The New York Times tech writer Farhad Manjoo turned to meditation.
Escaping the digital world with app blockers, heightened self-control or even going offline doesn’t work in a world driven by digital connectivity.
There’s meditation that Manjoo says actually helps him to not care as much about the commotion in the digital world and makes him nicer, refreshed and more focused.
There’s heeding to this important warning signal.
If you’re reaching for your phone, the conversation you’re in is not holding your interest.
If you are with a person you care about but you are constantly checking your phone, you don’t care about them as much as you think.
If you’re lost in the black hole of Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat or social media, you need to jump start a new life in real time.
The phone is not going away – it shapes what we see, hear, how we interact, our commerce, everything.
When losing your life to a mobile device, it is time to reexamine the life you are living.
That may be the best gift you’ve ever gotten from a smartphone.
Subscribe to these Day Starters for free here.
Share them with friends and family by forwarding this email or posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social media with my permission.
Read some sample chapters of my book Out of Bad Comes Good, The Advantages of Disadvantages here.
Don’t want to get these emails anymore? Unsubscribe below.
Hi Jerry,
Perfection is such a great topic!
I admit that I aim for perfection, taught to me, in part, by my folks, and later in the Air Force, and during my TV and radio career. (You and I have chatted before.)
In 1967, I was a kid just out of high school in suburban Boston and helped put together a small radio station in our town. Yup, the FCC found out about the operation, showed up in person, and as the two-man crew left, they whispered: “We get a lot of these stations, but yours is the most professionally-run that we’ve ever seen!” WOW!
The local papers did a couple of stories about two brothers and a friend running this station out of our friend’s home. It caught the eye of a local resident who, it turns out, was the film director at Ch. 7 in Boston. He asked if I’d like a summer job in his film department? And, my friend with the keen electronic background, ended up in Master Control.
(Later, he moved to Dallas to open his own audio company, went on the road with folks like Cat Stevens and Willie Nelson, today operates his own station QX-FM.com and recently opened a communications and broadcast museum, profiled on this Texas program: http://thetexasbucketlist.com/2016/04/the-texas-bucket-list-texas-museum-of-broadcasting-and-communications.)
I’m getting ahead of myself. :)
One day at work, as I was splicing commercials together, my boss, the film director, asked me about a problem that impacted commercials on the air. Turns out that during my inspection and cleaning of the commercial film reel being readied for broadcast, I had failed to remove a three-inch piece of masking tape used as a reminder that a missing commercial needed to be inserted at this point on the reel. The head of engineering came down and was none too happy with me as the film reel gummed up the projector, and I couldn’t blame anybody, but myself. It was a very strong lesson learned.
Time marched on and I continued working Ch.7 as a writer, producer, and assignment editor and spent 13 years during the infancy of rock and the later switch to talk, much of the time as a news anchor, at WRKO. And, as you know, Jerry, perfection was an absolute key to success
Attention to detail (is that different from perfection?) is so paramount in all walks of life, even at home with the family. But, my wife believes that I’m a bit too gung-ho while she’s the complete opposite.
For example, she’ll constantly forget to turn off, say, a closet light, leaving the switch-flipping to me. So, as you can see, the issue of perfection can be a source of irritation. But, in my experience of 40 years in broadcasting, perfection leads all of us down the golden path.
My apologies for being so long-winded!
Ron