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Check our app for details. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. - Hey friends, quick ad as we begin. Today is Friday, April 13. As of this recording, I have 18 consulting slots left. Most of those are available next week. If you would like to book a consulting call with me, this is the time.

Those calls are available through the end of April and there are 18 remaining at this discounted rate that I have. If you'd like to book a call with me, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult, radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult and book now. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds, I'm your host. Today I wanna share with you some ideas on the importance of cultivating a super skill that will lead you and your children to success. Anybody who's been listening to the show in an up-to-date manner knows that I have been going through a series called How to Invest in Your Children at a Very Early Age.

And the basic premise of this series is simply, there are many things that you can do to invest into your children so that they have a high capacity as they pass into adolescence and into young adulthood. And I believe that these investments, these things that you can do, are a worthy source of our attention and of our money.

And so far I've been talking about investing into their bodies and investing into their minds. And I've done, I would say half a dozen shows now on how to enhance the intelligence of your children. Because if you want smart kids, you can do that. You can cultivate smart children.

You can cultivate intelligent children. It's not an accident. Whatever the baseline genetic potential that your children have, that's something that can be cultivated with intentionality on your part as a parent. But being smart is not enough. It's not enough for you or me to simply be smart. And it's not enough for our children to be smart.

Simply being smart will not cause your children to be financially successful. It will not cause your children to be successful at work. There are other skills that are associated with this. Now, while this topic is related to intelligence, I'm probably not gonna label this as connected to that series.

You feel free to listen to this through the eyes of investing in your children if you like. But I wanna talk to you, you, someone who is not a child. Because what I'm going to share with you in this podcast is a core foundational, it's a foundation of you taking the intelligence that you have and turning it into success.

See, this lines up with another long-held belief I have had, which is simply that financial products don't generally cause people to be financially independent. It's everything else that causes people to be financially independent. And the financial products come in at the end of the line. In the almost 10 years I've been doing this podcast, I've been saying that financial advisors are very good at helping rich people stay rich and get richer, but they're not good at helping poor people get rich.

Quite simply, because you can't get rich with a financial product. You have to get rich with work, with income, with smart decisions. So how do we do that? Well, you could talk about skills. I have other podcasts devoted to developing highly compensated skills, skills that the marketplace values. We could talk about action and activity.

That's exceedingly important. At the end of the day, setting goals doesn't actually cause you to be successful. Reading doesn't cause you to be successful. Learning doesn't cause you to be successful. It's the application of those things, the activities that you do. It's the action that matters. If we could just only measure action and action alone, then we would know how to cause your financial success.

Why are people fat? They're not fat due to lack of knowledge. They're fat due to lack of action, exercise and eating habits. Why are people poor? They're not poor due to lack of knowledge. They're poor due to lack of action. So I could aim this entire podcast in that direction, in the direction of you, you're taking action.

And someday, maybe I will. I have other shows on this topic. But today I want to talk about one of those things that is related to intelligence that can either be a resource, a catalyst that helps you to take lots of action, or something that keeps you from taking action.

That topic is attention span. Your ability to pay attention is something that you must evaluate, measure, and enhance or grow. If you do everything that I've talked about to help your children be very intelligent, if you do the things I have talked about to help you be intelligent, but you do not simultaneously exercise the discipline necessary to enhance attention span, you will be limited in your actual application of intelligence to action.

And that's a horrific state to be in. What a pain to go through all the work of developing a giant, powerful brain, and then have that brain's output and usefulness limited by the inability to pay attention. Think of it like this. Imagine that you had access to a mainframe supercomputer, running the latest, greatest AI software that has access to all of the resource of the internet at its fingertips.

And yet your ability to access that computer comes only through a dial-up modem. Remember those? A dial-up modem. The brain is there, the computer is there, the computer is running great software, but you can't get all of the fullness of its capacity because you're limited to this tiny, horrifically slow internet connection.

You'll get something, but it's deeply limited. Every step you could take up the wireless pathway to go from a dial-up modem to some sort of faster access, up to a direct fiber optic connection to the computer through the internet, up to directly plugging into the computer, speeds, speeds, speeds your ability and allows you to tap into the potential of that massive, powerful computer.

And this is how I think of our attention span. Our attention span is basically the connection that we have to our computer. How long can we access that computer and how long can we then direct it in the direction that we want it to go? If you have a powerful brain, Just like if you have a powerful computer, and you ask it a really important question, then that powerful brain can give you a glimmer of insight or answer a question very, very quickly, but it would be better to have a tremendous connection to a less powerful computer, but a connection that you could just ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, the best questions and get the best results out of it.

Think like, again, think chat GPT is a great metaphor for us to use. You could just ask it everything, and it could give you everything, and it could boom, fast, fast, fast. It'd be better to have a high-speed connection to a less powerful computer than a very limited connection to the most powerful computer.

I think of that as like a tension span. A guy who's got a less powerful brain, but who's cultivated the skill of paying attention and focusing on important work is the guy who will take vastly higher quantities of action, and the right action, because they're governed by his brain, versus the guy who can take perhaps the perfect action one time, but he's limited by his attention span.

Whenever we talk about intelligence, we have to recognize that intelligence is not everything. Attention span, in order to take action, accounts for most of the results. Yes, you want to take the right actions, but as we've learned ever since we were first told the tale of the tortoise and the hare, the guy who continues taking steps forward steadily, steadily, steadily, steadily, steadily wins the race compared to the guy who's the fastest.

Nothing has changed. In today's podcast, I want to share with you the importance of attention span, and I want to highlight this, especially with a discussion on intelligence, because for the last few years we faced something dramatic, something new. That something is that IQ seems to be falling. Now this has been known for a number of years.

One of the earlier articles that we can read on this would come from going back to 2018, but I'll read you in a moment an article from just the last few days. But here's an article from ScienceAlert.com published June 13, 2018. IQ scores are falling in "worrying reversal of 20th century intelligence boom." A defining trend in human intelligence tests that saw people steadily obtaining higher IQ scores through the 20th century has abruptly ended, a new study shows.

The Flynn effect, named after the work of Kiwi intelligence researcher James Flynn, observed rapid rises in intelligence quotient at a rate of about three IQ points per decade in the 20th century, but new research suggests these heady boom days are long gone. An analysis of some 730,000 IQ test results by researchers from the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway reveals the Flynn effect hit its peak for people born during the mid-1970s and has significantly declined ever since.

This is the most convincing evidence yet of a reversal of the Flynn effect. Professor Stuart Ritchie from the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study, told the Times, "If you assume their model is correct, the results are impressive and pretty worrying." The researchers sourced their data from the IQ test scores of 18-19-year-old Norwegian men who took the tests as part of their National Compulsory Military Service.

Between the years 1970-2009, three decades of these young men, born between 1962-1991, were conscripted, resulting in over 730,000 IQ test results. What the results show is that a turning point for the Flynn effect occurred for the post-1975 birth cohorts, equivalent to seven fewer IQ score points per generation. Pay attention.

It's not the first time we've seen this kind of dip. Research by Flynn himself that looked at the IQs of British teenagers almost a decade ago observed a similar fall in test scores. "It looks like there's something screwy among British teenagers," Flynn told the Telegraph at the time. "While we have enriched the cognitive environment of children before their teenage years, the cognitive environment of the teenagers has not been enriched." Although that kind of environmental attribution remains hypothetical, it's a possibility that's supported by the latest research, which it's worth emphasizing comes from just one Norwegian sample, albeit a particularly huge one.

