Why You Can’t Hit Your Goals and You’re Confused

This is the most confused society to ever exist. Have you ever gone to the kitchen to grab something and you forgot the very thing that you went out there to go grab? Or better yet, have you ever grabbed your phone to send a message or do something important on there but forgot what you were doing and ended up doing something completely different? Or better yet, you're having a full-blown conversation with someone and all of a sudden you say, I don't remember what I was about to say. Shoot, hopefully it comes back. That's not forgetfulness. That is signs that your brain is showing a confusion collapse and it's happening to everyone, including myself. And No, it's not because you're lazy. It's not because you're broken, but it's because your mind is being stretched thinner than ever before in human history. And the truth is, these 4 hidden problems are eating away at your ability to think clearly every single day. And if you don't fix these problems, they're going to trickle into all areas of your life, whether that be business, fitness, relationships, and anything else you can think of. Now, I believe one of the biggest attributing factors to this decay and this ensue of confusion amongst humanity is short-form content. I believe short-form content is a plague amongst your mind. Have you ever promised yourself just one video or just one second? You want to just see this one thing, and before you know it, you just spent hours and you don't even know where the time just went. Now, that's not just lost time. It's a direct hit to your brain's prospective memory. Now, if you don't know what prospective memory is, it's basically the mental tab or a mental system that holds onto intentions, like remembering to reply to an email. Now, if it's happening to small-scale things like remembering to reply to an email, imagine what it's doing to the goals that you set off to do, or better yet, the vision that you hold yourself to. A lot of the times people don't complete their goals because they just merely forget them. And that's because short-form content is destroying your prospective memory, which is the memory to intentions. So if you have an intention to be a better self, it's eroding it every time you scroll on the platform. And no, I'm not just making that up. Gloria Mark at UC Irvine tracked workers and found they switched tasks every 3 minutes. And the crazy part is half of those switches weren't caused by a boss or coworker. They were self-interruptions. Humanity is so conditioned to be distracted that we intentionally distract ourselves. And the shocking part about distractions is every interruption doubles your chance of forgetting what you actually intended to do. So when you dive into short form, your brain is constantly resetting those intentions like corrupted files on a PC. That's why you walk into the kitchen and forget the exact thing you were there for, or you open your phone to text someone and 10 minutes later you're deep into a TikTok scroll hole with no memory of the original goal. Short form isn't just stealing your minutes, it's eroding the system your brain uses to stay on track. And the crazy thing is Nicholas Carr warned about this shift years ago in the book The Shallows. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but he wrote, the internet itself is endless novelty headlines, feeds, and scrolls that train your brain to skim instead of think. That was back in 2010. Now imagine what he would say about TikTok today. And the reason why you cannot get off short-form content is because it floods your mind with dopamine. And not the way that you think. The reason it floods your mind is because Short-form content is a chronic state of novelty. And if you know anything about dopamine, you know it's directly correlated to novelty. And the solution is simple. Obviously cut out short-form content, but the practicality of that is not that easy. No one can just say, I'm done with something and just walk away. Maybe not no one. Many people can, but more than likely most people cannot. So what you should do instead, which is something that I actually do and everything I'm going to tell you in this video that will help you increase your clarity and exchange confusion for clarity is things that I've actually implemented in myself because I run a business that focuses on content creation and it is the center focus of my existence and I obsess with content. So with that being said, I'm constantly in a chronic place of being in an environment that makes me want to scroll these things. And I've had to find ways to supplement that chronic dopamine chasing environment to more depthful things. So the very first thing that you should do as a solution is replace your short form with long form. And you could start with something small. Whenever you would open up your app for Instagram or TikTok or whatever and to go scroll, just open up YouTube instead. And not in the Shorts feed, make sure that you're actually on the homepage where you could be given the option to check long-form videos. Long-form is extremely important because long-form removes that shallow dopamine that I was talking about, or better yet, it replaces that chase of novelty, and it replaces it with something I call depth dopamine. That's the reward you feel when you complete something you actually learn, or something that invokes a new inspiration in your mind. And it's not just me boasting about long-form. In fact, there was a study done by University of California, and this study showed that students who engage with 20 minutes of uninterrupted lectures significantly higher retention and intention recall compared to those who learned in microclips. In other words, long form doesn't just entertain, it literally trains your memory to hold onto goals. You could start with this video. If you finish this video, you just trained your memory. I look at it like this. Long form isn't just entertainment, it is actually medicine for your mind, and it's training you every time you complete these videos. Meanwhile, on the other hand, short form chips away at your memory, but it's not the only thief. Even if you never scroll again, your focus will still be hijacked dozens of times every single day. That's the invisible damage of notifications, something I call the notification