Are we too busy to pay attention to life?

An inbetweenisode of sorts where Jeff Annello and I discuss whether we're too busy to pay attention to life - on whether we're too busy to live. If you want more of these let me know #tkp on twitter. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to a special edition of The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. I'm the curator behind Farnham Street, which is an online intellectual hub of interestingness covering topics like human misjudgment, decision-making, strategy, and philosophy. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do. It's more conversation than prescription, and this is a special episode. Call it an in-between episode. On this episode, Jaffanello and I, who started writing for Farnham Street last November, have a fascinating conversation around a piece of content on Farnham Street recently, discussing whether we're too busy to pay attention to life, whether we're too busy to live. To find the piece of content, just Google "Farnham Street and Too Busy to Live."

• 0:51Shane Parrish?

  Because this is a bit of an experiment, I want to know your feedback. Do you want to see more of these? Tweet out with hashtag TKP and let me know what you think. Peace. Before I get started, here's a quick word from our sponsor. This podcast is supported by Slack, a messaging app bringing all your team's communications into one place. Slack integrates with other tools and services you already use, like Google Drive, Dropbox, and more. Visit slack.com/farnham to create your team and get $100 in credits you can use if you decide to switch to a paid plan. One of the most recent popular posts on Farnham Street was talking about Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman and the concept of whether we're too busy to pay attention to life. What did you think?

• 1:36Speaker 01

  I liked it a lot. I thought that it's a very interesting concept because modern life is very different than probably the world that we evolved in. And I have found myself thinking about it a lot because... What we have now that you probably never had in the past, in the distant enough past, is that you could keep your brain engaged consistently throughout the whole day with no breaks, if you wanted to. And most people, and a lot of people do. You know, you can start your day, and literally, I think this is how a lot of people construct their days, that they wake up, the phone, the phone wakes them up, uh, you know, you have an alarm on your phone. First thing you do is check your email. First thing you do is check your email. Your text messages.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  You check your text messages. I, I don't really use social media very much. I mean, we have a, you know, we have our, our Twitter accounts and, and, um, and I, and I do some stuff with that, but though, I'm pretty infrequent on it, and I only follow like 20 people on Twitter, and who are pretty well curated, to people I'm interested to hear from. But I don't use Facebook and I don't use Instagram and stuff, but I know people who, you know, the first thing that they do when they wake up is they check their email, they check their text messages, they check their Instagram account, they check their Facebook. Like, they literally go from A to Z on all the social media, just to get caught up on, I don't know what happened overnight. And then, then they get their day started. Where does that need come from, do you think, like this need to be up to date on everything that happened?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I think that the success of these companies is because we have a biological need to stay in touch. Um, where it, it wouldn't be unoriginal for me to say that we're a social species. So those things are deeply part of us, and I think that most of these services have evolved in a very natural selection type of way, so that the most, the only ones that are left and that are thriving are the most addictive ones that play on some of our deepest desires and provide our brain with the most, um, you know, and I don't know how much I trust brain studies. I mean, I think that science has a long way to go, but I think it would be,

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I think it's probably true that when we're checking, when you check your Facebook account regularly, that you're getting a hit of, uh, whatever drug, yeah, that is comparable to a, to a, to dopamine, you know. Again, I'm, I don't wanna, I think some of that stuff gets a little sciency where it's not real. But but I believe it enough to say that I understand that it's like a drug, like if like an actual drug um for the brain.

• 4:09Shane Parrish?

  We can't even stand in line anymore, like even at the coffee shop.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Well, I'll give you I'll give you an example. So um we're recording this in in Austin, Texas, and we both flew in here. And one thing that I make a point of noticing now is when the plane touches down, look, just you just look around immediately, literally before before you even taxi up to the gate, people will have their phones out. And I was sitting next to this girl on the way in here. And, you know, I think within a minute or two, she had checked her text messages. And I was, you know, I wasn't like reading them, but I kind of I could notice what she was doing, basically, because she was sitting right next to me, her text messages, her email, her Instagram account, her Facebook account,

• 4:54Speaker 01

  and another social media thing that I mean, it was like Snapchat, and something that I didn't recognize, because I've kind of there's so many things now, it's hard to keep keep up with all them. But I just the point was that she had checked like six different services in a period of like a minute or two. And then she just like turned her phone off and put it in her pocket. Like, it was almost it remind and what I thought of immediately was, it reminded me of someone who has been stuck in a restaurant all night. And as soon as they get outside, they pull out a cigarette and smoke, because they've just been like cooped up the whole time.

