STAY VIGILANT.
Dealing with attacks from multiple fronts.
"If you want to overcome the world, overcome yourself."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
The distractions of modern life are increasing fast — while our demands and expectations of ourselves are higher than they’ve ever been. And we have to live with all this chaos while everyone knows that the only way is focus.
But how can you achieve focus and attain your purpose when you can’t even sit alone and think? Well, you have to make sacrifices.
I recently started to take draconian measures with my workflow and how I spend my days. Self care and quality of life has started to take precedent over the attainment of SUCCESS. i.e. It’s not that one has given up on one’s goals, but that I realise increasingly that I am willing to only do it my way.
I realised the abuse of stimulants (i.e. caffeine) to keep a certain level of energy and continue pouncing on takes a toll on health fast. Reducing daily consumption to a single less-one-shot coffee per day has worked wonders for my calmness, focus and sleep quality. I previously went 0 caffeine many times for long periods of time but have always gone back whenever some sort of energy-demanding difficulty reared its ugly head.
A few months ago I installed Opal on my iPhone — a screen time management app that nudges you to reduce your screen time and monitor it more effectively. I don’t want to waste time on social media and feed the Big Tech business model which relies on gluing us to the screen, mindlessly scrolling a bottomless pit.
Nicholas Carr, Cal Newport, Jaron Lanier and others have spoken about the dangers of excessive internet use, social media and the Big Tech business model which influences our brains via neuroplasticity and changes how we fundamentally operate.
This reduces our ability to focus and engage on single tasks (like reading, or even deep thinking!) for long periods of time. The implication of this is not only a general dumbification of the populace — as literacy and education drops precipitously, but also a reduction in general intelligence as we lose our ability to focus.
You can even see the effects of this on the investment profession..
Instead of professionals engaging in deep work and making investment decisions according to their findings, they doom scroll Twitter looking for bite-sized noise that would enable them to make good investment decisions. Ridiculous.
For the investors and traders reading this — my advice is to structure markets around your life* rather than living your life around markets. This does not only increase your quality of life, but paradoxically also makes for better results in your career.
In October I wrote a short essay on attaining mastery as an investor, and highlighted the skill sets required to walk that path. Being in top form is also a requirement, and you must maintain that top form for decades.
Abusing the internet and social media, wasting your energy and focus and engaging in value-destroying activities means you will never have that top form required.
*Instead, learn to simplify and declutter by removing more things.
Well said!