the levels of distraction have just reached insane levels the human brain is insane what it's capable
of but it has certain laws certain things that you need to abide by and one is when you have
undivided attention to something when you focus when you concentrate you are maximizing the powers
of the human brain so you take albert einstein who certainly was you know we agree now he's on a
genius level but when he was 16 17 nobody thought he was a genius he was actually a poor student
he focused on this one theory his theory of special relativity for 10 years that's
all he thought about thought experiments people would see him walking crossing bridges in zurich
and he was like so absorbed he wouldn't even know where he was he was just focusing in every
single day on this one problem and look what it led to and you look at anybody who's a genius
who's successful at something they have the ability to focus that was steve jobs mantra
sometimes he would close the door when he had a particular problem nobody could interrupt him
and for several days he would just sit there and think and focus and take notes and be alone and
people have lost that ability you need to be able to figure out a problem to solve it to be creative
you have to be alone you have to close the door you have to not look at your instagram account
you know you have to sit there and just computer or pen and paper however your process is and deal
with it and i compare it to like a drill that's going into a piece of wood and the more you drill
down the closer you get to reality but if every few seconds the phone's going off you pull back
that drill just backs it's not going anywhere because you're never digging deep enough into
the problem so what do you do you have to first understand that you're not going to be successful
in life you're not going to get what you want if you become a slave of these technologies a slave
of these machines you have to have a degree of control now it's not easy and i know the
temptations i'm not asking you to repress or never look at your accounts or never deal with
social media that's not possible and it's not even necessarily good but are you in control you
know these people who run facebook and instagram so they're incredibly clever they know marketing
like einstein new relativity right and they know all those gadgets and the tricks for getting your
attention making you addicted to checking out your feeds every day and to getting that like
and getting people to to respond and so you're a slave you're addicted you have to understand that
you know it's like a horse that you're on top of if you don't know how to hold the reins
that horse will just go anywhere you have to be the rider you have to be in a degree of control
now the question is how does one take back control and make these machines into your slaves instead
of the other way around robert doesn't really give a specific answers in the interview but i
have a couple of strategies that i'd like to share with you there's basically three things that you
can do strategy number one is to fight fire with fire basically by using apps to manipulate apps
i've been using an extension for many many years now called news feed eradicator and it completely
eliminates the news feed from my facebook page this allows me to have the utility of facebook
which is messaging others and being in groups without having to deal with the most addictive
part of the platform which is the news feed itself there are apps like this for instagram twitter and
even youtube most of which leave you with just the search bar which forces you to manually
type in what you're looking for instead of being suggested things that the algorithm knows you like
strategy number two is to manipulate your physical environment i found that working at home is near
impossible because that's where i tend to relax when i'm at home there are hundreds of little
triggers in the environment like the color of the wall the smell of the room and even the lighting
all of which trigger my habits for surfing the web playing games and watching netflix because that's
what i usually do at home so when i'm working at home i have to constantly deal with these urges so
what i've done instead is manipulate my physical environment by going outside and working in random
cafes that way there are no pre-existing triggers in the area distracting me while i'm trying to
work i take this even further by never getting the wi-fi from my laptop so there's literally
nothing i can do on it other than work and finally strategy number three you can start taking back
control from the mechanical algorithm overlords by training yourself like a dog while you work now
this isn't the best strategy because like robert greene said some of the best work is done when
you're able to focus for extremely long periods of time but let's be real most of us are struggling
with focusing for just 15 minutes let alone 5 hours at a time so i think it's a relatively
good idea to start by training yourself to be able to work in 10 20 and eventually 30 minute focused
intervals and a great way to do this is to work for a bit and then purposely reward yourself for
a short period of time sort of like how you would give a dog a treat after he does a trick i do this
all the time i'll write or edit a script for 20 minutes and then i'll take a short little break
and play a round of a card game that i like on my phone and then i'll go back to work this way
you essentially train yourself to expect a reward for your hard work which actually makes you want
to work more it's important to note that the key here is to be disciplined when it comes to the
reward if your plan is to watch a short youtube video after 30 minutes of work you have to stick
to the plan you have to be disciplined and stop after that one video so that you can get back
to work and repeat the process again the advice from strategy number one can help with this you'll
be less likely to be sucked into a youtube binge if your recommendations are all turned
off if you like to watch the entire robert green interview where he discusses more about addiction
relationships and his life just click on the link in the description box below this episode was
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