• 5:24Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  And then they release that need immediately, you know. And I think that now I see people do that with their phones or whatever. It's just like they have this pent up connect and can need to connect. And when they, you know, when they're able to, they they take it, they take a quick hit. And and some in some sense, it's not as much anymore, because you can get Wi Fi in a lot of planes. But if you don't, you know, if they're charging for it, you don't pay for it, or whatever, you've been disconnected for a couple, couple of hours.

• 5:53Shane Parrish?

  And so we can't even do that, right? Like, a couple hours is just so much now. It's like we're unable to be bored or unable to be bored.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Well, I would agree with that totally. I mean, I think that that's that's kind of what I was saying before was that it's just you can now, I don't think that in the even in the recent past, you could go through a whole day being with your being engaged the way that you can now. Unless you are an were an extremely busy person, the average person in the world, you know, and we forget too, like, the majority of people used to work on farms, and you'd be you would be sort of your your brain is just doing very different things now than it would have.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  When we were, the world was agricultural and even before that, when the world was, you know, more of a hunter gatherer.

• 6:37Shane Parrish?

  I think that affects our, our learning too and our ability to concentrate for long periods of time. And all of this stuff is just a byproduct of that. Like I noticed even in line at the supermarket, if people don't pull out their phones and distract themselves, their immediate response to having more than two people in front of them is like almost disgust.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't, it, it's, you know, there've been a lot of articles written now by people who,

• 7:04Speaker 01

  you know, who basically say, I know I'm addicted. You know, it reminds me of Alcoholics Anonymous or something where the, the journalist starts by saying, I know I have a problem. Um, this connectivity problem and I'm gonna take 30 days to be, you know, clean and sober, basically. And it always reminds me of someone who like, is like, well, I know I have a smoking problem, but like, I'm gonna like, try to stop smoking for a month. And then, and then they write, you know, this expose about their time without social media or whatever. And, uh, and there's two things that seem to happen with all these people. One is they find when they detach that they get a lot of those powers back that they missed. So they're like, well, I can focus more and I don't feel so jittery all day and so on.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  But the second thing, which is almost isn't, which is maybe even more telling, is that in all cases, they go back to it. They go back to the life.

• 7:57Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. Why do you think that is?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Well, we, I, we miss it. I think that people are, are very unwilling now to dare to be different. So if you were truly disconnect from those things, what you have to understand is there's a, they're network tools. So when you turn your network off, their network has some homeostasis, right? So if you, and there's gonna be a homeostatic response. So if you, let's just say that you're someone who is a very active texter, a very active Facebooker, Instagrammer, Snapchat, or whatever, and you just decide, I can't do this anymore. I'm destroying my ability to focus and be bored and so on. Well, in the first day after you turn those things off, immediately, people are like, well, I

• 8:44Speaker 01

  sent you this thing and you didn't respond and like, why are you, are you mad at me? And you know, and what it is, is just, it's just a homeostatic response. It's like you've disrupted the system and the system notices. So I think that it's one thing for a journalist to be able to say, I'm writing a story about it. So that you can tell the network, like, you know, I'm going to be turning it off for a while. But

• 9:08Shane Parrish?

  On a day-to-day basis, you can't get away with that. And I think part of that, part of that has to do with our ability or fear of culturally, it's almost unacceptable to say, I don't know. And I don't know can be an answer to a question about what's going on in the world, or it can be a question about deep learning or your job or how to apply something. But we just have this inability to appear misinformed. And so I think that manifests itself in these soundbite type opinions where we're reading the Twitter feed and then we talk about it at the water cooler. And sure, we're informed because we read the 144 characters and we know exactly what's going on, right? Like, we're not doing the deep thinking that we used to do. And these subjects are so transitive. I mean,

• 9:52Shane Parrish?

