The Cost of Distraction

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In July 1991, Warren Buffett found himself dragged to an event at the Gates Compound in Seattle. A friend convinced him to go, promising it would be worthwhile to meet Bill Gates.

Buffett was reluctant to go, saying: "What the hell are we going to spend all day doing with these people?

Meanwhile, Gates had his own reservations about meeting Buffett. “I don’t know about a guy who just invests money and picks stocks...he just buys and sells pieces of paper. That’s not real value added. I don’t think we’d have much in common."

Within minutes of Buffett’s arrival, they were deep in conversation, and it lasted all day. Buffett and Gates ignored everyone else at the party, including much of Seattle's elite. Gates's father even politely nudged them to socialize with others, but they talked and talked.

The sun began to set and Gates’s helicopter had to leave. But he wasn’t ready to end the conversation, so he stayed behind.

That night at dinner, Bill Gates Sr. asked everyone at the table to write down on a sheet of paper: What factor do you feel was the most important in getting to where you are in life?

Both Buffett and Gates wrote the same word on their sheets of paper: "Focus."

Focus is underrated, but it’s the secret to great work. You undoubtedly have serious things that you want to accomplish—personally and professionally. Finishing them is what brings an enormous degree of life satisfaction.

In the words of Bill Gates’s college roommate, Andy Braiterman, “Bill had a monomaniacal quality. He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing.”

One of his ex-girlfriends described him as being extremely focused and intolerant of distractions. He didn’t own a television and even dismantled his car radio.

When asked how to get smarter, Warren Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said, “Read 500 pages like this every week. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”

As someone who likes to write a thousand words a week, focus is a necessity. It’s rarely an easy process and writing can’t be done passively. I can’t hang out on the couch with friends, watch TV, or listen to music and passively type away on my keyboard.

The only way I can truly write is by entering a flow state of deep, concentrated thinking. It’s a hard state to enter and even harder to retain. Once that concentration is broken, it takes an embarrassingly long time to get back, if ever. I sound like a primal animal saying that, but it’s true.

Distraction is the disease of our time.

According to a 2015 study by Microsoft, “People now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the effects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain.”

It’s probably even worse eight years later now with more social media, more algorithms, and so much more of everything. This is a pretty big issue if you want to grow.

Without extended periods of focused attention, you can’t do the things that truly matter in life. You can’t learn, you can’t create, you can’t form deep relationships, you can’t get fit, you can’t pursue goals, you can barely even cook. You can only react to what happens. And that’s much of what we’re seeing today.

Endless feeds and clickbait articles are distraction without satisfaction—just interesting enough to keep the mind noisy and unfocused. These distractions seem free. It costs nothing to innocently scroll social media and surf the web. But nothing is really free.

When a product is free, you are the product. Social media platforms are meticulously designed to capture and monetize our attention. The longer you spend on the platform, the longer you are exposed to ads.

And you’re not going to stay online if your feed is filled with pictures of pretty sunsets. No, we’re fed content that evokes an emotional response: controversial takes and sensationalist news—things that make you want to comment, share, and dig deeper.

None of these networks really exist to enrich our lives anymore. They’re in the business of converting dopamine to dollars. It’s why our feeds have turned into cesspools. Once we could instantaneously search, buy, and communicate things on the internet, the platforms were weaponized with addictive features that nobody asked for.

It's just a quick scroll here, a click there, but before you know it, you've lost an hour. Losing 10% of every day to social media doesn’t even feel wrong, but rather just a built-in feature of life.

Smartphones made the rabbit holes portable, inviting us to disappear into them at any time, any place, and in spite of anything else we’re doing. Information has penetrated every waking moment of life.

We wake up to an onslaught of disjointed news, pictures, articles, hot takes, and videos. That chaos is the curse and the miracle of modern life.

You see, information is like food—consuming more than you need is comforting in the moment but it slows you down. The brain acts as a muscle and gets tired.

Here is an excerpt from Your Brain at Work, where David Rock discusses this in more detail.

Unlike other forms of entertainment, social media lacks a narrative or a clear finish line. It’s not building up to something bigger. It becomes a carousel of fragmented thoughts:

“Wow that’s outrageous. How could they do that?”

“Cool, that’s impressive. I want to learn that.”

“Lol that’s funny. I’m gonna rewatch that”

“Well that’s two minutes I’m never getting back”

Remember those times when you walked into a room and forgot what you went there for? Chances are, it wasn't due to some rare neurological condition—it was probably because you just watched 25 TikTok’s in the time it took you to go to the bathroom.

It’s exhausting and it’s not clear our brains are equipped for hundreds of these rapid-fire reactions in mere seconds.

The late Edward O. Wilson once said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”

Most young people can watch a video, text, and have a conversation all at the same time. But when we're constantly shifting attention, we're chipping away at the brain’s ability to concentrate. It’s hard to focus on serious things when the brain can get a dopamine shot every time we check Instagram.

It sounds crazy to say, but a strong attention span is a legitimate advantage in today’s world.

And the more time you spend focused, the stronger this ability will get. If you regularly focus on something—anything—your ability to focus on everything else in life will become easier.

When used correctly, the internet is the highest leverage tool imaginable. But choosing what to ignore is as important as choosing what to pay attention to.

It’s almost paradoxical—we have access to unfathomable amounts of information and thus the potential to master anything, but because of that, it's hard to really focus on any one thing because of how many options there are.

So how am I curbing this? Through a few things that are already beneficial, but this is another good reason to do more of:

• Exercising

• Reading books

• Spending time in nature

• Cooking healthy meals

• Performing cognitively demanding tasks like writing or programming

It sounds so basic but these are things that show the brain it can get dopamine from fulfilling stuff, not just the cheap stuff.

Some have found success in both changing their iPhone to a grayscale display and using Freedom, which is awesome. More importantly, we need to become aware of why we’re seeking these distractions, what they’re costing us, and how we can reduce our dependency on cheap dopamine.

We all appreciate the joys of our digital world—the information, the laughs, the connection. But we are only beginning to understand the costs.

It’s very easy to get addicted to the cheap dopamine and just coast. But that robs us of the deep satisfaction and pride that comes with doing things well—the things that fulfill our potential and ultimately make up our identity.

Let’s reclaim our focus.

- Sam

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