In the new study, the researchers observed IQ drops occurring within actual families, between brothers and sons, meaning the effect likely isn't due to shifting demographic factors as some have suggested, such as the dysgenic accumulation of disadvantageous genes across areas of society. Instead, it suggests changes in lifestyle could be what's behind these lower IQs, perhaps due to the way children are educated, the way they're brought up, and the things they spend time doing more and less, the types of play they engage in, whether they read books and so on.

It goes on to talk about other possibilities. By the way, always be careful when you deal with IQ research, because it's very hard to say that IQ scores are the world's best measurement of intelligence. For example, do they measure how good people are at taking tests, or do they measure true intelligence?

It's a very hotly debated area of study, and this argument or discussion is no different. Now, that was 2018. In a moment, I'll read you a recent article from Science Norway. But first, I want to begin with a more recent article here. This is published in The Hill. The headline is "American IQs Rose 30 Points in the Last Century.

Now They May Be Falling." Published March 29, 2023 by Daniel de Visey. A new study of human intelligence posits a narrative that may surprise the general public. American IQs rose dramatically over the past century, and now they seem to be falling. By the way, this new study is not the previous discussion from Norway.

Cognitive abilities declined between 2006 and 2018 across three of four broad domains of intelligence, the study found. Researchers tracked falling scores in logic, vocabulary, visual and mathematical problem solving and analogies, the latter category familiar to anyone who took the old SAT. In the 12-year span, IQ scores dipped up to two points in the three areas of declining performance.

Scores declined across age groups, education levels, and genders, with the steepest drops among younger and less educated test takers. IQ scores rose in just one area, spatial reasoning, a set of problems that measure the mind's ability to analyze three-dimensional objects. The study, authored by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon, appears in the May/June issue of the journal Intelligence.

Researchers across the globe have been tracking an apparent decline in human IQs, starting around the turn of the millennium. Theories abound as to why scores are dropping, but the smart money says our cognitive skills may have plateaued, teetering into an era of intellectual lethargy. If you want to ascribe blame, look no further than this screen.

Cognitive researchers hypothesize that smartphones and smart speakers, autocomplete and artificial intelligence, Wi-Fi and runaway social media have conspired to supplant the higher functions of the human brain. In its quest for labor-saving tech, the world may be dumbing itself down. "We're all getting super lazy in our cognition because it's getting super easy to do everything." said Ruth Karpinski, a California psychologist who studies IQ.

"We're using Waze and Google Maps to get where we need to go. We're losing our whole sense of compass." The new study joins a growing body of research on something called the Flynn effect. James Flynn, a New Zealand intelligence researcher, tracked a dramatic rise in IQ scores across the 20th century.

How dramatic? If you gave an early 1900s IQ test to a person of average intelligence in 2000, the test taker would rate in the top 5% of the Teddy Roosevelt-era population in cognitive ability. "IQs rose all over the world over the course of the century about 30 points," said Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell who studies intelligence.

"To give you a sense of what 30 points mean, the average is 100. Usually, gifted would start around 130. So we're talking about the difference between an average IQ and a gifted one." Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Until recently, IQ scores had been rising for nearly as long as we had IQ tests. The first tests emerged around 1905, tailored for struggling schoolchildren in France. Then it goes on and talks more about the history. Talks about some people thought it was nutrition, schooling, better parenting for the rising scores.

It's not necessarily known. The article then goes on and talks about the impact of test taking and becoming just better at taking tests, etc. Couple of paragraphs here from an article from PopularMechanics.com published April 8, 2023, just last week. American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the reverse Flynn effect.

Same headlines. A Northwestern university shows a decline in three key intelligence testing categories. Goes on and talks about it. But the point here is the number of people. The study published in the journal Intelligence used an online survey-style personality test, called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project, to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans.

The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018 in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data shows drops in logic and vocabulary, known as verbal reasoning, visual problem solving and analogies, known as matrix reasoning, and computational and mathematical abilities, known as letter and number series.

On the flip side, however, scores in spatial reasoning, known as 3D rotation, followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period. Now one more comment on this. Let's go now to ScienceNorway.no. This article published Tuesday, April 4, 2023. The headline is "Our IQ is steadily declining. Should be worried" by Bard Amundsen.

Are we scoring lower on IQ tests because of the food we eat? Are schools and teachers the cause? Or maybe computers and mobile phones? Or is the trend due to something completely different? The phenomenon of declining IQ scores was detected early in Norway. New researchers are seeing the same trend in other countries.

The researchers don't know what's behind it. Proposals vary widely. John Martin Sundet, 81, is a psychology professor and arguably Norway's leading IQ researcher over many years. When we ask him why, he answers calmly, "Does it really matter?" We'll come back to Sundet later. Two other Norwegian researchers published a study in 2018 in which they established that starting with a cohort born in 1975, the IQ of young Norwegian men entering military service has fallen steadily.

Goes on and explains how they measured that because the Norwegian military has a huge sample set and that was where they started to see it. Now let's talk about the newest study and the comments on it. New study on 400,000 Americans. Researchers discovered a few years ago that the Flynn effect had stopped.

And not only that, it had actually reversed direction in pretty well the entire developed part of the world. Rogberg points out that Sundet and two Norwegian colleagues may have been the first to notice this in a study published in 2004. The most recent major study to find a decline in IQ looked at the test results for nearly 400,000 American adults between 2006 and 2018.

The American researchers found the greatest decline in IQ in the youngest participants of both sexes ages 18 to 22. The ability to solve problems has declined in mathematics and vocabulary. Only the participants' ability for certain types of reasoning has increased. The researchers in the USA point out that similar findings have been made in Finland, France, Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Australia, the Netherlands, and Sweden in recent years.

The researchers in this American study posed some possible explanations, including poorer schools, the food we eat, or perhaps the increased use of computer technology at the expense of book reading. Still good at logical and abstract thinking. The test that Norwegian soldiers have to take when they show up for military service is technically not an IQ test, but it is designed in the same way.

The test is divided into three sections. One section involves mathematical skills, another section is vocabulary based, and the third section has to do with logical and abstract thinking skills. In our 2018 project that looked at the changes in Norwegian soldiers, we only had access to the total scores based on these three tests, says Rogberg.

But analyses by Sundet, which are based on the results from each sub-test, show that the ability for logical and abstract thinking has remained at a high level among young Norwegian men. Fixed Intelligence and Fluid Intelligence Mathematical abilities and vocabulary are often called "fixed intelligence", or knowledge that is accumulated and learned over time.

Fluid intelligence is often described as the ability for abstract thinking and analysis. These skills involve the ability to solve problems and quickly see things in new ways. Rogberg finds it interesting that the most abstract skills have remained at a high level. He does not find it that strange to imagine that pen and paper calculation skills could have become weaker in recent generations of young people.

Many of them have grown up using calculators at school, and now all young people walk around with an advanced calculator in their pocket. The foreign words that new generations of Norwegian soldiers continued to be tested on were often more common in the 1950s than today. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that these scores have declined as well.