  they pass so quickly, right? So even though you're, you're getting the headline, you're not getting the information or facts necessarily, you make a judgment and then you're on to the next thing. And then you always have an answer to whatever comes up in whatever situation, no matter how shaky that foundation is.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I almost feel like people like feel that they don't have an excuse to not know anymore. Cause it's, cause because the information is so ubiquitous, for you to say, well, I don't know anything about that. People are like, do you live under a rock? You know, if, if someone says, what do you think about Trump's XYZ? You know, like, I don't really know much about, I mean, you probably heard about it, but you just say, I'm not an expert or not, I don't know. I just, you know, I don't, I don't have anything useful to offer on that topic. That people are like, yeah, but the, you know, you know what I'm talking about, right? Like, I, I, people can almost can't accept that. If you say, I don't know, you get a lot of weird looks because you're expected to know something about it because it's so, it's there. It's avail, it's so easily available.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of people have a trouble differentiating between knowing like the surface thing and actually knowing like in a deep sense. And one of my, my favorite story about the difference between those two things is from Charlie Munger. When he's talking about the physicist Max Planck going around giving this complicated lecture in the, in the early 20th century. And, and he had given this lecture so many times that he eventually, you know, who knows if this story is apocryphal or not, but he, he eventually said to his chauffeur, you know, like, I want you to give the speech. And so the chauffeur gives a speech on this complicated, detailed topic.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And someone in the audience asks him, you know, hey, uh, you know, some, some complicated tech, tactical question, follow up question on a technical lecture. And he said, he goes, I'm surprised such a smart person like you would ask a question like that. And it's so easy in fact, that I'm going to pass it over to my chauffeur. So Munger tells that story as a way to say, are you Max Planck or are you the chauffeur? And ever since I heard that story, I've thought about it very regularly because if you are an introspective person, you will realize, and I certainly did, that a lot of the things that you think you know, you only know at the chauffeur level, you don't know at the Max Planck level.

• 12:15Shane Parrish?

  Right. We have a post on that called the two types of knowledge. And it actually talks about plank knowledge and chauffeur knowledge and goes into it. It was from, uh, Rolf Dobler's book about the art of thinking clearly, which, uh, you know, there's some.

• 12:32Shane Parrish?

  Interesting thoughts in there and there's some interesting, you know, connotations about where you got the sources and all of that stuff. But leaving all that aside, I think it's an interesting concept to distinguish between when you know something and when you don't. And when you're fooling yourself and Feynman said, I mean, you know, uh.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  You're the easiest person to fool.

• 12:51Shane Parrish?

  Key is not fooling yourself and you're the easiest person to fool. And then mapping that kind of to our concept of circle of concept or circle of competence. And how we go about making decisions and operating within those bounds and then having strategies and ways to overcome. I mean, there's no way that you can live a life in today's day and age and only make decisions in your circle of competence. Only make decisions where you have plank knowledge. You have to go outside of that, but the strategies you employ when you go outside of that are incredibly important. And those are kind of the tools that we, we want people to build up.

• 13:31Shane Parrish?

  But you, I wanted to come back to something you said, you, before you joined Farnham Street, you were working in an organization. An office culture. How often did anybody in there actually say the three words?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, not that. I mean, you know, and I think it has a lot to do with the person and their ego in a sense that like there are certain topics that everybody feels comfortable saying, not everybody, but each individual person feels comfortable saying, I don't know. Like if, if I were to ask you about, you know, gymnastics, you would have no problem saying, I don't know, because they're, none of your ego is wrapped up in gymnastics. But when I was working in finance, you know, if you ask somebody a financial question, their ego is wrapped up in that because it's, that's their profession. So even though they may, they may be at a very narrow, operating in a very narrow area of finance. Let's see, let's say you're an analyst focusing on, you know, Canadian insurance companies or something, which is a niche.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And I ask you about, I know Coca-Cola company. That may be outside that circle. Well, it's a financial question and you feel like, you know, you work in the finance industry and you are a business person and you understand investments and so on. And so you have, that's in your, that part of your ego is wrapped up in understanding things like that. So you feel like you have to answer that. And so you give me an answer about that, even if you know nothing about it. You go, oh, well, Coke is, you know, and it's not the same as if I asked you about gymnastics because no one expects you to know anything. You don't, you don't expect that of yourself. So a lot of it, in my opinion, people are perfectly willing to say, I don't know. If it's something that they don't, they

• 15:12Speaker 01

  have no, you know, no skin in the game on at all. But if, but if they do, then you get all these weird nonsensical answers where people, it's kind of related to their field of understanding, but.

• 15:25Shane Parrish?

  So do you think we've rocked up our self-worth then in keeping up to date with our friends on Facebook and World News up to the minute, up to almost the second, right? I mean, there's this race to, is that because we, we have some sort of self-worth in terms of being up to date? Or is it?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I would, I guess, I don't wanna, I don't wanna make, stretch the analogy. I think the two things are different. The social media thing, I don't, I don't think is an ego thing so much as we're wired to wanna know things about other people in our network where we've been gossiping since we developed language and it's no surprise that the most valuable social media tools are basically tools in which we gossip about one another. And the problem that I have seen beyond, beyond the concept of being busy all the time and connected all the time is that the tools we have now are also the biggest envy generators that have ever been invented. So something like Facebook, you know, I think is destructive

• 16:31Speaker 01

  to happiness in a big way because people are unable to see those things and not feel tremendously envious. And envy has been part of the human DNA for as long as we've been human. I mean, it's just, that's just part of who we are. I'm sure there, there is a evolutionary reason why that's true. I wouldn't pretend to be able to give you a good answer on that, but.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  You know, it was in the, you know, the old religious texts for a reason and so on. So, and I think as much as there's value in, in the connectivity it gives us, that's a huge downside. And so, you know, when you combine the effect of being constantly connected and unable to be bored and, and struggling with focus with the envy generation, I think, I don't know, I just question whether the tools have been weighed, we've, we've weighed the pros and cons of the tools.

