How To Reverse Brain Rot
The moment I stepped into the hotel lobby, I tapped my left pocket out of instinct.
It was empty.
A fleeting shock permeated my entire body for a split second.
You know that panicked feeling that hits you when you’ve lost something important?
You feel like you’re temporarily frozen in time.
I realized I’d left my phone in the Emirates car.
In what was a futile effort, I walked briskly back outside searching for the car.
Unfortunately it was long gone…
Attaching too much importance to the entire scenario, we spent the next hour on the phone to Emirates being lead around in circles. No one knew anything.
It was midnight, I’d just flown in to Istanbul and was beginning to feel irritated.
Obviously this was the last thing I wanted.
Catching myself before saying something I’d likely regret, I released all importance attached to getting the phone back and called it a night.
The truth is that I couldn’t care less about the phone.
The only thing I cared about were the thousands of photos still on there.
Usually I’m not so organized and had six months worth of photos on the phone from my travels that I’d failed to back-up — I wanted them back.
I also didn’t fancy wasting hours of time on the phone to banks and various software providers trying to set up my 2FA codes again.
I woke up the next morning and had some fruit for breakfast (this fruit until noon concept is working well by-the-way) before setting the hotel lobby staff the task of tracking down the phone (why should it be my job lol?).
Forgetting all about the phone, I grabbed my kindle, notebook and pen and headed off to Voyage Coffee.
They have easily some of the best and strongest coffee in the world. Plus it’s easy to spend hours in there reading with their stunning interior.
Already I was feeling noticeably more present, perceptive and engaged with my immediate environment.
I was feeling a sense of relief to be away from the phone. For months it felt like this tiny device had a psychological hold over me.
I felt like things had flipped.
I’d been spending a lot more time on the phone than normal. It felt like the phone was in charge of me. More-so than me being in charge of the phone.
I sat in the cafe re-reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x and lost all concept of time. I was fully immersed, captivated and absorbed by the words I was reading.
So much so that I pulled out my notebook and starting making a tonne of notes using compelling sentences from the book as writing prompts.
One of the things the book talks about is the concept of the Gap vs the Gain.
When you’re in the gap, you’re measuring yourself against an ideal.
The problem here is that ideals aren’t stable… They are always changing based on where you’re at in the present moment.
Another way to conceptualize this is the horizon in a desert. It’s a mirage.
No matter how far you keep on walking, you see it but you never reach it.
The gap is an unhealthy need you’ve placed on something outside yourself.
Go back to a time where you felt like you needed something…
You needed that deal. You needed that new car. You needed that house. You needed the weather to be better. You needed that person to be “better.”
You needed that promotion.
You needed that raise.
The gap is never be satisfied because what you’re chasing is the real life equivalent of a mirage in the desert.
The gap is an externally focused approach to the world. It’s where you’re measuring yourself against other people, an idea or anything external to you.
You’re approaching things from a state of need rather than want.
The gain, on the other hand, is a proactive, creative and internal approach to measuring yourself and your experiences.
When you’re in the gain, you are not measuring yourself against anything external.
You’re only measuring yourself against yourself.
You’re measuring yourself against where you were before.
You want it. But you don’t need it.
A personal example of being in the gain is this Substack.
“BuT BRO… thE OpPoRtunItY CoSt!!!”
I’ve had people give me bizarre reactions when I mention to them that I’m writing one article per week.
Many just dismiss it entirely (lol!).
They mention things like “the opportunity cost” and that I could be making more money if I spent the same amount of time working on “BIZneSs sTuFf” instead.
The honest truth is that I couldn’t care less.
These people are in the gap.
My next 10x is devoting more time to writing and creation.
That’s because I’m only measuring against myself. It’s a massive 10x for me personally to be doing this compared to working on yet another marketing campaign.
My businesses are mostly now self managing and I have a brilliant team that does this for me anyway.
My next 10x is building out this platform (whatever it is) and potentially writing a book.
“Your level of capability in the future depends on the measurement of achievements in the past. You can’t move forward and grow until you have acknowledged how far you’ve come and how properly you have measured your gains.”
The next hour totally melted from a conventional time perspective.
I was fully absorbed writing out all my 10x wins and piecing everything together from the last few years.
“You’ve gone 10x before: Review your 10x jumps and “the 20%” of those jumps.”
Ideas were coming out of nowhere.
Not only was I dialed in from a focus perspective, clarity regarding my future direction was streaming in from nowhere.
It was becoming immediately clear what path I wanted to take next and what decisions I should be making now into order to go down this path.
The mental fog was lifting and everything was becoming clear.
