ha! you clicked!

bet you are already itching to scroll away

because you’re a junkie (an internet junkie to be specific)

just begging for a hit. twitter. porn. email. anything new.

i mean let’s call it what it is .. a massive issue!

or is it a massive opportunity??

it’s called distraction arbitrage

put simply it is the unfair advantage you get from keeping your focus while everyone else sells theirs for tiny hits.

cool, let’s dig in!

an arbitrage is a gap nobody has closed yet

once everyone notices, the gap disappears and the arbitrage is gone

luckily some of the smartest engineers alive are being paid millions to make distraction harder to resist (sad)

great news for you. terrible news for society.

so while everyone else keeps getting worse at focusing, focus keeps getting rarer

and thanks to leverage, more valuable.

one actually focused day can now beat a week of half-assed work between 571 iphone pickups

and let’s be real .. it’s not because you are now a genius ..

it’s because the bar is that damn low!

but if locking away your iphone and deleting social media gives you the heebie jeebies, don’t worry.

i am about to hypnotize you.

okay, not actually. that is for another day.

i am going to show you how to break the habit without willpower. that’s right. no forcing at all

you do not need to get better at saying no.

you need to stop believing there is anything good to say yes to.

this is what allen carr does in the easy way to stop smoking and the easy way to stop drinking.

he does not give you more discipline.

he removes every reason you still think smoking or drinking gives you something.

people finish his books and quit addictions they spent years fighting

carr uses an entire book

but we have maybe 60 seconds before you check twitter again

let’s ruin your three favorite reasons.

“i’ll be bored”

yes. for a minute.

then something terrifying happens: you start thinking.

boredom is where your brain starts connecting things.

that’s why your best thoughts arrive in the shower. it is one of the few places you stop feeding your brain new information from devices.

your best ideas have been trying to reach you. but you only listen to everyone else’s.

“i need to relax”

scrolling is physically passive but mentally exhausting.

your body is on the couch. but your brain is making hundreds of tiny decisions about what to watch, read, skip, or become angry about.

here’s an easy test:

if it makes it harder to return to what you were doing, it was not a break.

“i need to stay informed”

here’s another easy test:

what did you see in the news yesterday that changed how you lived or worked today?

nothing?

then you were not informed. you were just stimulated.

okay that 60 second belief breaking exercise probably wasn’t enough.

so i highly recommend doing your own research.

dopamine, attention economy, boredom, etc

go deep.

keep researching until you can’t possibly see how constant distraction could benefit you in the slightest way

and then you can take the distraction arbitrage