Rogberg emphasizes that he is speculating, but it could be that these parts of the IQ tests are simply poorly adapted to today's young people. What about TV and mobile use? At the same time, Rogberg does not rule out that something has changed within schools, or maybe with the food we eat.

We also know that people are reading fewer books, and that they would rather sit and watch TV or a mobile screen. "I'm an economist, not a psychologist," he says. But if I allow myself to speculate a little more, I think another hypothesis could be that today we're interested in developing different qualities in our children than what parents emphasized in the past, says Rogberg.

Maybe we need other cognitive abilities more than math skills now. That goes on and talks about other aspects of it. I made sure to read you a little bit of the controversy, to say that this is unknown, this is speculation, we don't know exactly how and why this is happening, blah blah blah.

At its core, I would be willing to place my money on the idea that a lot of what I've talked about in my series on intelligence for children is a component of that. So what are some of the things that I have talked about and discussed of how to increase the intelligence of your children?

Well, first I talked about the mind and the physical care of the mind, good nutrition. I talked about the importance of fat, a high-fat diet for children. We live on the backside of the low-fat revolution. I talked about the importance of protein. We see people, many of us live, and especially if we eat the standard American diet, very high carbohydrate, very low protein, and then low fat.

When there are fats, they're often fats from nasty seed oils and things like that. So there's a decent chance that that's affecting our brains in some way, especially the lack of fat, lack of protein, not enough animal protein, too much bread, too much sugar, etc. Maybe that's a factor.

What about movement and exercise? We know that movement and exercise increases the power of the brain, it increases the blood flow to the brain, makes it work better. We know that, at least American children that I know, we know that they're fat and sedentary. So it wouldn't be a surprise if by being fat and sedentary their brains don't work very much.

What about oxygen, sunshine, these other physical factors that enhance the brain? Well, of course, we know that a lot of cases are many of our children, unfortunately, aren't playing outside. They're not playing outside in the fresh air, they're not getting lots of sunshine, their vitamin D production is low, they're sitting inside, they're pasty-skinned and fat.

So that's a problem. What about physical or chemical trauma and the impact of that? Well, there's a decent chance that their lives are full of chemicals, that all these, everything from the plastics in the food and the microplastics to the chemicals and the cleaners and everything that's in our air fresheners and our candles and the...

Who knows, right? Maybe that's all a factor. It certainly could be. What do we know about literacy in our children? Well, we know that the amount of reading that they do is substantially diminished. Although they technically consume a lot of words, the absorption of literature, which leads to high vocabulary due to the infrequently used, the less common words, we know the consumption of literature is down.

During this series on children, I shared with you lots of evidence and articles and college professors noticing it, et cetera. We know that literacy is down. If you look at the actual test scores of reading ability for government schools, the test scores are horrifically bad. So some people come through and become literate, but the test scores generally are very bad.

We know that while it may be the case that a literate person in 2023 consumes perhaps more text than somebody did in 1823 when books were less common, certainly, and more advertising billboards, et cetera, we know, and pay attention because I'm going to talk more about this, but we know that the ability to follow long form literature has dramatically decreased.

I noticed this myself when I try to read old books. I am a very highly skilled reader, and it's difficult for me to read old books because my attention span, I zone out in the middle of the half page sentence. And so if I'm a highly skilled, experienced reader, and I'm experiencing that, how much more are children when they have been conditioned to communicate in very short sentences?

Remember the comment that I've made about advertising literature and the fact that successful advertisers know they need to speak at no more than a fifth grade level and communicate in written text at no more than a fifth grade level for maximum effectiveness. So literacy is down dramatically, both in the sense of actually being able to read and then the ability for the higher level reading.

What about numeracy? We know, at least from American data, that numeracy is horrifically bad. The test score results for general American students' ability and mathematical ability across the population is very, very bad. And we know that mathematics education, that we're basically trying to do the bare minimum. Well, I think mathematics is best viewed as a language.

And as a language, it's something that needs to be absorbed over a very long period of time with lots and lots of strenuous use in order to solve the ability to problem solve. And we know that. And so I would say that not only do we have bad test scores, but we have a lot of crutches that have been introduced that are making for bad outcomes.

I myself am totally opposed to the use of calculators. And yet the use of calculators is now standard in most of our high school classrooms. I am firmly persuaded that high school students should not use calculators in any regard. If Isaac Newton can invent calculus without a calculator, then we can study what Isaac Newton invented without a calculator.

That slows students down. It makes many things more difficult. But that is not a problem. We don't, in the same way that if we don't give, you know, and this was a, I didn't mean to get off on this rabbit trail. It's not that calculators might not be useful in some contexts, but just like using Google Translate, it might not be useful in some contexts, but the actual forced, in learning a language, but the actual forced difficulty of thinking, that is why we do math.

Just like that is why we learn a language. We have to keep our brain going and think it. So we know that numeracy is in dramatic decline. What about multilingualism? Well, we know that multilingualism, at least in English speaking places, is down. I think multilingualism is probably up in non-English native places, non-English native countries as English has become so common, but at least in England, the United States, et cetera, multilingualism is in rough shape.

What about writing ability? I mean, I talked about cultivating writing ability. Unfortunately, I think there's good evidence to say that our children, broadly speaking, are poor writers. Writing is hard. They don't have enough time to do it. There's not enough effort. Writing by hand, all the things I talked about of really the hard thinking ability, that's gone because we type everything.

And so we miss out on those skills there. And then we have learned to write and we teach our children to write, not at a high level, not highbrow literature, but for the lowest common denominator. We want short, simple, fast, punchy stuff and we know that that's what's practical.

So again, these things are changing. Well, I think that this poor writing ability is often reflected in poor thinking ability. So when I talked about writing, I said one of the reasons we write is because it helps teach us to be better thinkers. So regardless of whether or not someone reads it, we want to write in a detailed and careful way in order to make sure that our thoughts are carefully ordered.

And a lot of times to carefully develop good, deep thinking, we need to write long, long sentences, long paragraphs, long essays, etc. This is something I'm acutely aware of as a podcaster. The appeal of my long format podcasts is very limited in the public space as compared to an eight minute YouTube video or a very short TikTok video.

And yet the depth that I'm able to deal with ideas is much deeper. And they all have their place. Sure, short form content has its place, but if you want to really get into your thinking, you're going to need to write significantly. Other things that I've talked about, art, music, often down seemingly.

Not everywhere. Again, there's programs, but I looked at a lot of programs and I found a lot of music teachers trying to say, "I need to bring music into these underprivileged children and look at the results," etc. Formal logic, philosophy, these things are all down. So is there a good chance that IQs are down for all of these reasons?

I think so, definitely. But we need to pay attention to this. Now practically speaking, back to my initial analogy, what is another limiting factor in all of these things? Well, it's attention span. Because at its core, we live in a world of paradoxes. On the one hand, it's never been easier to get a world-class education than it is today.

Everything is available for free. Grab a $30 smartphone, grab an $80 tablet or a computer of some kind, and you have access to the world's greatest literature, all for free. You have access to the world's finest minds, the best math instruction, everything free. And the paradox is, we don't take advantage of it.

What do we do instead? Well we spend our time swipe, swipe, swipe. And this affects all of us, you and me included. I myself have noticed over the years a significant decrease in my attention span, because in various forms and in various ways, I've allowed myself to become addicted to the new and novel.