After what felt like hours, I went on a long walk around the Mall lost in my own thoughts. Honestly I felt like I was operating in some other dimension.
I’d lost all concept of time.
I walked into a supermarket and said “good afternoon” to the girl packing the shelves.
She smirked and me and said “SIR… It’s still morning.”
We joked around for a bit and then it hit me…
I had entered what’s known at “Kairos” time.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos.
Chronos refers to the conventional or sequential perception of time.
Kairos on the other hand refers to period or season. It’s a passage of time that’s not exactly known, established or even defined.
Chronos is quantitive… Think meeting after meeting. Everything is scheduled.
Kairos has a certain higher quality to it. A more permanent nature if you will.
Chronos time passes whether you’re fully conscious or not.
We you’re operating on chronos, time passes you by very easily.
You’ll be caught up in overthinking, micromanagement or busyness BUT not real movement or high quality output.
When you’re operating in kairos, you gain the ability to tap into higher levels of consciousness and subconsciousness.
You’ll automatically gain access to groundbreaking ideas, superior human connection and inspiration. Essentially you’ll experience a lot more flow.
Advancement and progression is kairos.
Busy and over-scheduled is chronos.
You know you’ve entered kairos time when you are fully absorbed in the moment. The more you live life in kairos, the more meaning and peak experiences you’ll encounter.
When you’re not making massive progress, time speeds up. The years pass by and you’ll feel stuck on a hamster wheel going nowhere fast.
When you have a packed calendar full of calls, meetings and respond to emails, you’ll notice time starts speeding up…
“I’d love to but I’m just too busy” says the person trapped in chronos time.
It’s one of the main reasons I never follow up with people who use busy as an excuse. It either means they can’t manage their time or they simply aren’t interested.
On the flip side, when you are transforming and making massive progress, time actually slows down. You’ll feel like every year is a decade for you.
All of this got me thinking…
Imagine how many ideas, interactions, events, insights, clarity and breakthroughs we are missing out on when glued to our phones constantly?
Imagine all the groundbreaking inventions, works of art and experiences are being held-back from the world because people are distracted scrolling through brain-rotting “content” instead?
The phone essentially cuts us off from the source.
The more time we spend mindlessly scrolling, the more cut off we become.
Very soon we start wondering why we’re feeling so dull.
Like something is off but we can’t quite put our finger on it.
Why we can’t quite reach our next breakthrough idea.
Or why we are struggling to gain clarity…
Or connecting to other human beings.
Maybe your next breakthrough is simply a morning spent OFF your phone… Fully absorbed entirely and deeply in what you are doing. Only focusing on the task as hand.
Once I resurfaced out of kairos time, my phone miraculously turned up at the Emirates lost and found at the airport.
I ventured out to collect it not even wanting it back.
The thing was full of notifications when I collected it.
I had no will, desire or enthusiasm to read any of them.
Being off the phone for so long made me discover how none of them were truly urgent (no offense to anyone who messaged lol).
We survived thousands of years already simply by sending letters, calling people and waiting days, weeks or even months for responses.
I noticed during the evening that I was much more present at the dinner I was attending. Later that night, I was fully present watching a YouTube video I’d been hanging out for. I didn’t check my phone once.
I put some music on and stared out the window at the bright lights with the cars wizzing by… Ideas were coming flooding in.
One song gave my goosebumps for minutes. Last night I had one of the best and deepest sleeps in years — likely because of the dramatically reduced blue light levels from not being on my phone.
Curious to see what would happen the following, I left the phone in my hotel room and ventured out for breakfast, coffee and reading…
The same thing happened.
The morning melted away and all concept of time was lost.
I then wrote this article in record time even when I didn’t intend to write anything today or this weekend for that matter.
So the question I pose is how much human connection, progress, clarity, insight, ideas and feelings are we sacrificing by being on our phones scrolling mindlessly?
This was a truly eye opening experience for me and I will be implement “no-phone” mornings going forward where practical.
Research shows that only 16% of creative insight happens while you’re at work. Ideas usually turn up when you’re at home, exercising, at the park, in transit or doing some other kind of recreational activity.
We need the time, space, relaxation, recovery to allow ideas to incubate and form.
So essentially, the more time spent on your phone, the last time you have to generate the clarity, ideas, inspiration and the human connection that you crave.
Imagine what happens as your screen time increases and compounds over the time…
The amount of ideas, insights, inspiration and human connection will likely decrease at the same drastically compounded rate.
Eye opening stuff hey?
As the saying goes, the urgent is never important and the important is never urgent.