• 17:25Shane Parrish?

  What do you think the solution is? I mean, we both heavily curate and reduce the influence others have on our lives, but.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, it's hard for me to say in this because I don't have any problem. I didn't have any problem disconnecting from all of that. So I had a Facebook account, just I'm using, I'm picking on Facebook and I feel, you know, I mean, if anybody from Facebook ever listens to this, I, it's, I'm just using it as an example because you're the most popular. So you won the game. But, um, you know, I got rid of, I, I had my Facebook account when I was in high school and in college and then, and then, you know, when I probably like right after I left college, I got rid of it. And at the time, there was that homeostatic response. And people are like, I don't know how to invite you to things. Like I, we use Facebook to organize things and I, you know, I'm like, you don't,

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I remember missing out early on on a few important events that people assumed I knew through Facebook, like people getting engaged or having kids and announcing they were pregnant or whatever. That the way that they would tell people is to put on Facebook. So there were a couple of those things early on that I missed out on because people didn't realize or forgot that I wouldn't find out through Facebook. But then what I noticed in a pretty short term, pretty short period of time is that, you know, when there was an event, a person would let me know directly. I think it was like a little bit of resentment. They'd be like, you're not on Facebook, so I have to tell you this directly. But eventually everybody got used to it, you know, and, and I've, and I haven't looked back and it's, you know, whatever, seven years later and I have.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  I haven't looked back at it. So, um, and then as for the other networking tools, social media tools, I just didn't. I was early enough that I just didn't pick them up, you know?

• 19:04Shane Parrish?

  But you use Twitter to

• 19:06Speaker 01

  I use Twitter in a very targeted way.

• 19:08Shane Parrish?

  But so these tools can be valuable then?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  It's not that they don't have value. It's just the person who put this well was Cal Newport wrote in his new book. About deep work. He has something in there about that resonated with me that he put into words better than I had been able to myself before, which is that. It's not that the tools don't have value. It's just that we're not weighing the pros and the cons as we would with any other tool.

• 19:30Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And he's, I think Cal's exactly a hundred percent right on this notion that. It would be a mistake to say the tools have no value. It would also be a mistake to say that the tools have are perfect. And that on balance, some of the tools may be worth less than zero, that they may be an, an, on average a detractor. So I think it was impossible. I found for me personally, it's impossible to use something like Facebook on a, in a balanced way. Like I just wasn't, it was detracting so much.

• 19:59Shane Parrish?

  You're all in or all out.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I couldn't just use it in like a judicious way. So I had to get rid of it. And I didn't pick up Instagram or Snapchat, any of those. I don't, I can't say, but I suspect that I probably wouldn't get a whole lot out of those either. Twitter is, I can use Twitter in a very targeted way, which is I can follow exactly who I want to follow. And, you know, click the links I want to click and, and save them to, to read them later or whatever. And then. If I have any things I want to tweet out on behalf of, of us, um, for Farnham Street and stuff through, you know, I'll do that, but. Then I just turn it off. Like I don't, I resist the tent. I don't have, for good, like I don't have Twitter, the app installed on my phone. So I don't go through it on my phone. I don't have it on my iPad. The only time I really use Twitter is on my.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Actual on my computer and, and so I'm limiting myself to when I'm able to access the tool. I'm using, I'm trying to control my own impulses.

• 20:50Shane Parrish?

  And so we take this, uh, to a different degree too, because we, we try to have an incredibly high signal to noise ratio. On the stuff we do disseminate on all of these channels, including Facebook and Twitter. Uh, a lot of that I think comes from our natural respect for readers. And we want people to have Farnham Street as part of their lives and not encroach too much on. The nonsense aspect of it, but I think these tools for me personally, I use them differently than you do. I think that they're useful, uh, for me to receive information, for me to curate. Um, I don't read the newspapers anymore. It's a good way that information gets filtered. And I don't, uh, I don't follow a lot of people on Twitter. I think I have like sixty.

• 21:32Shane Parrish?

