses, nonprofits, books, plays, albums, inventions, games, software, and more. His favourite part of the work is stepping into a field he doesn't know yet and helping someone build something new in it.
His book of philosophy in verse, The Book of Change, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2007; his play Our Diamond is published by Baker's Plays and Samuel French.
This site holds the free tests, the seven theory papers in the Reading Room, and the book. The applied and business side — the instruments for funnels, audiences and AI products, the two published standards, and the record of what has been corrected — is at grantedattention.com. He publishes through his independent company, Ambitco.
Questions, objections, or a case where the framework does not fit: clint@takenorgiven.com. The counter-case is the useful thing to send, and it is what has produced every correction so far.
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