We wait for the world to tell us what to do. We wait for twitter to inspire us, to prompt
us to react. We check our email for the
next thing to add to our to-do list. We
are stimulated by voice mail and text messages; they feed us, they satisfy our
need to be important.
An earlier generation thought that television was going to
dumb us down. The half-hour sitcom interrupted
by commercial breaks, it was said, would shorten our attention span. Attention spans have been shortened for
Americans.
What can we suppose about the current communication technologies
and their impact on current and future generations? Interesting to think about, and scary.
More importantly, what impact are these technologies having
on you and your effectiveness? Do they
control you or are you effectively using them?
The screens we look at are no longer just in our living
rooms or on our desk in the office. No,
we carry these screens around with us and we look at them constantly. It has been suggested that the average American
looks at their smart phone 150 times a day.
While I don’t know if that number is accurate, I do know that we look at
those screens a lot. So much so that
technology companies are predicting the next growth area is in wearable technology.
I love technology. I
marvel at the availability of information.
What is occurring in this lifetime is truly revolutionary. As with any revolution we know that things
will never be the same, and, during the revolution, we don’t know the eventual
outcome.
I recently upgraded to a new smart phone. I decided not to install facebook on the new
cell phone, whereas I had it on the old.
At first I just didn’t take the time to download it, then I thought that
maybe without the app on the phone that it would improve the phone’s performance,
particularly speed. After a while I’ve
come to appreciate that I feel less distracted and more in control of my time
and my thoughts. That’s right, more in
control of my thoughts. With
facebook not on my phone I’ve actually improved my performance.
We are our thoughts.
What we think about, we get. What
we think about, we become. If we are
constantly paying attention to other people’s clever posts, then we think about
what kind of clever post we can submit that will be sufficiently similar and
somewhat unique. The size of our
thoughts shrinks to that of the next post, in a similar way to how our
attention span has shrunk over the years.
For those of us who desire to do big things, important
things, we cannot afford to think small thoughts.
Big, important things are things you’ve never done
before. They are dreams and stretch
goals. They are the great ideas that you
have, that you haven’t pursued. They are
the stuff that you procrastinate about, life goals.
To pursue those things you need to think about them. You need to dream and ponder and
contemplate. You may need to do some
research and seek advice. You need to
fill your mind and your spirit with information that will lead you to answers
related to your goals. The information
inputs must align with and be congruent with the direction you intend to go.
Everything else is distraction.
1 comment:
So True!
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