  And not a lot of them are repeating the news, but when anything big happens, it always finds its way to me. No matter how much I try to avoid the news or I don't follow any of the news channels on Twitter. Um, and then the other thing is just using it and knowing why you're using it and cutting it off. Right? So I follow the number of people on Twitter that I can go through in about ten minutes, the day's feed. Um, that's kind of the way that I do it and it gives me ideas for posts and cross connections. But what I, I find the biggest problem for me personally is the, the multitasking aspect of it. I'll be learning something and then my inclination when I'm, I'm learning or reading is like, oh, that's really cool.

• 22:11Shane Parrish?

  I should tweet that out or I should, and that immediately takes me from the moment where I'm focusing and concentrating. And then it puts me in another space and then that's, as we know, the internet is this big rabbit hole. So it's so easy.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So, uh, on that topic, something that I did recently that I recommend that everyone go through this exercise to see. So the next time that you're working on something or reading something, have a pad next to you. But don't, don't give yourself the ability to connect to the internet. And as you're reading that thing or working on that thing, doesn't matter whether you're writing something, doing a presentation, doing a piece of work, reading a book, reading a ma- it doesn't really matter. Anytime where you, you need to be engaged, when you think of something that you're, you would do on the internet. For example, you're doing a research project and you're like, oh, I, I want to look up, um, this guy on, on Wikipedia or something.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Um, or like you said, I want to tweet that out or I, I want to send an email to somebody. Instead of doing the thing, write it down on the pad. And do that for a couple of hours or whatever, how long it takes you. And then, and then when you're done, look at the pad. I guarantee you, you will be, you will look at the pad and be like, holy shit. I would have been distracted 20 times.

• 23:29Shane Parrish?

  At least, yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  At least. I found that. I would literally, I would literally fill like a piece of a legal, a yellow legal pad, like from top to bottom with stuff. It would be like, look up X, look up Y, send chain email on this, like all these things, one after another. And if I had indulged on each one of those things, I can't imagine that I would have ever gotten the thing done. It would have taken me twi- at least twice as long to actually finish. Even if I'm just working on a post for Farnham Street or whatever. You know, like, so something that I do now is I'll write, I'll write out the whole post without any links, without any, um, anything I would need to look up or need to link to or whatever. I do it all at once at the end.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  And I download all of my thoughts first because what I found is that if I do all of that stuff while I'm writing it, it just delays me so long because the internet is just this machine, this hyperlinking machine. The whole, the internet is built on the idea of hyperlinking. That's the core of the idea is that things, everything links to each other. And then Google built their search algorithm originally on this, things that are being linked to, you know, if it's something that has a lot of inbound links, it's going to end up at the top of the search ranking. And they've refined it since then, but that, they had this major insight about what a popular website was, is something that had been, you know, basically it was linked to the most frequently. And so, um, which is a great insight and made them a lot of money.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  And obviously I'm ridiculously oversimplifying Google, but, um, the problem with that is that when you log on, it, it, you can never, it's like, you know, we, we like, we have posts about on Farnham Street. Garrett Harden said, you can never merely do one thing. That's his first law of ecology. And I think that's like the first law of the internet at this point, which is that you can never merely do one thing. You, you can't use it like a saw or a hammer or some tool that in the past where you pick it up and you use the hammer and then you put it back down. You have to, you go on and you link and you link and you link and it just goes, it, it, it literally is infinite.

• 25:29Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  You can go forever if you want to. You could die linking. So that, that's a hard habit to break. And, and I, and the only way I've found that I can do it, for me, I'm not, some people are probably much better at this than I am, but I definitely have a monkey brain when it comes to this.

• 25:45Shane Parrish?

  Well, do you think we can actually multitask? Do you think anybody can multitask?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Well, I think they've pretty well proven that you can't multitask, that there's really no such thing as doing, really doing two, I mean, in, at some point, there's comes a problem of definition, what multitasking is. Cause the, what the, you know, the neuroscientists are saying, well, you're not actually doing two things at once. And I can kind of see a response where people are like, well, I'm not saying literally doing two things at once, like, in an existential sense, I just mean that I can watch TV and, and, you know, like, you know, hang out with my kids at the same time.