And I've allowed my pretty capable brain to be dramatically handicapped due to this lack of attention span. So the first part of recovery is to acknowledge that there is a problem. I'm going to pick on TikTok for a moment, because I was recently reading an interesting article about it and I thought it was a pretty good indication.

I'm not super partisan. I'm not trying to say that, I think people often say, "Well, I'm better than others." Right? Well, I'm against TikTok and your mother is against TikTok, totally against TikTok, and yet she's on Facebook for hours a day. Okay, fine. But I think at its core, we need to pay attention to all of these potential things that can diminish our attention span.

So first let's identify the problem and then I'll share with you the solution. I'm reading here from a Substack article by Gerwinder. This article was published in January of 2023. It's entitled, "TikTok is a Time Bomb, the Ultimate Weapon of Mass Distraction." Distraction, excuse me, the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

A little Freudian slip there. And the basic point of the article that he makes that I'm persuaded is plausible from various sources is quite simply that the Chinese Communist Party uses TikTok as a form of a weapon to make Americans stupid and to polarize Americans against each other and erode the basic foundations of Western civilization.

I think that's a plausible theory, certainly unproven, but plausible. But most importantly, I want to talk for a moment about this because TikTok is an extreme form of the social media phenomenon and the distractions that we all face. From section one, the smiling tiger. TikTok is the most successful app in history.

It emerged in 2017 out of the Chinese video sharing app Douyin, and within three years it had become the most downloaded app in the world, later surpassing Google as the world's most visited web domain. TikTok's conquest of human attention was facilitated by the COVID lockdowns of 2020, but its success wasn't mere luck.

There's something about the design of the app that makes it unusually irresistible. Other platforms like Facebook and Twitter use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don't need to form a social network or list your interests or the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires.

You just start watching, skipping any videos that don't immediately draw your interest. TikTok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the "For You" algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits and possibly your facial expressions. Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.

The result is a system that's unsurpassed at figuring you out, and once it's figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you. Since the "For You" algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos, such as how-to guides and field journalism, tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info.

Many of the most popular TikTokers, such as Charli D'Amelio, Bella Poche, Porch, and Addison Rae, do little more than vapidly dance and lip sync. Individually such videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn't intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it's got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it.

This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex reassignment surgery. There's evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness. Researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette's sufferers developed Tourette's-like tics.

A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and challenges, where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it'll make them TikTok famous. Acts include licking toilets, snorting suntan lotion, eating chicken cooked in NyQuil, and stealing cars. One challenge, known as "devious licks," encourages kids to vandalize property, while the "blackout challenge," in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.

As troublesome as TikTok's trends are, the app's greatest danger lies not in any specific content but in its generally addictive nature. Studies on long-term TikTok addiction don't yet exist for obvious reasons, but based on what we know of internet addiction generally, we can extrapolate its eventual effects on habitual TikTokers.

There's a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain's gray matter, and "digital dementia," an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression, and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control, the last of which increases the addiction. By the way, I want to reread that to emphasize it, because you've probably zoned out in the middle of my reading you about five paragraphs, and so I need your attention again.

By the way, this is linked to some interesting research with some of these claims. Listen carefully. "There's a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain's gray matter, and "digital dementia," an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression, and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control, the last of which increases the addiction." These are the problems caused by internet addiction generally, but there's something about TikTok that makes it uniquely dangerous.

In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want, while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click.

Its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive, uninteractive experience of all major platforms. If it's the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy.

Indeed, many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that's come to be known as "TikTok brain." If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what TikTok addiction will have done to young developing brains a decade from now.

TikTok's capacity to stupefy people, both acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior and chronically by atrophying the brain, should prompt consideration of its potential use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks to neutralize enemies not by inflicting pain and terror, but by inflicting pleasure. Pay attention. TikTok's capacity to stupefy people, to make them stupid, both acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior and chronically by atrophying the brain.

Friend, don't do all the hard work for yourself and your children that we've been talking about and then cause it all to be undone in a few weeks with TikTok brain. Or any brain. Continuing, last month FBI Director Chris Wray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could "use it for influence operations." So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops?

The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok's malign influence on kids is that it's forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a "spinach" version, where kids don't see twerkers and toilet lickers, but science experiments and educational videos.

Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am. Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn't just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.

In a later paragraph he goes on and talks extensively about some of the history and who's directing TikTok, and some of the people involved in the development of TikTok. But I want to drop down a little bit later in the article. As for the CCP itself, it's known to have viewed former US President Donald Trump as the "accelerator-in-chief", or more accurately, "Chuan Jianguo" – my apologies to my Chinese speaking friends – literally "build China" Trump, because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West's decline.

For this reason, support of him was encouraged. The CCP is also known to have engaged in "jiāsù chūyī" – more directly, for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions. But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Lian's original apocalyptic vision.

Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things. And for decades, it's been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification, because that's what consumers want. Over the past century, the market has taken us toward ever shorter form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips.

With TikTok, the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant. There's no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair. And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily, it could turn the West's youth, its future, into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.

I'm going to pause the article for just a moment. I don't know about you, but I feel half the time like we're there. The time I most – like we're already half there, at least – the time I most recall this was a few years ago when the footbridge at Florida International University fell down.

And if you remember this, I think I was in Florida, and so it was certainly a big thing. But an engineering firm is building a pedestrian footbridge across a road in Miami, I think with the intention of connecting basically a parking lot or a parking garage to the main campus.

I've forgotten. A pedestrian footbridge, a standard construction scenario, a standard thing, not a huge giant bridge across the Grand Canyon, not the world's tallest bridge, a pedestrian footbridge across a highway. And while it's in the near-finishing stages, it's sitting there, and then one day it just collapses and crushed several cars underneath it, killed a handful of people.

And I thought to myself, "What on earth? Have we become so incompetent that we can't build a footbridge?" Now clearly that's an anecdote, but for me that was a triggering point. And I thought, "Are we getting dumber?" And it sure feels like we're getting dumber in many ways. That's mixed with incredible advancements, right?

We choose where we focus on. I try to spend most of my time focusing on the advancements, on sending a man to Mars, etc. But when you look back and you realize what the US space program did with handheld calculators and slide rules and sending a man to the moon, and then you look at the decline that's around us, it's hard not to notice some difference, even if we can't prove our differences.

Continuing with the article. We seem to be halfway there already. Not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but since 1970, the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it's at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state.

If you don't use it, you lose it. By the way, this is perfectly proven. We know this in terms of muscular development and the physical with our body's muscles, and we know this with regard to our brain muscles. If you don't use them, you will lose them. And even those still willing to use their brains are at risk of having their efforts foiled by social media, which seems to be affecting not just kids' abilities, but also their aspirations.

In a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was "astronaut," and the top answer among American kids was "influencer." If we continue along our present course, the resulting loss of brain power in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically.

But more importantly, if it did, it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counter-argument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome, ruin the West and refute it. Two birds with one stone.

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Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County in Santa Ana and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. I hope that these articles scare you a little bit. It's interesting to me that I find myself in the position of trying to, sounding like the preacher wandering through the streets saying "repent." But it's funny that when I think back to my youth of how right so many people were, I just see continued evidence of their rightness.

