I spent a a good deal of my young adulthood searching for business advantages. Ultimately I found mine by reading: While the other guys were talking about nonsense and chugging back brews, I was reading the literature of my business… and it worked.
Things are a bit different nowadays, but I still respect the drive to get ahead, and today I have something for all who are interested: a big advantage, ready for the taking. Most people will turn away from it, but if you’re serious about getting ahead, this is for you.
Your Competitors Have Hobbled Themselves
As I’ll show you in a moment, your competitors have hobbled themselves: given themselves a serious impediment. All you have to do is not hobble yourself. That sounds easy, and perhaps too easy, but it’s absolutely true, and once you hear it you’ll understand why most people will turn away from it, no matter how much of an advantage it offers them.
A very clear fact is this: Nearly everyone you know is operating at a 20 percent or greater decrease in their cognitive ability. And that decrease is self-imposed; it’s not natural and it’s easily reversible.
Studies (A. Acquisti, E. Peer, Carnegie Mellon University, 2013, among others) say that people who insist on using a common item – an item you don’t have to use – score 20 percent lower on standard cognition tests.
So, what is this device? It’s the smartphone. (This would be the right time to run away, if you are so inclined.)
A University of Oregon study in 2018 found that when a person is focusing on something and is then distracted, it takes an average of 23 minutes for them to regain the same state of focus. Given that smartphones are designed to interrupt you, and that social media is paid to grab and hold your attention as long as possible, you can gain a tremendous advantage by disconnecting from them. But there’s even more:
By unplugging, not only do you escape insane levels of disruption, but you give your creative processes space to work. Creativity requites open cognitive space… including space that feels like boredom. That open space is simply gestation time for the best, most creative and most profitable ideas that are able to emerge from you. Being interrupted is how you prevent them from forming.
At this point you can bear in mind that unplugging from the smartphone isn’t a serious obstacle. Plenty of people never use them, and they survive quite nicely. (Alternatively you could get an Android and reflash it with the Graphene OS… or buy a Librem phone… or at the very least purge your aps and turn off every notice, warning and advisory.)
You can also restrict your contacts to email, which doesn’t interrupt you unless you allow it to.
The A Word
Before closing, we have to face the fact that social media delivered via smartphone is an addiction, and probably as addictive as smoking. That’s why this subject triggers so many people: no one likes being told they’re an addict.
Still, we all know this is true, just like smokers knew that cigarettes were addictive long before they were able to admit it.
Cigarette smoking in the US has fallen more than 75 percent since 1965. Back then everyone knew that smoking was bad for their health, but they couldn’t stop. So, they ignored such thoughts, found reasons to imagine that they were over-stated, and creatively evaded the subject. Over time, however, most smokers have been freed of their addiction.
Last Words
These days the easy things are pretty much always rigged against you. We can either face that fact or turn our faces away because we want everything to be easy, all the time. But to actually progress, whether in our personal lives or in the overall human saga, we have to do the hard things.
You have in front of you, right now, an advantage of 20 percent or more. Why not use it? It’s sad that so many people have agreed to hobble themselves, but it’s openly self-destructive to join them.
Joining them, however, the easiest thing to do; no one will call you weird and you can peck away at your distraction tool just like everyone else… and soon enough forget about the advantage you could have had.
The choice is yours.
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Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com