A short YouTube excerpt in which Nir Eyal recounts a personal anecdote about being distracted by his phone during planned quality time with his daughter. He uses the story to argue that mastering the skill of becoming "indistractable" is essential to living a fulfilled, high-achieving life and urges listeners to learn this skill.
Chapters
It happened when I was with my daughter. We had this day planned where we could spend quality daddy daughter time. And I remember we had this book of activities that dads and daughters could play together. And one of the activities in the book is to ask each other this question. The question was, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember that question verbatim. But I can't tell you what my daughter said, because in that moment, for whatever reason, I thought it was just a good time to just check this one thing on my phone real quick. And by the time I looked up from my device, she was gone. Because I was sending her a very clear message that whatever was on my phone was more important than she was. And if I'm honest with you folks, it wasn't just with my daughter. So if you want to get ahead in life, if you want to live the kind of life you know you are capable of living, you have got to figure out how to become indistractable. It is the skill of the century.