When I was a child, I grew up with no TV in our home. My parents just made the decision not to have a TV and I'm deeply grateful that we never had one. To this day, we've never had one. And obviously the concept of TV has changed in terms of how we consume stuff.

Very rarely does anybody just watch TV. But one of the things that I observe whenever I'm around a TV is how stupid it all is. And when you're not around it a lot and you walk into a house where the TV is on all the time and here I'm talking about broadcast television, cable TV, etc.

It's mind-numbing. I cannot watch, I can't stand listening to cable news or to just any local programming. It's horrific. And it comes from not being desensitized to it. Well of course the same thing happens with regard to our social media consumption. My generation and younger, we've just turned away from the TV and turned to consuming the same vapid content and worse on apps.

But the argument that was always made to me, that persuaded me when I was young, is that TV makes you stupid for two reasons. The first reason is simply TV fails to... when you watch TV you are a passive spectator. This is unlike doing something like listening to a book.

If you're listening to an audio book or listening to a podcast, your brain has to consciously form the mental pictures so that you can follow the story. So your brain activity is higher when you listen to a book or read a book versus TV. That's to say nothing of the size of the lexicon used in popular programming versus a book etc.

or the topics covered. You may be going and reading a thick book about the ethics of cloning and you cannot even scratch the surface. Even if a 60 minute documentary is done on that, you can't even begin to scratch the surface of what you can get out of the thinking that you have to do to think of a 400 book on some ethical issue or some point of philosophy etc.

So the first argument against TV is that it makes you stupid because it's a passive activity that's not engaging your brain in a meaningful way. The second argument against TV has to do with the opportunity cost. It's not so much the content on the TV that's bad, it's the fact of what you could be doing with the time in the time that you're watching TV.

So those things are deadly. And that was the argument from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s etc. We'll bring that forward to our modern forms of consumption. Swirling through your Instagram reels or your TikTok videos or your YouTube shorts or even just your normal YouTube feed etc. We have the same basic fundamental problem.

The content is stupid and it causes you to become stupid because it doesn't require engagement. And if you're immediately saying "Yeah Joshua but the only time I go on YouTube is because I want to learn something about finance or I want to learn how to fix my car." Yes, that does exist in the same way that TV has always been a powerful medium for learning.

The screen can take certain concepts that you could never effectively teach in a book and you can teach them in five minutes with a powerfully produced something on the screen. But you are the exception that proves the rule rather than the other way around. There are exceptions but if you believe that you can't deny the fundamental truthfulness of what I'm saying.

And then the second thing is what it keeps you from doing. And unfortunately TV for all of its flaws was not nearly as addictive as our modern swiping is. And so we got to be super super careful and we got to help our children to avoid falling into these traps of becoming stupid.

We cannot let all of our hard work for ourselves or for our children go away. So what is the alternative? How do we solve this problem? There may be many safeguards that you would put in place. A couple of practical things would be use a screen time function on your phone or device to control the amount of time that you spend on any one particular app.

I'm familiar with the Apple screen time on the iPhone. I'm sure there's an Android equivalent. If not install an aftermarket app. And that's a useful tool. And so you can say I want to spend X amount of minutes per day on this app. And then when you're done it pops up and says you've reached your limit.

And you say okay and the app disappears. Or you can say extend it. But you have to be intentional. There's a popular app. Let me look up the name of it real quick. There's an app that's been super popular these days that's called OneSec. As in one second. It's a great little app that you install on your phone.

And what it does is very simple. You tell it the apps that you're most likely to be distracted by or to click on. You know when you're just feeling I just don't know what to do and just randomly click. And when you click on that app it pops open a screen that just gives you a gray screen for one second.

And then it says are you sure you want to do this. It says take a deep breath. You take a deep breath. You wait one second. And then it says do you want to continue on. Do you want to continue on to TikTok or Instagram or do you want to stop.

And you just click yes I want to continue. And it just inserts that momentary decision where you take one second to breathe and then make a decision. Do I really want to do that or am I just mindlessly controlling. I would encourage you to use these solutions that I have just said.

I think these are the two best. Go into your phone for any app that you use a lot. Even for the most positive purposes. Notice I'm not trying to say that an app is bad or that you have to delete it from your phone. The key question is if there's an app that is causing you trouble and is getting in the way of your accomplishment as a human being.

Just insert a little bit of intentionality of decision making. Put a time limit on it and add the one second app so that you can just make an intentional decision. Those are good strategies. There are other strategies but at their core we want to be intentional about building our life.

Imagine where you're going to be a decade from now. So ten years from now. And imagine what you could accomplish if you were focused on accomplishment. We know that over the course of the next ten years there are going to be 87,600 hours of your life that are going to pass.

87,600 hours. Go to your screen time on your phone and look at what some of your screen time is. Let's say that you spend on average five hours a week. So five hours a week on an app can be the most positive thing out there. YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, whatever.

You say this is positive. Five hours times 52 weeks times ten years is going to be 2,600 hours. That if you continue with this behavior over the next ten years you will invest 2,600 hours into this application. I want you to imagine all of the good that can come from that investment of 2,600 hours into that app, into that activity.

Think of all the good things that can happen in your life from that 2,600 hours. Now think of some of the other things that you could do with that 2,600 hours. What are you giving up? What's your opportunity cost? What could you be doing with that 2,600 hours if you didn't invest it into the use of that app?

You answer the question. Now let's imagine a similar example or a comparative example. If you work in your job a normal work week of say 40 hours per week and let's say that you do that over say a 50 week year in the US, sorry my French friends we work 50 weeks a year, just kidding.

That would be 2,000 hours. 2,000 hours per year is what you work if you work a full-time job. So at five hours per week over the course of the next ten years, if that's 2,600 hours that's more than one entire year of working a full-time job. What could you do with that time otherwise in a way that would enhance your life?

And here's where we pivot to this importance of the secret of success. The man who is going to reach financial independence in the next ten years is not the guy, the guy that's going to fritter away five hours a week on a worthless meaningful app. The guy who's going to reach financial independence in the next ten years is the guy who's going to take hold of that time and going to invest it in the direction that he wants to go, into the things that he wants to do, that he intentionally decides to do.

The starting point of doing this is to enhance your attention span and to do serious deep work. When you're trying to get rid of something in your life, it's not enough just to say, "No, I don't want to do that." That's a starting point. But what you have to substitute is an alternative activity.

You have to substitute something to do instead. Now what you choose to do should come directly from your goals. The activities that you do should come from the goals that are in front of you. But if you would invest yourself into cultivating attention span and you would apply your attention span towards your goals, you will be unstoppable.

And if you will take control of your children to the degree you're capable of, and you will surround them with an environment where they have the chance to build their attention spans in a very intentional way and teach these things to them, they will be unstoppable. And I am convinced that this is a central strategy that is going to make the difference in your life and in your finances.

Let me read you an excerpt from the introduction to Cal Newport's book called Deep Work. In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower.

After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. In my retiring room, I'm by myself, Jung said of the space. I keep the key with me all the time. No one is allowed in there except with my permission.

In his book Daily Rituals, journalist Mason Currie sorted through various sources on Jung to recreate the psychiatrist's work habits at the Tower. Jung would rise at 7am, Currie reports, and after a big breakfast, he would spend two hours of undistracted writing time in his private office. His afternoons would often consist of meditation or long walks in the surrounding countryside.

