Ever wonder why it’s so hard to operate most of the time but there are a few days that you seemingly dance your way through life with zero effort?
The difference is noise, mental noise.
Our digital world allows for an unlimited amount people to speak to you at once. Imagine just ten people standing around you, all trying to tell you something at the same time. It’d be hard to hear.
Well, the internet has no limit to the amount of people trying to tell you something and that’s what every day is like for most people. Dozens of people and things trying to jam their way into your mind to fill it with information that’s useless to you. And it is that way through technology.
In simpler times before the internet
In the old days, to gather information into your mind you needed to grab a newspaper or a book or make your way out to the local tavern to talk to people. And it was willful. You had the choice to gather the information. But now, it is against your will. All you need to do today is open your phone and you’ll be bombarded. Notifications from every app. Emails from everyone. Phone calls. Text messages. News blasts found everywhere from the lock screen to your desktop to just opening up your browser. News found at every nook and cranny you could think of.
The internet is continually growing and expanding with information
And even worse? With technology and the digital age, it has no limits. Paper and the amount of space on the paper limits a book. The will of the person to share or not, the amount of information readily present in their mind to share at that moment and the amount of people the tavern can hold is what limits a tavern of people.
But the internet is a limitless expanse of everything. It is a book with no end. A tavern of people that never empties where the people don’t stop talking and never run out of things to say. Most of it being useless to you to begin with.
All of this is information… and it takes space. It takes space in your mind and it can only hold so much in a day. When we fill it with all of this random information it becomes a cluttered mess of random ideas that serve no use to your present goals. Taking space up in your mind, creating friction, and preventing you from accessing what you need and going where you want. Wasting time, energy, and mental bandwidth.
Friction sucks away all your energy and brings everything to a stand still
Everything becomes hard. Friction increases and grinds all progress to a halt. It raises energy expenditure exponentially. Your resources become jammed and overloaded. All mental processing power goes to zero. Focus dies. We can’t make decisions.
With so much mental load, we bog ourselves down. That’s what makes it so difficult.
You spend significantly more time because you have to search and dig through the trash to find what you are looking for. You spend more energy digging, searching and tripping over the mess in your mind. What would take a clear mind only a few minutes to do, takes a cluttered one half an hour or even hours to do.
Noise and clutter, useless information, only creates friction and waste. Burning away and spending all your resources for the day.
Clearing the noise
You have to clear the noise. Empty your mind. Silence everything. Let go of all of it. Clear the radio waves. Empty the trash can. Clear the cache. Flush the pipes. Drain the swamp. Silence the noise.
Close your door, your window, your ears. Close off and block every potential place where useless information can enter into your mind.
And then… we’ll become clear. Decisions will become easy and instant. Your focus will narrow to a laser point. Friction will disappear and flow will find its place. You’ll solve problems quickly and prompt with zero effort.
It’ll be as if you were dancing through life on ice skates with no issues. No overheating. No waste of energy or time. Everything will be as efficient as possible and by the end of the day you’ll leave with a large store of energy that didn’t waste away.
You’ll feel like you could work 2 or 3 more of those shifts back to back because of how much energy you have. It’ll feel like you didn’t even work at all, and yet you did everything with ease. Almost as if it wasn’t work…
Because it wasn’t.
What’s work is trying to clean up the mess in your mind and fight against yourself just to do the simplest and smallest task. And it’s draining…
But with a clear mind, it won’t be anymore.
Stay clear my friends.