I’m laying here after a tough night with some very puzzling dreams. And I’m thinking, the world really doesn’t work the way people think it does. There are hidden costs to everything, and the truth of them is right beneath the surface. The greatest costs come with our time and attention. This is why it’s so important to value your time, as so many successful people advise. They are correct. 

But what about valuing attention? That’s what my dreams were about… the distractions we allow into our lives are real costs on top of our time. Many of them are extracurricular activities that add no real value to our lives.

I’m not entirely sold on how Tim Ferriss labels his “low-information diet” approach. I don’t think that’s the correct name for it. I think what he’s really saying is to focus on actionable information. That’s not low, that’s basically assigning mental and emotional nutritional value to information. Yes, there is too much information in this world, because a lot of it is noise. 

I think this is why baseball statistics fascinate me. Many of them are interesting but not actionable. A lot of the composite stats are though. Having a quick easy representation of a data set is quite useful. Burying yourself in numbers and spreadsheets does not, unless it’s organized for a narrow actionable focus. 

But I’m really beginning to understand the dangers of an attention based economy, which is precisely what we are in right now. We don’t really value skills properly; we’re just soaking up attention. It’s not about actually solving problems or actually building skills. Yes, attention grabbing is a skill I suppose. But once that attention is grabbed, there are so many empty calories we’re constantly force fed that it’s actually quite ridiculous.

I’ve really dialed back my interest in professional sports. Not the sports themselves mind you, but I’m more interested in the machinations of the professional game rather than the outputs. I’m much more interested in the hard truths of the human costs and the goals of the business side. I’d argue the players are vastly underpaid, which might shock most people. 

The value of one person’s activity is vastly understated when considering their attention drain. The reason people have become progressively more ineffective at their jobs is a matter of a lack of the ability to properly build actionable skill sets. They have so much just-in-case knowledge jammed into their heads that there isn’t room for the just-in-time information that is actually useful and actionable. That’s really what Tim means. Low information isn’t really the best term; it should be high nutrition, low calories information diet. That just doesn’t sound as tidy.

Emily brought up a great point about how no one actually deals with major life altering happenstances. But gatekeeping through credentialism is the real problem; it’s a way to create guaranteed income streams, at a high human cost…