There was no electricity at the Tower, so as day gave way to night, light came from oil lamps and heat from the fireplace. Jung would retire to bed by 10pm. The feeling of repose and renewal that I had in this Tower was intense from the start, he said. Though it's tempting to think of Bollingen Tower as a vacation home, if we put it into the context of Jung's career, at this point it's clear that the lakeside retreat was not built as an escape from work.

In 1922, when Jung bought the property, he could not afford to take a vacation. Only one year earlier, in 1921, he had published Psychological Types, a seminal book that solidified many differences that had been long developing between Jung's thinking and the ideas of his one-time friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud.

To disagree with Freud in the 1920s was a bold move. To back up his book, Jung needed to stay sharp and produce a stream of smart articles and books further supporting and establishing analytical psychology, the eventual name for his new school of thought. Jung's lectures and counseling practice kept him busy in Zurich, this is clear.

But he wasn't satisfied with busyness alone. He wanted to change the way we understood the unconscious, and this goal required deeper, more careful thought than he could manage amid his hectic city lifestyle. Jung retreated to Bollingen, not to escape his professional life, but instead to advance it. Carl Jung went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.

There are, of course, many reasons for his eventual success. In this book, however, I'm interested in his commitment to the following skill, which almost certainly played a key role in his accomplishments. Deep work. Professional activities, performed in a state of distraction-free concentration, that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit.

These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. Listen carefully. Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. Remember my metaphor here?

The discussion between the powerful supercomputer and the internet connection? Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity. We now know from decades of research in both psychology and neuroscience that the state of mental strain that accompanies deep work is also necessary to improve your abilities.

Deep work, in other words, was exactly the type of effort needed to stand out in a cognitively demanding field like academic psychiatry in the early 20th century. The term "deep work" is my own, and is not something Carl Jung would have used, but his actions during this period were those of someone who understood the underlying concept.

Jung built a tower out of stone in the woods to promote deep work in his professional life, a task that required time, energy, and money. It also took him away from more immediate pursuits. As Mason Currie writes, Jung's regular journeys to Bollingen reduced the time he spent on his clinical work, noting "although he had many patients who relied on him, Jung was not shy about taking time off.

Deep work, though a burden to prioritize, was crucial for his goal of changing the world." I interrupt the story to make this application personal. Deep work in your life, dear friend, though a burden to prioritize, is crucial for your goal of changing your world. Deep work, though a burden to prioritize in the life of your child, is crucial for your goal and perhaps his goal of changing the world.

Indeed, if you study the lives of other influential figures from both distant and recent history, you'll find that a commitment to deep work is a common theme. The 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne, for example, prefigured Jung by working in a private library he built in the Southern Tower guarding the stone walls of his French chateau, while Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a shed on the property of the Quarry Farm in New York, where he was spending the summer.

Twain's study was so isolated from the main house that his family took to blowing a horn to attract his attention for meals. Moving forward in history, consider the screenwriter and director Woody Allen. In the 44-year period between 1969 and 2013, Woody Allen wrote and directed 44 films that received 23 Academy Award nominations, an absurd rate of artistic productivity.

Throughout this period, Allen never owned a computer, instead completing all his writing, free from electronic distraction, on a German Olympia SM3 manual typewriter. Allen is joined in his rejection of computers by Peter Higgs, a theoretical physicist who performs his work in such disconnected isolation that journalists couldn't find him after it was announced he had won the Nobel Prize.

J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, does use a computer, but was famously absent from social media during the writing of her Harry Potter novels, even though this period coincided with the rise of the technology and its popularity among media figures. Rowling's staff finally started a Twitter account in her name in the fall of 2009, as she was working on The Casual Vacancy, and for the first year and a half her only tweet read "This is the real me but you won't be hearing from me often I am afraid as pen and paper is my priority at the moment." Deep work of course is not limited to the historical or technophobic.

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted "think weeks" twice a year, during which he would isolate himself, often in a lakeside cottage, to do nothing but read and think big thoughts. It was during a 1995 "think week" that Gates wrote his famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo that turned Microsoft's attention to an upstart company called Netscape Communications.

And in an ironic twist, Neil Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically. His website offers no email address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here is how he once explained the omission "If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time chunks, I can write novels.

If I instead get interrupted a lot, what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, there is a bunch of email messages that I have sent out to individual persons." The ubiquity of deep work among influential individuals is important to emphasize because it stands in sharp contrast to the behavior of most modern knowledge workers, a group that is rapidly forgetting the value of going deep.

The reason knowledge workers are losing their familiarity with deep work is well established. Network tools. This is a broad category that captures communication services like email and SMS, social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the shiny tanglement of infotainment sites like Buzzfeed and Reddit. In aggregate, the rise of these tools, combined with ubiquitous access to them through smartphones and networked office computers, has fragmented most knowledge workers' attention into slivers.

A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60% of the work week engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30% of a worker's time dedicated to reading and answering email alone. This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking.

At the same time, however, modern knowledge workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work. Shallow work – non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks often performed while distracted.

These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate. In an age of network tools, in other words, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with a shallow alternative, constantly sending and receiving email messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

Major efforts that would be well served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy, or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted dashes that produce muted quality. To make matters worse for depth, there is increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed.

Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation, admitted journalist Nicholas Carr in an off-cited 2008 Atlantic article. And I'm not the only one.

Carr expanded this argument into a book, The Shallows, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. To write The Shallows appropriately enough, Carr had to move to a cabin and forcibly disconnect. The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow is not new.

The Shallows was just the first in a series of recent books to examine the internet's effect on our brains and work habits. These subsequent titles include William Powers' Hamlet's Blackberry, John Freeman's The Tyranny of Email, and Alex Soo-Jung Kim-Peng's The Distraction Addiction, all of which agree, more or less, that network tools are distracting us from work that requires unbroken concentration, while simultaneously degrading our capacity to remain focused.

Given this existing body of evidence, I will not spend more time in this book trying to establish this point. We can, I hope, stipulate that network tools negatively impact deep work. I'll also sidestep any grand arguments about the long-term societal consequence of this shift, as such arguments tend to open impassable rifts.

On one side of the debate are techno-skeptics like Jaron Lanier and John Freeman, who suspect that many of these tools, at least in their current state, damage society, while on the other side techno-optimists like Clive Thompson argue that they're changing society for sure, but in ways that'll make us better off.

Google, for example, might reduce our memory, but we no longer need good memories, as in the moment we can now search for anything we need to know. I have no stance in this philosophical debate. My interest in this matter instead veers toward a thesis of much more pragmatic and individualized interest.

Our work culture's shift toward the shallow, whether you think it's philosophically good or bad, is exposing a massive economic and personal opportunity for the few who recognize the potential of resisting this trend and prioritizing depth, an opportunity that, not too long ago, was leveraged by a bored young consultant from Virginia named Jason Benn.

Pay attention in this particular story, because it indicates the opportunities that all of us have. If you are looking to increase your income so that you can reach your financial goals, I'm offering you a path to that. There are many ways to discover that you're not valuable in our economy.

For Jason Benn, the lesson was made clear when he realized, not long after taking a job as a financial consultant, that the vast majority of his work responsibilities could be automated by a "kludged together" Excel script. The firm that hired Benn produced reports for banks involved in complex deals.

