FOMO is killing your greatness
These days, we are pulled in so many directions that our attention feels less like a resource and more like a battlefield. Adverts assault your intellect and senses, urging you to spend right now. While others advise you to prudently save, invest, and think long-term.
LinkedIn wants you to be awesome at work. Facebook and Instagram want you to model your relationships according their influencers’ pronouncements. TikTok wants you to be the constant spectator of a perpetual clown show.
“Bad news sells”, therefore the news is overwhelmingly doom and gloom, constantly triggering an existential survival crisis in consumers.
And we are absolutely hooked!
Our Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is so normalised that you can’t walk down the street without having your head bowed down, looking at your device. We have been described as the “distracted hearts generation” – a term I first heard over a decade ago, and which has only become more apt with time.
Is any of this new?
Some lament this as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, but I disagree. Evolutionary biologists explain distractibility in terms of a survival advantage when you needed to be on the lookout for predators. Modern neuroscience explains it according to dopamine reward pathways in the brain. Religious texts dating back over a millennium have warned that man is not only hasty but that he is made of haste itself, always wanting quick responses. The basic human biology has not changed.
What has changed is that the sheer amount and intensity of the distraction has been ratcheted up several levels in the pursuit of someone’s profit margins and shareholder value. But it was always the human condition to be insecure, distractable and seeking the next hit; today’s technologies simply tap into this remarkably effectively.
A lot has already been said and written about micro level things such as social media algorithms. But what interests me is the important parallel with the macro level.
A few years ago, the same biological and psychological processes led me to be consumed by the passing fads of the time – money, cars, property, cryptocurrency, buy to let, whatever. However, I could never master any of these because each required considerable research, time, and investment.
It took a big cognitive shift to realise that the vast majority of normal people – myself included – cannot achieve greatness in something if they allow themselves to be distracted by whatever is thrown at them. Yes, hedging your bets feels secure. But placing lots of small bets without ever going all-in is a winning hand that never gets played.
By trying to do everything, you end up being average or mediocre in many different things. However, rather than breadth, you need depth, to be great.
There’s a lot of evidence for this. For example, according to data from the US Foreign Service Institute, a native English speaker needs 600-750 hours of study to achieve proficiency in a European language, and 2,200 hours for proficiency in some non-European languages. It is said that elite athletes need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve world-class skill.
How can you put in those hours if you’re trying to be great at everything?
Of course, the conspiracy theorists will tell you that “keeping the masses occupied and dumb” to prevent people achieving greatness and / or rebelling is the grand plan of the whoever happens to be controlling the world right now. It was the Illuminati in the 1980s, the Freemasons in the 1990s, right-wing media moguls in the 2000s and big tech in the 2010s. I don’t know how true that is.
All I know is that “a distracted mind… is a mind that wants to be distracted.”
It’s in your individual control to seek focus – but it needs a mindset shift as I mentioned above, and some specific actions, such as having an explicit statement of what you want to focus on, and concrete goals for what you want to achieve. (That’ll be the topic of a future post! Please subscribe to my email newsletter or connect with me on LinkedIn / Facebook to be notified.)
A person cannot achieve greatness by being average, mediocre or “good enough” in many different things. The cure for FOMO is accepting that missing out is the price of mattering.
And that’s A Deeper Thought.
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