We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.
On Distraction by Alain de Botton. I’ll finish this later, I need to reload Techmeme.
Now what was I doing! 😉
Haha!
Yeah, de Botton brooks no distraction. His “On Love: A Novel” is minute and occasionally disturbing (over-)analysis of anyone’s – everyone’s – typical relationship. And brooks no distraction.
Wonder what’s on Mashable this morning?
This may be why I hang on to my junky old non-smart phone after all these years. I know I need an iPhone — it’s inevitable — but I don’t want to be someone who is so plugged into the chatter that I can’t even appreciate where I am for a moment. This is why I prefer reading books to blogs, and blogs to tweets.
Damn Matt, how do you do it? That was some awesome content with some killer quotes. Definitely going to hype this, and not waste time about it.
I guess a related concept would be Parkinson’s law, or the ready, fire, aim approach to business.
In the end I think it’s all about balance — like most false dichotomies, the right answer isn’t “ready, fire, aim” or “perfect the product, no matter how long it takes” but something in the middle. However I’ve noticed most people passionate about products, like myself, tend to default to private iterations that don’t evolve in the same way they would if they had the benefit of even a few real users.
We are receving so much information these days, that we’re simply not able to process it. We’re not wired for such an information overload. Multitasking is something we, human animals, are not very good at.
The amount of (mostly useless) information that an average human being receives today is hunder times bigger than, say, Leonhardo DaVinci did several hundred years ago. Does that make a man/woman of today smarter?
“We are made” is, in my opinion, the key phrase in the article. Indeed, we are made to do a lot of things. We are made to believe the food we eat is made by farmers. That we can’t live without a particular product. That staying in touch with our frends 24/7 is a good thing.
With all this advances in technology and communications – are we really closer to each other than we were before?
We are not evolving anymore. We are mutating. Rapidly.