It was about as interesting as it sounds, Benn joked in one of our interviews. The report creation process required hours of manual manipulation of data in a series of Excel spreadsheets. When he first arrived, it took Benn up to six hours per report to finish this stage. The most efficient veterans of the firm could complete this task in around half the time.

This didn't sit well with Benn. The way it was taught to me, the process seemed clunky and manually intensive, Benn recalls. He knew that Excel has a feature called macros that allows users to automate common tasks. Benn read articles on the topic and soon put together a new worksheet, wired up with a series of these macros that could take the six hour process of manual data manipulation and replace it, essentially, with a button click.

A report writing process that originally took him a full workday could now be reduced to less than an hour. Benn is a smart guy. He graduated from an elite college, the University of Virginia, with a degree in economics, and like many in his situation, he had ambitions for his career.

It didn't take him long to realize that these ambitions would be thwarted so long as his main professional skills could be captured in an Excel macro. He decided, therefore, he needed to increase his value to the world. After a period of research, Benn reached a conclusion. He would, he declared to his family, quit his job as a human spreadsheet and become a computer programmer.

As is often the case with such grand plans, however, there was a hitch. Jason Benn had no idea how to write code. As a computer scientist, I can confirm an obvious point. Programming computers is hard. Most new developers dedicate a four-year college education to learning the ropes before their first job, and even then, competition for the best spots is fierce.

Jason Benn didn't have this time. After his Excel epiphany, he quit his job at the financial firm and moved home to prepare for his next step. His parents were happy he had a plan, but they weren't happy about the idea that this return home might be long-term. Benn needed to learn a hard skill and needed to do so fast.

It's here that Benn ran into the same problem that holds back many knowledge workers from navigating into more explosive career trajectories. Learning something complex, like computer programming, requires intense, uninterrupted concentration on cognitively demanding concepts, the type of concentration that drove Carl Jung to the woods surrounding Lake Zurich. His task, in other words, is an act of deep work.

Most knowledge workers, however, as I argued earlier in this introduction, have lost their ability to perform deep work. Benn was no exception to this trend. "I was always getting on the internet and checking my email. I couldn't stop myself. It was a compulsion," Benn said, describing himself during the period leading up to his quitting his finance job.

To emphasize his difficulty with depth, Benn told me about a project that a supervisor at the finance firm once brought to him. "They wanted me to write a business plan," he explained. Benn didn't know how to write a business plan, so he decided he would find and read five different existing plans, comparing and contrasting them to understand what was needed.

This was a good idea, but Benn had a problem. "I couldn't stay focused." There were days during this period, he now admits, when he spent almost every minute (98% of my time) surfing the web. The business plan project, a chance to distinguish himself early in his career, fell to the wayside.

By the time he quit, Benn was well aware of his difficulties with deep work. So when he dedicated himself to learning how to code, he knew he had to simultaneously teach his mind how to go deep. His method was drastic, but effective. "I locked myself in a room with no computer, just textbooks, note cards, and a highlighter." He would highlight the computer programming textbooks, transfer the ideas to note cards, and then practice them out loud.

These periods free from electronic distraction were hard at first, but Benn gave himself no other option. He had to learn this material, and he made sure there was nothing in that room to distract him. Over time, however, he got better at concentrating, eventually getting to a point where he was regularly clocking five or more disconnected hours per day in the room, focused without distraction on learning this hard new skill.

"I probably read something like 18 books on the topic by the time I was done," he recalls. After two months locked away studying, Benn attended the notoriously difficult Dev Boot Camp, a 100-hour-a-week crash course in web application programming. While researching the program, Benn found a student with a PhD from Princeton who described Dev as "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life." Given both his preparation and his newly honed ability for deep work, Benn excelled.

"Some people show up not prepared," he said. "They can't focus. They can't learn quickly." Only half the students who started the program with Benn ended up graduating on time. Benn not only graduated, but was also the top student in his class. The deep work paid off. Benn quickly landed a job as a developer at a San Francisco tech startup with $25 million in venture funding and its pick of employees.

When Benn quit his job as a financial consultant, only half a year earlier, he was making $40,000 a year. His new job as a computer developer paid $100,000, an amount that can continue to grow, essentially without limit, in the Silicon Valley market, along with his skill level. When I last spoke with Benn, he was thriving in his new position.

A newfound devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office, allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work without distraction. "On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting," he told me.

"Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I do mean focus. No email, no hacker news, just programming." For someone who admitted to sometimes spending up to 98% of his day in his old job surfing the web, Jason Benn's transformation is nothing short of astonishing. Friend, if you're struggling with this, you can change.

I can change. Your children can change. Harder to change your children, because then you have to deal with their motivation and how do you motivate another person? Difficult. But you can start by setting an example, and I can start by setting an example. Change is hard, but it's worth it.

Jason Benn's story highlights a crucial lesson. Deep work is not some nostalgic affectation of writers and early 20th century philosophers. It's instead a skill that has great value today. There are two reasons for this value. The first has to do with learning. We have an information economy that's dependent on complex systems that change rapidly.

Some of the computer languages Benn learned, for example, didn't exist 10 years ago and will likely be outdated 10 years from now. Similarly, someone coming up in the field of marketing in the 1990s probably had no idea that today they'd need to master digital analytics. To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

This task requires deep work. If you don't cultivate this ability, you're likely to fall behind as technology advances. The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience, e.g. employers or customers, is essentially limitless, which greatly magnifies your reward.

On the other hand, if what you're producing is mediocre, then you're in trouble, as it's too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you're a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot startup.

To succeed, you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing, a task that requires depth. The growing necessity of deep work is new. In an industrial economy, there was a small, skilled, labor, and professional class for which deep work was crucial, but most workers could do just fine without ever cultivating an ability to concentrate without distraction.

They were paid to crank widgets, and not much about their job would change in the decades they kept it. But as we shift to an information economy, more and more of our population are knowledge workers, and deep work is becoming a key currency, even if most haven't yet recognized this reality.

Deep work is not, in other words, an old-fashioned skill falling into irrelevance. It's instead a crucial ability for anyone looking to move ahead in a globally competitive information economy that tends to chew up and spit out those who aren't earning their keep. The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook, a shallow task, easily replicated, but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative, integrated systems that run the service, a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate.

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century." We have now seen two strands of thought, one about the increasing scarcity of deep work, and the other about its increasing value, which we can combine into the idea that provides the foundation for everything that follows in this book.

The Deep Work Hypothesis The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive. This book has two goals pursued in two parts.

The first, tackled in part one, is to convince you the deep work hypothesis is true. The second, tackled in part two, is to teach you how to take advantage of this reality by training your brain and transforming your work habits to place deep work at the core of your professional life.

Before diving into these details, however, I'll take a moment to explain how I became such a devotee of depth. I've spent the past decade cultivating my own ability to concentrate on hard things. To understand the origins of this interest, it helps to know that I'm a theoretical computer scientist who performed my doctoral training in MIT's famed Theory of Computation group, a professional setting where the ability to focus is considered a crucial occupational skill.

During these years, I shared a graduate student office down the hall from a MacArthur Genius Grant winner, a professor who was hired at MIT before he was old enough to legally drink. It wasn't uncommon to find this theoretician sitting in the common space, staring at markings on a whiteboard with a group of visiting scholars arrayed around him, also sitting quietly and staring.