contamination. We live in a world where we are continuously contaminated with so many notifications. You see, the average person gets between 100 and 150 notifications every single day. You need to think of every single notification as someone tapping you on the shoulder mid-thought. Like, as if I'm filming this video and somebody's tapping on me and I'm trying not to address it and continue to prove my point. And the scary part is most of us allow it. The look away from the camera to talk to somebody tapping you, most of us will do that. There's this really cool research done by Gloria Marks. It takes 23 minutes to fully refocus after interruption. So when your phone buzzes or someone taps you on the shoulder during work, you don't just lose 10 seconds, which you would think, oh, it's just a few seconds. You're actually losing almost a half hour of clarity. Now, if you multiply that by the number of alerts you get on a single day, you're bleeding hours you never even noticed. But the damage runs even deeper than that. Each ping leaves what psychologists call attention residue, which is a mental ghost of the task you just checked. Which is why even when you complete certain things, you don't feel like they're actually fully done because there's a residue of the interruption that stained the interaction of whatever you're doing. For instance, let's go back to the filming of this video. If I'm filming, someone interrupts me and I jump back to the sentence. Yeah, I might complete the sentence, but I don't feel that I gave the delivery I was supposed to give prior to that interruption. And that's what happens every time you do something. And if you're somebody that's effective and you like to give it your all whenever you're doing anything, mental residue will eliminate the possibility of that ever happening. And that's exactly why deep work feels completely impossible. It's not just a distraction, it's a contamination. There's a book I once read, it was called "The Distracted Minds," and it explained this exact situation I'm talking about perfectly. And it said something just like this, "We suffer from an unprecedented overload of information and interruptions, and our brains have not evolved to handle it." Now, the solution is very simple. Mute and hide. Turn off all nonessential notifications. Hide apps from your home screen. That's something that was a big upside for the ROI on a solution that I've implemented in my life. I've taken Instagram and all the shallow depth scrolling things and I've hidden it from my home screen. That way, whenever I open my phone out of guttural reaction to just open something, because that's what everyone does, I don't have Instagram there for me to go get Instagram. It's a whole process and a lot of times it's just a poor mission or I revert to going on YouTube and absorbing long-form content which strengthens the muscle of memory, which we talked about a little bit earlier. Now, the home screen play is a big one. You need to think of your home screen as a door because that's what it is. When you leave your home screen open and you have all these strangers— TikTok, Instagram, all these things— the likelihood of them coming through the door into your mind is very high. So why would you leave the door open? By rearranging your home screen, you're basically putting a lock on the door and closing it to allow the exercise of strengthening your mind rather than diluting it with confusion. And no, I'm not just making this up. One study actually found disabling phone notifications cut phone checks by 47%. That's not just fewer distractions, it's hours of clarity given back to you. Silencing notifications literally gives you back hours. But unfortunately, time isn't the only thing at risk. Your ability to focus and the stamina of your attention is actually collapsing in a different way. This is the attention stamina collapse. A lot of people say our attention spans are shrinking, and that's not actually the case. They're not shrinking, they're actually evolving. They're evolving into something vastly more dangerous than the thought of a shrinking attention span. They're turning into a hyperselective attention. Think about it. Your brain isn't gone. It's just trained to ignore anything that doesn't deliver instant stimulation. If we look at short-form content, It's 30 seconds, 60 seconds with music, captions, different scenes, jump cuts, animations, and it has you completely locked in. On the contrary, go in a quiet room with a book and no notifications. What happens? Your brain will immediately revolt. And there's a study done by Gloria Mark that actually shows this to be very true. The average screen focus dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2024 to just 47 seconds in 2023. And here's the twist. It's not that we can't focus. It's that we require more stimulation to unlock a deeper focus. It's like your brain has put attention behind a paywall and the currency is novelty. That's why you could binge an entire Netflix series or you can scroll on TikTok or Instagram for countless hours, but you can't sit through a long-form piece of content or watch an entire lecture. Your attention stamina isn't gone, it's being trapped behind the wrong habits, which is everything we talked about so far. In Gloria Mark's book, she put it very simple. We can still pay attention deeply, but it now takes more deliberate effort and fewer distractions to get there, which is basically implying we don't have attention problems. We just need forever increasing stimulation to make us want to use our attention and/or focus. There's a very funny thing going around on the internet that I actually think is very good for humanity. If you've ever seen it, it would look something like this. Somebody would be doing a selfie video and they would have no AirPods in their ears and they would not be doing anything other than the very thing that they're doing. Most of the time you would see these creators on an airplane saying, raw dogging a 10-hour flight. Raw dogging life, as funny and comical as it sounds, is a very healthy way to train your mind to not need loads of stimulus to just give 10 minutes of attention. And if I didn't make raw dogging clear enough, what it means is doing something with zero stimulation added other than the very thing you're doing. For instance, next