2 Excellent Habits to Defeat Digital Distraction

It’s a messy, busy and hyper-distracted world we live in. Your productivity is dramatically defined by the environment you set up so set up one that doesn’t have the attraction to distraction. Work in quietude, on a big problem that will revolutionize the lives of those you serve. And live with greater silence, serenity and presence.

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Transcript

I'm gonna get right into the first habit that will help you beat digital distraction. And that's no phone conversations. Well as I travel across the planet, I go into restaurants, I see entire families sitting around a table. No one is talking. Everyone is on their phones or on their tablets. I was in a European country recently and I saw a husband and wife sitting at a table with probably a five-year-old child. The five-year-old child had these noise-canceling huge massive earphones that were bigger than his own head and I'm joking but huge earphones to block out the noise and a tablet had been set up in front of him and he was playing with video games and he didn't say a word to his parents and over the two-hour meal while
I was at the restaurant with my loved ones having deep conversations of laughter and sharing and you know. I'm not judging, I'm just reporting the parents didn't say a word to their child. I see so many times in business meetings, someone in the middle of a meeting, they will pull out their phone and start checking their social media feed or start checking emails. And what I suggest, this is just my opinion, but that's disrespectful. The greatest gift you can give your child or your spouse or your client. or your coworker is the gift of the fullness of your attention. When you focus your presence and your energy and your attention on another human being, you make that person bigger. You validate that person. One of the greatest gifts you can give another human being is the gift of pristine listening. And if you're
checking your phone, well then again, you're taking your attention and you're leaving attention residue. on your phone, which means you have less attention for the conversation. And if you have less attention for the conversation, then you're not really listening to that person. And if you're not really listening to that person, the deep place within them knows it and they're going to trust you less. And you're going to miss data that would allow you to serve your client or build the teammate or dominate your domain. So no phone conversations professionally and personally. Just turn off your phone. Turn off your device before the meeting and go all old school and have a real conversation. The best leaders are curious. You
don't get that if you're worried about your incoming digital messages. The second excellent habit that will allow you to beat digital distraction, construct your own Menlo Park. So I'm a big fan of Thomas Edison. He's one of the greatest, if not arguably the greatest inventor in the history of humanity. Over a thousand patents to his name came up with amazing, amazing things. How did he do it? Isolation. You can be out in the world, you can be a history maker and a productive legend, you don't get to do both. One thing all great geniuses do is they spend a lot of time in solitude. Solitude has a bad reputation in our society right now. We think if we're not with the cool crowd, if we're not checking our devices, if we're not posting selfies or other images, we are losing out. We have all these fears and here's what really happens. As you start to play with your phone, as you start to get hooked on likes, as you start to spend most of your best hours of your greatest days posting, checking, playing with apps, getting hooked, you actually become addicted. We all know about technological addiction. And it's literally a dopamine. Dopamine is the inspirational neurotransmitter. And every single time  you check for a like, there's a shot of dopamine. And it becomes this addiction. Every single time you check for a life, the hook grows stronger. Every single time you pick up your phone, you build the neural pathway to check it even more often. Every single time you see that if someone's liking you and is your following growing, you tap into that reward system that every human brain has. Because when we were tribal, thousands of years ago on the savanna, we wanted to be liked by the people in our tribe. We wanted to follow the herd. And if we weren't being followed by the herd, we would stray from the herd and get eaten by saber-toothed tigers, we would starve, or we would be captured by warring tribes. And now here it is in
modern society. but we still have that neurobiological instinct, it's a part of who we are, to check for likes so we fit into the crowd. Well, the true nature of a leader is you're not a follower. And so you absolutely have to do the inner work required to break that hook of being liked. I mean, that's what leadership is all about. That's what being a great artist is all about. That's what dominating your domain is all about. That's what changing the world is all about. It's about saying, here's who I am, I have my own mission, my own vision, and I'm going to break free from the crowd. So, an addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production. Your phone is costing you your fortune. If you look at the great geniuses of the world, the Shakespeare's and the Basquiat's and the Beethoven's, the great chefs and the great titans of industry and the great humanitarians, all great thinkers have one thing in common. They spent long. periods of time away from diversions, distractions, trivial interruptions.