What is your MOST important, non-renewable resource?

I don’t use caps lock that often, but when I do, it means I’m passionate about it. This resource is used in both business and personal life.

Technology? You can always buy more of it and optimize its use.

Money? You can always make/beg/borrow/steal more.

Health? Getting warmer, but not quite, at least not directly (1). This deserves its own post, but barring inherited predispositions towards disease and injury, you have more control over your personal health than nearly anything else in your life. You have direct control over your own “meat vehicle”; you don’t have to ask permission from a bureaucracy to change what food you put in your mouth or how much physical activity you perform. Use that to your advantage (2).

Time

Time once spent, cannot ever be gotten back. AND you only have a limited, finite amount of it (3).

Those seconds that turn into minutes, that turn into hours, that turn in to days/months/years cannot be returned, reused, or repurposed for personal fulfillment or enjoyment.

Take a hard look about how many times you open up Facebook or other social media and “news” sites in a day. There always seems to be “dead time” to check it. I’m just as guilty, if not more.

My job involves waiting for code to compile and for automated tests to run, so there is plenty of opportunity for “dead time” in between my day’s tasks. That’s when the phone comes out and the brain turns off as I mindlessly scroll from one headline, “Stephen A. Smith ‘disappointed’ in Cam Newton” to another “Iranian Hackers Targeted Deloitte Via A Seriously Convincing Facebook Fake”. (The irony is not lost on me that you’re probably reading this from me posting on Facebook.)

I’m able to mitigate the mindless scrolling with the Freedom app/web blocker (not an affiliate link). It works pretty well, and has a technically interesting blocking mechanism, but I still want to analyze the motivation for why we want to turn out brains off and let the phone do the thinking for us.

Cliche Alert

It’s cliche at this point, but we have a fear of missing out. We’re always waiting for something to happen. We want to be one of the first people to know something “new” and then repost it to show our friends how much we know about the world. (Again, the irony is not lost on me that I’m posting this as if I know something about the world, but I will give myself the credit of actually writing this whole post, not just reposting what someone else said.)

But when has reading something from Facebook/Reddit/Hacker News/Social Media fundamentally changed your life? How many times have you made a life decision based on a single source of posted media or content? For me, zero, and I would hazard a guess that it is zero or close to it for you as well.

If we’re not changing our lives around based on the “7 Easy Little Ways You Can Greatly Improve Your Health”, (even though it says something important about health!), then what are we getting out of bite-sized articles? (Side note: my favorite meta-listicle)

I think of personal media consumption (and learning / life experience in general) as like a constant, flowing stream of water. This stream carves out paths in the unshaped bedrock of your mind.

Each headline digs into the bedrock a bit while still going along a pre-existing path to reinforce an idea. The overall bedrock is molded by this stream. Learning is in the direction of this flowing stream.

Where is your stream flowing?

I challenge you to evaluate the content you choose to view on a daily basis and the thoughts that arise from that content. Is it supportive of who you want to be? Is it carefully chosen to carve out the direction you want your mind to go?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for your life to be 100% “productive” (whatever that means) and 0% fun. There has to be a yin and a yang, an ebb and flow (topic for a future post). Go ahead and watch that cat video, share those dank memes, catch up on celebrity gossip. Just don’t do it “mind-less”-ly out of habitx. Be “mind-full” of the stream you are shaping your bedrock with and how often you are doing so.

If you want to change the direction of your stream, you are my motivation for creating this content. I want to be a part of the stream that positively shapes people’s minds and help them find life in the “dead time” that may not have been positive and supportive otherwise. Plus, I have gotten a lot out of writing this by crystallizing my thoughts and expressing myself more eloquently than I am normally able to in a conversation.

Look out for more posts from me in the future about heady topics such as: Grit, Humility, Mentorship, Injury, as well as lighter topics like the music I listen to, what I do for fun, etc.

Thank you for reading!

Footnotes:

(1) The total amount and quality of time one has is heavily influenced by the aforementioned “Health” factor, so invest your time in a “guaranteed ROI” by improving your fitness.

(2) I constantly need to remind myself about this. Luckily, I enjoy physical activity. Unluckily, I don’t enjoy green things, and love carbs. Find ways to make incremental, consistently-held changes in your life. This will be a post at some point.

(3) Probably the most shocking and awkward to explain phone background I’ve had for about 4 months is “You’re Gonna Die” from Gary Vaynerchuk. Currently it is “Good” by Jocko Willink since I’ve gotten injured. More on that later.