time you eat, don't put your phone propped up watching something. Take a walk, leave your phone behind. A lot of this will feel extremely uncomfortable at first, but that discomfort is the attention stamina rebuilding. So raw dogging life is a very mindful practice, and I implore you to dedicate some part of your day to raw dogging life or whatever task you're doing at the moment. You may feel bored and you may reach for your phone, but if you don't bring your phone with you, then you can't reach for it, which will force you to raw dog the activity. And what you'll find is when you raw dog the activity, you actually find more connectivity to the thing that you're doing. I found myself finding food vastly more enjoyable when I don't have something playing in my ears or I'm texting or something's playing on the screen. Slowly but surely, you will actually taste your food more. And that applies to anything. I've actually started doing some workouts without headphones in at all. No music, no podcasts, no nothing. And I have vastly more of an intention-filled workout, which allows me to feel the activity more versus me just doing the movements of the activity. Mindfulness research shows that 20% of people who who practice a single sensory task see a 30% increase in sustained focus in just after 8 weeks. So there's hope. You can rebuild your stamina by stripping away the noise and practicing raw-dogging your tasks. But there's still one more trap, and it's the most seductive of them all. The lie is that doing more at once makes you more productive. This is what I call multitask is a multi-lie. You see, we've been told that multitasking is a skill. But neuroscience proves it to be a lie. And I actually 100% stand behind the narrative that multitasking does not exist. A lot of literature shows that there's no such thing as multitasking. It's task switching because you actually can't do two things at once. You can only switch between them. And every switch comes with a tax. And that tax is your efficiency in the very thing that you're doing. The American Psychological Foundation found that multitasking cuts efficiency by 40%. So that's the fourth 40% efficiency tax that you have to pay every time you think that you could switch in between things. That means if you think you're getting ahead by juggling, you're actually moving slower. It's like changing lanes in traffic, but you actually don't get ahead because you're blocked in every lane. You think that you're doing something, but you're actually doing nothing and burning more fuel and eating more rubber on your tires. The biggest danger with multitasking is that it makes you feel productive because it makes you feel busy. You trick yourself into thinking you get more done, when in reality no task actually gets the full potential it should have. Busyness isn't progress, it's just organized confusion. And that's the very thing we're trying to move away from. It's the illusion of movement without satisfaction of a result. There's a really good book called Deep Work, and it puts it very bluntly: if you don't produce, you won't thrive, no matter how skilled or talented you are. And the best solution to this is something I call monotasking. Just doing one thing and giving that one thing your full attention. You see, when you look at multitasking and you compare it to monotasking, multitasking typically looks like this. Nothing actually ever gets done. Just little bites here and there happen, but they actually never add up to greatness. Even if you look like you've covered more bases because you've done a couple of things, none of the things done are done significantly enough to make an impact. When you look at monotasking, even if you only got one thing done, you got it done with such significance that it actually moves the needle in your life. Monotasking is the complete opposite of multitasking. The opposite of multitasking isn't laziness, it's finishing. Block out one task, ignore everything else, and don't stop until it's complete. Cook without checking your phone, write without opening another tab, go to the gym without without scrolling in between sets. University of Utah research shows that monotaskers have a 50% higher completion than multitaskers. Monotasking could be one of the most significant changes you make in your life that has the biggest impact on your goals. And when you put all these together, something powerful happens. You get your mind back, you exchange confusion for clarity, and you're able to build that business. You're able to scale past a certain revenue ceiling. You're able to get to a lower percent body fat. You're able to connect with your spouse. You're able to actually socialize and connect with people on a deeper level because confusion dilutes all of those things and doesn't let you actually feel them to the magnitude that you should be feeling them. So if you've been feeling more scattered than ever, it's not just you. It's these four forces working together. The short-form plague that eats away your memory, the constant notification contamination, the collapse of attention stamina into hyperselectivity, and the multitasking lie that convinces you Busy equals productive, but each has a fix. Replace short form with long form. It's going to train your memory. Mute and hide notifications to reclaim your clarity. Raw dog your tasks to build attention stamina and monotasking to actually finish what you start. The solution isn't complicated, but it's rare. A lot of people like the idea of change more than the act of it. But if you start small and you do small long enough, eventually that small is going to add up to something big and you're going to make a radical change in your life. Unfortunately, most people won't make it this far and they're going to continue to drown in a world of confusion. But the ones who reclaim their mind one task at a time will be completely unstoppable. And I'll leave with this. Cal Newport said it best: In a world of constant distraction, the ability to focus is becoming increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. In a world addicted to distraction, clarity isn't just a superpower. It's the ultimate competitive advantage against everyone else. Subscribe to this channel if you want to unlock depths of your mind to find more meaningful work and make better videos.