This could go on for hours. I'd go to lunch. I'd come back. Still staring. This particular professor is hard to reach. He's not on Twitter, and if he doesn't know you, he's unlikely to respond to your email. Last year, he published 16 papers. This type of fierce concentration permeated the atmosphere during my student years.

Not surprisingly, I soon developed a similar commitment to depth. To the chagrin of both my friends and the various publicists I've worked with on my books, I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account or any other social media presence outside of a blog. I don't web surf and get most of my news from my home-delivered Washington Post and NPR.

I'm also generally hard to reach. My author website doesn't provide a personal email address, and I didn't own my first smartphone until 2012, when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum. You have to have a phone that works before our son is born. On the other hand, my commitment to depth has rewarded me.

In the 10-year period following my college graduation, I published four books, earned a PhD, wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate, and was hired as a 10-year track professor at Georgetown University. I maintained this voluminous production while rarely working past 5 or 6 p.m. during the work week.

This compressed schedule is possible because I've invested significant effort to minimize the shallow in my life, while making sure I get the most out of the time this frees up. I build my days around a core of carefully chosen, deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output. My commitment to depth has also returned non-professional benefits. For the most part, I don't touch a computer between the time when I get home from work and the next morning when the new work day begins, the main exception being blog posts, which I like to write after my kids go to bed.

This ability to fully disconnect, as opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work email checks or giving in to frequent surveys of social media sites, allows me to be present with my wife and two sons in the evenings, and read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two.

More generally, the lack of distraction in my life tones down that background hum of nervous mental energy that seems to increasingly pervade people's daily lives. I'm comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill, especially on a lazy DC summer night listening to a Nationals game slowly unfold on the radio.

This book is best described as an attempt to formalize and explain my attraction to depth over shallowness, and to detail the types of strategies that have helped me act on this attraction. I have committed this thinking to words, in part to help you follow my lead in rebuilding your life around deep work, but this isn't the whole story.

My other interest in distilling and clarifying these thoughts is to further develop my own practice. Your recognition of the deep work hypothesis has helped me thrive, but I'm convinced that I haven't yet reached my full value-producing potential. As you struggle, and ultimately triumph with the ideas and rules in the chapters ahead, you can be assured that I'm following suit, ruthlessly culling the shallow and painstakingly cultivating the intensity of my depth.

You'll learn how I fare in this book's conclusion. When Carl Jung wanted to revolutionize the field of psychiatry, he built a retreat in the woods. Jung's Bollingen Tower became a place where he could maintain his ability to think deeply, and then apply the skill to produce work of such stunning originality that it changed the world.

In the pages ahead, I'll try to convince you to join me in the effort to build our own personal Bollingen Towers, to cultivate an ability to produce real value in an increasingly distracted world, and to recognize a truth embraced by the most productive and important personalities of generations past.

A deep life is a good life. And thus concludes the introduction to Cal Newport's book entitled "Deep Work." Strongly recommended. Friends, the world of the future is going to be much less egalitarian than the world of today. Instead of a fairly homogenous society with a big middle class and everybody earning about the same amount of money, it's not going to be that way.

The world of the future is going to be a world of extremes. This continues the trend. The most productive 20% of workers are going to receive 80% of the compensation. The most productive of that 20%, meaning the top 4%, are going to receive 80% of the 80%, which means the top 64% of rewards.

Your career focus should be to always be in the top 4% of your field. And in so doing, you will be part of the very small cadre of workers earning 64% of the total income available. In the fullness of time, you will be in the top 4% of wealthy people who control 64% of the wealth.

If possible, it would be great if you could move into the top 20% of the top 4%, which would be the top .8%, let's call it 1% among friends. And in so doing, you will be part of the top 1% that controls 80% of the top 80% of wealth.

Hopefully I did that right. That means that you will be part of the top 1% that controls 51.2% of the wealth of your nation, of your world, etc. You will have a huge set of problems when that happens. There will be hordes of people with pitchforks, both physical and digital, desiring to take that wealth away.

You will also have a huge set of problems to say, "How am I responsible with this wealth?" But the way that you get there is by using the intelligence that you have and harnessing your attention span so that you can take actions and produce work that matters. The reason I read you that entire introduction is to show you, here's a story from someone else of how that can be gained.

You can start with nothing. You can put yourself in a room. You can force yourself to learn something and go into a new field. And if you continue to work in that field, you'll continue to enjoy the benefits of it. Deep work is indeed the superpower of the 21st century.

Now one of the things I've noticed over the years is how absurdly easy it is in the modern world to be in the top 20% of society. Years ago I did a show on the 1000% formula. I pointed out how if you're practicing the 1000% formula, you read a book a week, basically because you read 30 to 60 minutes a day.

You read about a book a week. You read a book a week. That's about 50 books per year. I pointed out how books are the most efficient form of knowledge acquisition because you're standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants of people who have distilled their ideas into the most fundamental concepts possibly available.

Pointed all that out. And I showed you. I said, "Remember, you're living in a society where nobody reads. Now over the next 10 years, you will have read 500 books in your field. You're going to be at the top of your field no matter what because nobody reads for the price of what?

Call it 15 bucks a book times 500 books, $7,500 over the next 10 years of investment in yourself, you're practically in the top, again, you're guaranteed to be in the top 20% if not the top 20% of the top 20%. But today in 2023, the situation is even more lopsided.

When I used to talk about the 1000% formula almost 10 years ago, I talked about it in the context of reading. Well, today, even if somebody reads, nobody has the attention span to actually follow through on anything. And so your ability to follow through and just do something, because remember, it's action that leads to outcomes, not knowledge, it's action.

If you can cultivate an attention span and do deep work, just even more, the distinction is going to be even bigger. All your friends are going to be glued to their phones, swipe, swipe, swipe on whatever their app of choice is, rotting their brains, decreasing their gray matter, lowering their willpower, basically destroying their brains.

Decision is yours. Same thing with your children, you have a choice. Do you allow your children to be stupefied by the culture around? Or do you step in and teach your children how to do deep work? I've done my best and I will continue to do my best to share with you whatever strategies I can see that come up with, but you have to just use that paradigm and figure out what's going to work in your family for yourself, for your children.

Maybe it's those apps that I said, take a look at your screen time, take a look at the OneSec app. Maybe it's dumping your phone. There's all kinds of things that you could do. You got to figure out what's going to work for you. The chain starts with the desire to change and then you figure out how to change.

But this is the superpower of the 21st century. Knowledge is the starting point. I guess desire, ambition, goals are the starting point. Then you acquire knowledge, just the knowledge that you need to start your process towards those goals. And then from there, you need attention span to do deep work, to take the actions that are going to move you toward your goals.

But if you'll do that, the future for you and for your family and for your children is unlimited. We're living in the greatest time to be alive in human history. What it takes though, is someone to open their eyes, look around and recognize how do you thrive in this modern world?

And I've given you the formula as best I understand it. I hope that you'll take it and you'll implement it. Your tough Tacoma is here. Your powerful 4Runner. Your stylish Camry. Your versatile RAV4. Even your fully electric VZ4X. Your new Toyota car, truck or SUV is available now. So see your Toyota dealer today.

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