Distraction Is Killing You

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back to the show. I want to share something with you that sits really, really deep within my heart and that is the fact that you are so distracted. That's right. You, you and I, and the majority of other humans, we are chronically distracted. Look, researchers have shown that IQ goes down by 10 points when you're distracted. But research also shows that when you smoke a joint. That's right, marijuana. When you smoke a joint, your IQ points on average go down by 5 points. So therefore, what these scientists are saying, and they actually presented this to Hewlett Packard, was that it's twice as bad for decision making and focus to be distracted than it is to be stoned right now. Please. I'm not encouraging you to go out and smoke weed, but what I'm saying is distraction is destroying our ability to do great work and to have deep relationships. Now, there's an amazing book I read recently called Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Please get the book. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. And no, I don't get any commissions. It's not an affiliate link. It'll just be a link to Amazon where you can go and get it. It's a phenomenal book and there's a couple of things I want to share from that. Number one, we now live in an attentional pathogenic culture, which is an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us and you have to swim upstream to achieve it. Let me tell you this, it's not your Fault, you cannot focus. Secondly, attention spans are decreasing at the time when we need the most. One of the biggest contributors to inaction on big issues such as climate change is the lack of focus from a societal standpoint. When attention breaks down, problem solving breaks down. And thirdly, most office workers never get an hour to themselves without being interrupted. The average CEO of a Fortune 500 company, for example, gets just 28 uninterrupted minutes a day. What? How insane is that? 28 uninterrupted minutes a day? I'm going to tell you something. I firmly believe we're moving into a new age. There's going to be a new rich and a new poor. The new rich are going to be the humans who manage their focus, who understand that technology and other things at play are holding them back and distracting them, and they're going to put things in place to actually deal with it. The new poor are going to be the people who are addicted to to their technology, who have no time to focus, who can't solve complex problems, who avoid thinking at all costs. Now, look, there's a couple of quotes that I want to share from stolen Focus. Empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances and empathy. Look, to be empathic, you've got to be present, you've got to think, you've got to put yourself in other people's shoes, you've got to be fully and radically present. So please don't kid yourself thinking, hey, I'm very empathic. If you're constantly distracted, you need space and time and presence to be empathic. And another great quote was, it's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day. And then you're being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns. And look, the book goes deep on this, but it's quite staggering what's happening to our psychology. Simply by using phones, you know, iPhone, Android, whatever you're on iPads, these things, including the apps that send us notifications, these social media companies who are absolutely manipulating us. And look, I use these platforms, don't get me wrong, I do. But I'm learning where I'm being used and where I'm able to use it. And isn't it interesting that, you know, a lot of, say, a healthcare provider would call you a member, whereas in Palo Alto, for these social media companies, what do they call you and I? That's right, they call us users. When I think of a user, I'm like, oh, that person is a drug taker. Right. Isn't it interesting? They call us users rather than members. I'm not a Facebook member. I'm a user. So just want you to just to reflect on that. Now, the exciting thing, here's some things that you can do to improve your attention. So if you want to destroy your distraction, please think about this one. Use pre commitment to stop switching tasks so much. That's right, you're not a multitasker, you're just a task switcher. How do you do that? Well, a very simple way is get a case if. Right, just the letter K followed by the word safe. K safe. And I've had a few clients do this, suggested they needed it. You get a big plastic safe that has a timer on it. You put all your devices in there and you set 30 minutes or an hour. You cannot open that bad boy until the time is up. So use that pre commitment to actually stop yourself from switching. Secondly, embrace mind wandering. Letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention, but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right. When you're mind wandering, that's where creativity happens. You need to let your mind wander because that's when your brain's able to process something that's happened over here in your life and something that's happened over there. And that's when the two things can actually blend together and you come up with radically new solutions. That's how inventors invented their minds wandered. Now, at school, we're told to be quiet. We're told to sit down, we're told to stop daydreaming. Well, at least I was. Don't know about you, but we're told to stop these things. And in fact, it's one of the things we should be encouraged to do if we want to improve our attention. Then please take more time to let your mind wander. Get off your phone. Stop engaging in endless scrolling. Now, another big takeaway here is sleep is not a luxury. It's essential for sustained focus. So what is your sleep like? Do you measure your sleep? Look, you measure your money every week. You look for your paycheck. Come in, you look at the revenue for your company, whatever it might be, you measure it. But why don't you measure your sleep? There's a small population that actually measures their sleep. If you're not measuring already, I'm going To encourage you to get a wearable, whether it's a Garmin, whether it's an Oura ring. And no, I don't get any kickbacks, royalties commissions from those companies. I just think their products are very good. Why would you measure your sleep? Well, when you get proper deep and REM sleep, it allows your brain to flush out toxins, which can lead to fogginess in your mind. It can lead to tiredness during the day. It can lead to neurological disorders later in life, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. So sleep is crucial. And here's something very interesting. If you're awake for 18 hours, and I'm sure you've been awake for 18 hours, right? If you're awake for 18 hours, that's the equivalent of being legally drunk. So please, if someone gets down on a knee and proposes to you and you've been awake for 18 hours, don't make that decision. Wait, don't make any important decisions when you're legally drunk, right? So you wouldn't make big decisions, or hopefully you wouldn't drive heavy machinery when you're legally drunk. But we get behind the wheel of a car when we've been up for 18 hours, we make important business decisions. We have important conversations with our loved ones when we're being up for 18 hours. So I want you to just think about the importance of your focus. If we can collectively turn the focus of humanity, it's going to be a massive impact for our communities, for our world. And that starts with you. So my challenge to you is, what are you going to do today to just embrace a little bit more focus? Here's something I did recently. Much to the dismay of some people, I pop my phone on do not disturb, essentially flight mode. Only two people can get through two of the most important people in my life. And it stays like that all day. And when I need to make a call, well, it's on my calendar, it's scheduled. Or when I need to go to a meeting, I go there. I went into the notifications and I took a. Took me probably 90 seconds. And I switched off every push notification. So if someone sends me a text, I do not get a ding and it doesn't come up and show me a little red notification to say it's there. I just don't. There's no notifications. There's no little red flags telling me I've got to go and check something. None of that. I choose when to go in there. Why? Well, not because I'm special, not because, you know, it's it's also easy. But because I was struggling, I was struggling to just be energized. I was struggling to show up. I was struggling to think deeply. I was struggling to relax. Does any of that sound like you? Please, I'm going to challenge you to just do one thing today. Whether it's to go do not disturb, have a device free hour every day and sleep doesn't count. Of course you can't have your device with you when you sleep. Well, you can have it with you, but you can't check it. So I want you to think about what does that look like? Why is it important for you to be able to focus? Well, it's your quality of life we're talking about here. So are you going to be part of the new rich or the new poor? That's the question. So I hope Today Solo cast has served you. Please do me a favor, share this podcast with one friend. That would just be huge. I want to support as many great humans and high performers out there as possible. So please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

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