The Sunday Summary: Fuzzy baskets, distractions, and wandering minds
Here’s a bit about what I wrote, read and learned over the past week. I hope you find it helpful!
Blog posts from the past week
Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is “I don’t have time.” “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
The Reverse Flynn Effect may only get worse
“Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.”
What’s distracting you – notifications or boredom?
Notifications are the obvious one. By default, our phones are constantly buzzing for attention, usually for very unimportant things. However, boredom is also a big reason — I’ve seen a lot people that get bored (waiting in line, for example), and pick up their phone simply to see if it can distract them. They’ll pick up their phone, flip around a few screens, and sometimes just put it away. It’s their default “I need something to do”.
Notes from “Selling the Invisible” by Harry Beckwith
There is a unique challenge when it comes trying to market services – things you can’t see, touch, or try before buying. Unlike products, services are essentially promises that someone will do something for you. Traditional product marketing often fails for services because prospects can’t evaluate what they’re buying until after they’ve bought it.
“You know, when you are reading a book, it’s not just that it’s sustained focus because you want to be able to follow the argument that a writer is making, but there’s something kind of beautiful about the fact that you can pause and let your mind wander for a bit, to kind of stew in those ideas, and then come back to the exact moment where you stopped reading and the text can almost kind of shift and change for you as you encounter it in light of these new thoughts. When you are watching something, and especially when you are always being offered an option to scroll away and go to something new, if you get just a little bit bored, it means you never have time to do that kind of mind wandering.”
They would trade places with you in a heartbeat
People from the past would all just look at this moment and say, wow, so are you telling me that you have the ability to solve meaningful problems, to come up with adventures, to travel the world, to pick the brains of anyone on the planet that you want to pick the brains of? You can just listen to a podcast. You can just watch a video. You can talk to an AI. Like, are you telling me that you’re alive at this particular moment? Please make the most of that. Like, do something with that.
Books that I’m reading
I read for a total of 2:06 last week with the following:
Continued reading “Unoffendable“
Continued reading “Nearbound“
Continued reading “Think Remarkable“
Tech Rec
Stealing the idea from my friends at the Tech Talk Y’all podcast, I’ll drop in some tech recommendation every week as well.
Imprint. This is one of those apps that’s a great alternative to doom scrolling. When you’re bored, you open it up and learn something new instead of just wasting your time. They have tons of great topics to dig into, and it’s a very beautiful and well-crafted app.
I hope you found some value in this. If you ever have questions, ideas, or disagreements regarding anything I write, please don’t hesitate to reach out.