Faced with hundreds of links and too many choices, humans naturally gravitate to the easiest-to-process content, not the best. 1
One of the secrets of winners is that in order to win, they go on an information diet…
It cannot be called a fast. It’s a diet, where only what’s on the premeditated menu is consumed, nothing unplanned: no nibbling, no munching, no snacking, just the nutrient rich diet items you planned… what will give you what you need to develop something to the level of winning.
I am on an information diet about 90% effectively.
I am still looking at funny pictures about 20 minutes a day…
I don’t count the time I spend gathering pictures for the articles: they are actually the most productive times I have: showing consciousness the different takes on the same thing… so I don’t get stuck in a rut.
The rest of the time I keep my “nutrient rich” diet.
The 20 minutes provides me with a sense that I am not in prison, self made or not.
Your information consumption and your food consumption is probably similar.
If you cook from scratch is one thing.
If you order takeout or go to a restaurant to eat… that is another thing…
And of course you can be anything in between.
If you eat socially, if eating is a social activity… that is one thing.
If you eat because you are hungry: that is yet another thing.
If you eat near continuously: you are probably mineral deficient… Minerals are the food for the body… and if you browse the internet the same way: you have nothing to sustain your brain either… you are rotting away.
Spend your time on social media? Ditto… unless that is your business…
Addicted to low quality information, titillation, and pictures? It’s a clear indication that you are emptying even the stores of brain cells you already had… just like being addicted to junk food. 2
If you are converging to the lowest common denominator in information, all of your life will soon follow suit.
Beware… put yourself on an information diet…
Gossiping, talking to co-workers, watching TV, talking to neighbors is probably part of your low-value information diet…
So cut it out…
Unless you are OK with living in the gutter.
If you are on this site: I doubt that you are OK with that.
A better life means growth is necessary.
You need to have useful and coherent knowledge, and build skills.
You seem to have three options for you to be able to grow:
- Make a conscious decision about your ratio of deep to shallow information consumed. It doesn’t have to be 100% deep learning, but recognize that without deliberate decisions, it will trend to 0%.
- Learn the skill of self-education. The second barrier to learning is that most people don’t know how to teach themselves hard things effectively, so even if they could remove distractions, they wouldn’t learn programming, calculus or foreign languages.
- Once you are clear what you want to learn, find an online course, and just do it… Most can be done over and over. That is what I would do…
The 67 steps is an example of that…
- I have been observing what gets clicked, liked, shared on Facebook is the mundane, the ordinary, the shallow… the pretentious. The opposite of beautiful is cute… the opposite of wisdom is wittiness… the opposite of value is cheap
- There is a fallacy that people, given choices, will converge towards healthy eating… but it is based on a test that was skewed, and this theory is proven wrong about seven billion times a day… worldwide.