• 26:18Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  You could say that's multitasking. So I think it would, you don't want to necessarily take the idea too far that multitasking is not real, but I do believe the idea that if you are trying to watch TV and like, you know, write a paper at the same time, the paper probably is being sacrificed compared to what it would be otherwise, where you were totally focused. And it's also popular now to like, listen to music or something while you, um, work. And the most amusing one I had, I heard about that was from Ryan Holiday where he's like, he would listen to the same song like a hundred times in a row while he was writing, which I would never do to myself because I love music to me. He's like, I can't even listen to music anymore because I've ruined it.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And which is, I thought was amusing and it, it works for him. That's fine. I just, I would never want to do that to myself. But basically the way most people do it is not like that. There's more novelty, like they're just, you know, if your brain is hearing the music and in processing it and enjoying it, and you're also trying to focus on whatever the work is. And I think that one of those things is probably being. Sacrifice. So, um, you know, basically what I find for myself is I have, in order for me to do my best work by far, I have to do one thing at a time, pretty much. And I've learned to batch things into groups like so. In the next hour, I will do all the stuff I need to get done on the internet. You know, all the linking, all the emails I need to send and respond to and all of that or whatever, which is going to vary by person. Some people have a lot of email and a lot of.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Networking to do and depending on your job and, and I'm fortunate enough that I can, you know, put that into certain parts of the day and leave it there.

• 27:53Shane Parrish?

  So outside of multitasking, though, in the sense of it's hit on productivity and our ability to learn. Um, there's also kind of the thing that we come back to in the original post, which is that we're, we're missing out on life. Um, through all of this busyness. And, you know, a perfect example is when you, uh, when you walk into the lobby of a famous hotel instead of admiring it. Um, people immediately pull out their cameras and they start taking pictures. Instead of being in the moment, they want to take a picture of the moment and share the moment with somebody else like, look, I was here. Oh, it's, it's not quite like a one upmanship sort of thing, but it's like, oh, I was here. That's great.

• 28:38Shane Parrish?

  But you're not actually experiencing.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's an interesting question. I mean, some people would argue that, you know. I, I don't know. I, I just, I have this, I have this pet peeve about that where it's like. If you get so busy documenting everything that how could that, how could that? Be the same as experiencing it and, and obviously like the textbook example right now seems to piss everybody off. And yet everybody keeps doing it. Is when they go to concerts, they take out their phone and they're recording the concert and literally you, you go to a, you know. I, I went to see Pearl Jam last year and like, you know, a hundred, a hundred thousand people all with their phones out recording the thing. And it, it's just like, I don't understand how that's compatible with like optimally enjoying the thing.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  But I, I, what I guess I understand at this point is that some people just don't feel that. They feel that they haven't experienced the thing until they've documented it.

• 29:33Shane Parrish?

  But we're not recording it for ourselves, are we? Like, how often, how often do you think those people go back and then watch the video themselves?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  What I've noticed is people will do that and then they want to watch it with someone else. Like, hey, watch this video with me.

• 29:46Shane Parrish?

  Sharing an experience.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's just sharing the experience. So some of it, I think, is what you're saying where like, you're trying to impress other people. And basically, it's the flip side of what I was talking about before, where Facebook being this huge envy generator, people know that they're generating envy in others. And they feel that they have to keep up with that cycle. Like, if, if, if I'm on Facebook and I'm constantly seeing things posted by other people about the vacations they've been on or whatever, well, then I feel like in order for me to keep up with that and feel good about myself, I have to also do that.

• 30:17Shane Parrish?

  So it's another way of keeping up with the Joneses kind of thing? Like, when one car on the street is new, everybody gets a new car within a certain period of time?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  You have to document your trip to, you know, Barbados because you've seen your friends documenting their trips to Machu Picchu and to whatever. And I think it would be...

• 30:36Shane Parrish?

  It's almost like your trip didn't happen if you don't document it.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  If you don't document, that's my point. I think that there's like an, almost gotten to the point for a lot of people where they don't feel that the experience has happened unless it's been documented. And I'm, and that's not a totally brand new thing. I mean, that's been around at least as long as photography has been around and people, you know, showing each other pictures of their, their trips or writing each other letters about their... So I'm not, I, I'm not necessarily throwing out the whole idea. I'm just, it's just, you know, I love, I love the concept that, that bad ideas are good ideas born bad. And I think that we're at that point with a lot of this stuff where what it started as a cool idea, which is being able to document something and show it to other people later, has gone to this fever pitch element where you, you, you can no longer experience it without documenting it.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And, and that leads to these absurdities, like people taking pictures of all their food and ridiculous stuff that most people, I think, even if you're listening to us, I, I'm guaranteeing a lot of people will be nodding their heads like, yeah, that is ridiculous. And then they'll do it, you know, like they'll go ahead and do it.

• 31:36Shane Parrish?

  This is funny because wait for dinner tonight. Jeff and I are going to dinner and I'm going to take a picture of every course that comes.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  There you go. So if you're sincere about trying to detach from it, you'd have to come up with some sort of strategy. To mentally come to terms with the fact that you don't need to do all you. A lot of people do this stuff, but that you don't need to and that you don't need to get fulfillment from other people. Uh, you can enjoy things without other people sort of.

