A brief YouTube monologue by Asif Osman reflecting on how smartphones affect users' focus. Using two contrasting meeting anecdotes—one where a participant was constantly distracted by phone notifications, and another describing a successful business leader who avoids smartphones—Osman argues that phones should be tools under your control rather than masters of your attention.
Hello there, my name is Asif Osman and I'd like to share another thought with you, which I usually do on my YouTube channel. And this thought was actually provoked by a couple of meetings that I had last week which made me think about smartphones. And smartphones is something that I do think about once in a while. And sometimes I wonder, does the user of a smartphone actually get smarter or do people use smartphones because they want to be smart or they want to look good? And smartphones are really great, but at the end of the day, it's a tool and it's a tool that you use to make your work or your life easier. Well, last week a couple of things happened. I had two meetings, and in one of them, in one of the incidents, one of the people in the meeting was so fidgety and one of the more fidgety guys that I've seen every once in a while in the hour long meeting, he would look at his phone and he'd allow it to beep and basically he lost focus. I don't think he really captured the essence of what we were trying to discuss. And he was distracted so much because every few moments he felt he had to look at his phone and if it beeped, it's as if that beep was so important he had to fidget on his phone for a few seconds. Well, I don't know, frankly, I bet you have met many people like that as well. So the phone is pretty much the master and the user is the slave of the phone. Another meeting I had last week, which was pretty much the opposite, of course. The individual that I met is someone who works for this great man who is the owner of a very large business house and employs thousands of people and pretty much is a billionaire in his own right. And interesting thing that his employee told me is that this individual, this does not carry a smartphone. And I asked him, why? Why doesn't your boss carry a smartphone? Well, he says, first of all, he says that the smartphone is a huge distraction and the smartphone really does not help him to focus on the things at hand. And he would rather manage himself with a simple phone, which just allows him to make and receive calls. I realized at that moment that's the way it is and that's a very successful man telling you how to use a phone. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't use smartphones. I guess the important lesson here is use the phone as a slave rather than your master. So I hope you get the gist of what I mean when I talk about smartphones.
If these are God's chosen people then God chose them to test the rest of us.
