Quotes from the book "Stolen Focus" Part I
"Stolen Focus" is very interesting book written by Johann Hari, if I have it my way I will make this book mandatory for all students before they complete high school.
Here are few quotes from that book that I really loved.
On an average an adult working in an office stays on one task for 3 minutes.
Obesity is not a medical epidemic - it's a social epidemic. We have more bad food choices available so people are getting fat.
When attention breaks down, problem solving breaks down.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Average American spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on phone. We touch our phones 2,617 times every 24 hours.
We cannot put off living until we are ready, life is fired at us point-blank. - Jose Ortega y Gasset
Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego, it loves you, it hates you, it's talking about you right now. The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with soft, wet, welcoming indifference.
Our job is to think something that is different from everyone else, but we are in an environment where we all are getting same information as everyone else, and thinking the same things as everyone else.
It's always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species.
In 2013 a topic would remain in the top 50 most-discussed subjects for 17.5 hours. By 2016 that had dropped to 11.9 hours. This suggested that together, we were focusing on any one thing for ever-shorter periods of time.
In every system, there is an accelerating trend. It is "faster to reach peak popularity" and then there is is "a faster drop again".
The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
We are, collectively, experiencing "a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources".
There's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950's, and in just twenty years, people , have started to walk 10% faster in cities.
We have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth. if you go too fast, you overload your abilities and they degrade. Slowness nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.
Switch cost effect: if you frequently switch between tasks, Your performance drops, you are slower, all as a result of the switching.
Technological distraction: emails, calls caused a drop in the workers IQ by an average 10 points. This is twice the ding to your IQ than you get while smoking weed.
Screw-up effect: your brain is error prone due to distractions. Instead of doing deep thinking, you will be spending more time to fix it.
Creativity drain: You will be less creative, if you are distracted more number of times. You are killing from new ideas popping.
Diminished memory effect: Your mental space for converting your experiences into memories is distracted by notifications. As a result you remember less and learn less.
Average CEO of the fortune 500 company gets just 28 uninterrupted minutes a day.
Around one in five car accidents is now due to a distracted driver.
You don't get what you don't fight for.
Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.
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