• 32:01Shane Parrish?

  But how do you go cold turkey? Like, how do you go from somebody who's doing this and? Do you scale back? Do you stop? Do you?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Well, that's like asking how do I quit smoking? I mean, I think everybody. The answer when it comes to smoking is probably going to be the same answer when it comes to social media, which is that. A lot of people will fail. I won't be able to do it, even with sincere intentions. Some people will be able to quit cold turkey. And some people will be able to, you know, sort of back off slowly with the nicotine patch and. I, I would almost guarantee that, that social media and networking tools are gonna, and email included. Are gonna fall into that same bucket. So you have to, you have to start by being honest with yourself, like. How bad is my problem and how much? You know, again, it's very, it's very AA, but like, how much do I, how much help do I need, you know?

• 32:53Speaker 01

  And coming up with a strategy that's gonna, but I think the first thing is like, you have to understand that it. It's okay to detach a little bit, you know, like it's not. Um, and that expect the response to come from the network or whatever and just prepare for it and. It's doable. I, I think it's doable. I'm not, I still live a healthy social life and everything, even though I don't use all this stuff, but I, it, it's worked out completely fine for me. People started telling me when they had babies and stuff, so you can, um, and no one expects me to post a picture of my vacations online, so. I think you realize it's an illusion at some point.

• 33:27Shane Parrish?

  These are tough questions that we're grappling with in terms of. Busyness and its impact on learning, its impact on productivity, its impact on your life. Uh, I think the answers and you know, what we buy is we buy the solution to this problem and we buy that through. Self-help books and we buy that through everything else, which are very prescriptive. What we don't buy. Are, uh, this is a tough issue. This is grappling for people to deal with. And each person has to deal with it in a slightly different way. There's no formula. That you can just follow and get the right answer. And it has to relate to the context of your life and that's part of the work about thinking, right, is. Taking the ideas from other people, learning them and understanding them and

• 34:12Shane Parrish?

  understanding that when they apply and when they don't apply and then further understanding when they apply to your life and how they impact your life. And it comes down to things like weighing the pros and cons to using these tools and just being aware of those cons because we don't think about them. We just think about the the pros or the ability to share and disseminate. And I don't have to call somebody, I can just tweet somebody out. You know, I don't have to email somebody. All of these things where we can do massive communications instead of one on one communications make it easier on ourselves, but we also communicate more. We also share, so there's a cost to this, right? We're constantly on our phones, our devices.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  Can I give a little analogy that I it came to me recently, which is that, you know, there's this well known thing where people think that building a bigger, wider highway is going to alleviate traffic. And then what happens is they build the highway and they realize that the traffic is the same because people start taking more trips. So this was a huge problem in New York City for a long time. They would think that they, when you they built the Henry Hudson Bridge or whatever, that it was going to alleviate traffic from the existing bridge. And it turned out that they had way more traffic afterwards. Both bridges were now. So I think when it comes to communications, there's something similar happening where people think that it makes communication easier and thus I can, you know, I can make it even simpler. I don't have to write these letters and I can it would so much easier or whatever.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  But what happened is that that's the opposite. The traffic problem happened where communication just exploded.

• 35:41Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, you almost want some friction, right? Like there's a natural, you know, stoppage, I guess, to like, I used to have the Farnham Street email address up on the website and I had to take it down because it was just getting so many, it was so easy for people to email me and. It's not like you're emailing me one or two sentences like these are seven, eight paragraphs or thirty page documents or so what I've started asking people to do to add friction is oh well, why don't you print that and mail it to me? And if it's worth your time to print mail it to me, it's something I'll look at. And if it's not worth your time to print mail it to me, you were probably just communicating with me, not because you wanted to communicate with me per se,

• 36:22Shane Parrish?

  but because it was easy for you to do. And the cost on you was really low, but the cost on me is really high. So I can almost put those costs on somebody else. It's, it's almost like a modern bureaucracy, right? You think about how the office culture works. It's not about doing the work. It's about forwarding an email and shifting it to somebody else. And we spend all of this time, you know, just basically passing around emails and we think that that is a proxy for work, right? But it makes me wonder like who's actually doing work in a lot of these organizations?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's, that was my experience. You know, you asked me before, like, you know, I was working in the real world or whatever. Um, is that what people call work was like not really work. It was, sometimes it was, but of the ten hours a day that we would spend in the office, you know, maybe two of them would be what you would call work, like actual writing a report or doing research or whatever. And the rest of the time would be chatting and emailing and walking around the office and things. And, and then, you know, the person will report that they're working sixty hours a week or whatever. And then, and I want to say like, well, you're at the office sixty hours a week, but are you actually working sixty hours? And I'm not blaming any of

• 37:34Speaker 01

  the individuals. It's just that's the culture now, just the way it is. And, you know, it just like expands and expands and it's

• 37:42Shane Parrish?

