The Worst Thing about Life
The Worst Thing about Life
Forty years ago, there were only a handful of channels. On TV, there were in between 4 and perhaps 20 channels. Same goes for sitcoms and movies. We could all sort of be on the same page with the things you watched. Maybe there was the sense that you could catch up on all the news and shows. But it's not so today. There are so many incredible books, so much news to hear, so many amazing Instagram feeds to see, that you have no hope of seeing them all.
Your success is your ability to focus. Maybe that's the most insidious part of social media. It stretches you. It stretches your attention span and your empathy to places it perhaps should not go. It's a barrage of funny, maddening, dramatic, comedic, political, and religious all within seconds of each other.
Patrick Bet David talks about obsession. We don't like that word, but history books are written about those who were obsessed. And it appears like obsession is profitable. Ignore everything else and become obsessed with something and you bring value to the world and make a good living while doing so.
(I'm terrible at this. I want to do everything and I'm curious about almost all things. And then I get tired of the things I'm good at and the avenues I should keep pursuing. This whole post is about my problem. Thanks for listening. Send me a bill.)
The Attention Economy
Some scholars have called the world system an "attention economy," which "treats human attention as a scarce commodity." Matthew Crawford wrote, "Attention is a resource a person has only so much of it. "
I am constrained by time/energy/money/location.
For example:
-I pick up my phone and see something else, then ten minutes later, I finally get back to checking the weather, which is why I picked up my phone in the first place
-I can't adopt all the pets
-I can't foster all the children in the world
-I can't watch all the movies
-I can't read all the books
-I can't watch all the series on Hulu, Netflix, Paramount, Peacock, Hallmark
Compound Effect vs. Four Thousand Weeks
There are two schools of thought about Attention. One is the idea behind The Compound Effect, which is essentially how you do one thing is how you do everything. You should clean up your room perfectly because how you do one thing is how you do everything.
Conversely, there is the idea posed in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. In it, Oliver Burkeman claims that you will be defined by what you cultivate and by what you ignore.
The reason people become experts and the reason we listen to experts is because they ignored almost everything in their lives to become experts. Surgeons, pastors, authors. They spent years simultaneously attending to one thing and ignoring all the other things.
The worst part of life is choosing. But maybe it's the best part. To ignore everything else and find the three things you'll choose. Imagine the liberation there is in ignoring the things you shouldn't be doing.
What if Stephen King got interested in interpretive dance and stopped writing? Imagine the gifts we would lose.
If Taylor Swift got into carpentry and woodworking. What?!!
If Morgan Freeman became fascinated with building things out of Legos instead of acting and doing voice-over work? Like Vitruvius, but in real life.
How are you actively choosing just a few people and just a few things? How are you actively ignoring most of the things of the world? This is the time to get obsessed. The world needs your gifts.