Consumption vs Creation and 20 Seconds of Courage

The more time I spend with high-performance individuals, skilled and wise older professionals and people that inspire me, the more I believe that technology isn’t always our friend.

While I do love what technology can do “for” us, it’s what it is doing “to” us that concerns me.  Particularly, when I think about my grandkids who range in age from 3 to 21.  And when I talk with young energetic individuals who are just entering the job market.  And the many people I know who are unable to detach from their phones for more than 10 minutes.

I recently read that people check their phones on average 58 times per day, or every 12–13 minutes. This adds up to over 4 hours of screen time per day, or about 70 days a year spent looking at a phone.  A person could write a book in 70 days if they wanted.  Yikes. 

When did we stop thinking? 

Why do we use our valuable time consuming rather than creating or contributing?

When did what “others” are thinking and doing become our path forward? 

And it’s not that I don’t appreciate learning from other and avoiding reinventing the wheel, but hours and hours and hours of consumption is an addiction.  It’s something my high-performance coaching clients and I talk about on a regular basis.  Our ambitions are just that – ours.  When we lack agency, intent or purpose we are kind of like salmon drifting down stream.  I remember seeing a quote that said something like “It takes a strong fish to swim upstream. Even a dead one can float with the current.”  And aren’t we so much more than that?

It takes courage to swim up stream.  To choose to captain your own ship.  It’s okay to start small knowing that courage and comfort cannot coexist in this uncertain world.

Maybe you are just tired or uninspired, lacking a personal mission to take on.  When that happens, we scroll and scroll and scroll hoping to find some magic.  The magic is already inside you.  Be brave.

My dad once told me that when ever life offers up a choice, the proverbial fork in the road, always choose the hardest path because nine times out of ten it’s the right path.