  Time is not work, right?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Shane Parrish?

  Time is not necessarily productive time.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  What's the principle that like, I don't know what it was named after, but like the, the work will expand if it the time allotted?

• 37:51Shane Parrish?

  Parkinson, wasn't it?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, and that's kind of how it is. And now with the communications infrastructure being what it is, it's like, I think there's like a sub version of that where it's like communications will expand to fill the time allotted. I mean, you could literally, if you wanted to spend your entire time just communicating.

• 38:09Shane Parrish?

  A sub tangent. On this is I've noticed a trend that probably everybody else has already noticed and I'm slow to this. But it's the person in the the office environment that creates a half ass draft. It is not well thought out attaches it to an email to like twenty or thirty people. And it was like, oh, I did all the work on this. What are your thoughts? And then they basically shifted all of that work.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  So my my father runs an accounting firm and and does wealth management. He calls this um office tennis where it's like you do it and then you just you hit it into the other person's court. And then they hit it back and you know, that's what it is. It's like it's tennis and.

• 38:50Shane Parrish?

  But it creates an obligation on the receiver's part to feel like to do work and and a lot of work. And the person who is doing the work already, like the the initial person who did the work. They're basically half assing it to like some sort of bare minimum. Because now they're passing their work on to other people. And some people do this in a really shrewd way, which is like, oh, your experience is so much greater than mine. I think you'd add a lot of value and insight into this particular thing. Um, but at the end of the day, they're not doing the thinking, they're not doing the the they're not getting it to the quality it should be before doing that. And then they're not thinking about when they send it out and the impact it has on other people and their jobs. And it is kind of like office tennis.

• 39:34Shane Parrish?

  And it's shifting the burden to somebody else, which is so easy to do. And that's why we forward emails and we say like, you know, these quick, what do you think? Or for your situational awareness or FYI and all of these things. We're not actually thinking, well, what is the cost of the person to read this and understand it? Can I summarize it for them if you're passing something to your boss, which is, you know, something value add is literally just a. You know, a one or two sentence, here's the gist of it. You can get the context below, but if you know that I'm giving you the gist of it, I've just saved you some time and made you aware of the situation. But we don't do that. We're just.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Well, so it's gonna so it's not natural to do that because like you said, it costs me nothing. So my incentive is to just get it off my plate in the most frictionless way possible. And then you deal with it. And so in an organization, it would take someone is gonna have to. Come down from high and say, "Look, we're gonna improve our email culture and our communications culture." And so far, it's been going the other way where, you know, the companies are just encouraging more and more email and the tools for communication. I mean, you know, anytime, I know a lot of companies are implementing like, or have already implemented like instant messaging capabilities and not, you know, it's come a long way from AOL Instant Messenger,

• 40:49Speaker 01

  but there's sophisticated corporate tools supposedly, but you know, the people who have to use them, or the people who work there are now expected to use them. And that intrudes upon any time that they may have spent actually focusing on something and working, because when the IM window pops up, it's like, it's like email, but worse. And now it's even more frictionless. So it's kind of goes back to what we were talking about before, where it's like, the tools have been, we've only looked at one side of the ledger, which is all the frictionless nature of it, but we've been very hesitant to look at the other side, which is, well, what are we losing? And it goes back to that quote by Herbert Simon, where he said, you know, "What does information consume? It consumes the attention of its recipient." And so in a world rich in information, there's a poverty

• 41:34Speaker 01

  of attention. I'm paraphrasing, but that was basically what he said. And that was more of a prophetic than he thought it would be when he said it, you know, 50 years ago, whatever. So I think that's where we're at. And I think that as a person, you have to come up with strategies to fight it. And if you're running an organization, don't expect it to happen on its own. It's gonna, someone's gonna have to, you know, kind of come down from high and say, "We're gonna do this better." And, and, you know, put some carrot and stick into it. Like, you have to punish people who are not following it, so.

• 42:06Shane Parrish?

  Listen, this has been a fascinating conversation. I think we're gonna end it here. This is a bit of an experiment. The first time Jeff and I have done a one-on-one. We'd love to hear your feedback. With some level of irony, you can tweet to us, hashtag The Knowledge Project, and let us know what you think of this. Thank you.

• 42:28Shane Parrish?

  Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com/podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.