About

Clint Miller

grantedattention.com is the business application of Conferral Theory — the free instruments and paid diagnostics for owners, creators, and teams. The framework's short introduction lives at takenorgiven.com.

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.

For more than a decade he has advised founders on what makes their work distinct. At Harvard he independently advised undergraduates and graduate students building companies, organizations and creative projects across finance, tech, education and entertainment. He also tutored graduate students through theses and publications. In 2013 he co-founded an education consultancy, and he has since advised students and young founders around the world on businesses, nonprofits, consulting practices, inventions, books, films, games, software, and more.

He left Yale to record and tour an album, then graduated from Harvard College in 2011 with a concentration in philosophy, winning Harvard's Artist Development Fellowship in 2009. In 2012 he set up and led his own EEG lab in the psychology department at Zhengzhou University, designing original experiments on time perception, group judgment, language learning and focus, and developing a portable EEG method that schools in three provinces went on to use. 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 business applications: the free instruments, the two published standards, the design methodology, and the record of what has been corrected. The free tests, the seven theory papers in the Reading Room, and the book are at takenorgiven.com. He publishes through his independent company, Ambitco.

Questions, objections, or a case where the framework does not fit: clint@grantedattention.com. The counter-case is the useful thing to send — the specific situation a claim fails in — and it is what has produced every entry on the corrections record.