A short Heroic plus one podcast (Brian Johnson) discussing digital distraction using Cal Newport’s metaphor of a "cognitive athlete who smokes." Through an anecdote with a member named Fernando, the episode argues that frequent, low-effort smartphone checks ('digital puffs') cumulatively damage focus and cognitive capacity, urging listeners to create strict boundaries around social media use and treat attention like a skill to protect.
Hey hero, if you're enjoying these daily plus ones, make sure you head to Heroic us to check out all of the other goodness we have to help you activate your best every day. And now today's plus one.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Heroic plus one. I am absolutely loving connecting with our Heroic Masters in our daily coaching sessions at 1:01pm Central Time. Getting our Soul Force to 101. There's something magical about getting together as a community to move from theory to practice to mastery together every single day. Yesterday I got to spend some time connecting with Fernando, a hero from Mexico. His challenge was creating bright lines around his social media usage so he could use it as a tool for his business without becoming a tool for social media companies trying to make their money hacking his attention now. Fernando is a big fan of Cal Newport. Of course I'm a big fan of Cal as well, which is why we had him join us in our fourth heroic chats with Masters right after three of the most influential guides I've ever had. Phil Stutz, my beloved coach and spiritual father John Mackey, the co founder and former CEO of Whole Foods and William Damon, the renowned Stanford professor who is the world's leading scholar on moral development and how to live a purposeful life. Check out those sessions as part of our Mastery Program. And of course we featured Cal's wisdom in our notes on Deep Work and Digital Minimalism and so good they can't ignore you and how to become a Straight A Student. And he even joined us to lead his own class called Digital Minimalism 101. So Fernando and I talked about one of my favorite ideas from Cal's work, which we discussed way back in the day with plus one number 559 called a cognitive Athlete who Smokes. Here's the short story. Research shows that our addiction to digital stimulation does long term damage to our ability to focus and be present. When we constantly give in to digital distractions going from app to app and site to site, we become what Cal refers to as the cognitive equivalent of of being an athlete who smokes. Now, our supposedly harmless quick check ins while we're waiting in line at the grocery store, at a stoplight or while boarding a flight are not as harmless as we might imagine. Think about it. Let's say you want to be a world class athlete, perhaps an Olympic or world champion. You're committed to being the best athlete you can possibly be. Would you smoke? The idea is absurd. Of course you wouldn't. Right now. As we said in that prior plus one. And I'll repeat again here. You may or may not have the ambition to be a world class thinker or a world class leader, or to be world class at whatever it is you do. But we've got to know that all those little addictive checks on our smartphones are the cognitive equivalent of being an athlete who smokes. Puff, puff, puff. Insert smoking emoji. Of course, any one quick puff of a cigarette or a quick digital hit may not do any significant damage. But aggregate and compound those two packs of puffing a day, or your equivalent dozens of digital puffs a day, and what do we get? We get some badly atrophied and scarred lungs and equivalently atrophied and scarred neurons. Anyone serious about showing up at their heroic best wouldn't choose to do that. And that's today's plus one. Are you taking any digital puffs that you know aren't serving you? Is today a good day to kick the habit? Day one all in. Let's go, hero.
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