Attention is the New Oil

Throughout the 19th-20th centuries— oil was the commodity that drove war, wealth generation, and prosperity.

In the 21st century that tide has begun to shift to attention. If you don’t believe me just look at the 2016 US Presidential Campaign scandal involving social media.

Need more proof? Look at the Forbes Top Creators Lists where internet followings are generating millions of dollars for creators.

The ability to attract, hold and convert attention is the new oil.

The difficult part of this, is that our time and focus is the cost of attention.

A simple check of our screen time usually tells the stories of hours being spent on social media.

Every minute we spend on social media— someone is making money off that time spent.

The More Concerning Cost

While it’s become common knowledge that companies are earning $$ off our attention, the more subtle cost is our ability focus.

Studies have shown we now have an attention span similar to a gold fish— yes you read that right.

We now have terms like “ADHD-like personality traits” to describe individuals who don’t medically have ADHD but exhibit most symptoms due to their environment.

But nothing has genetically changed within us. All of this is the result of environmental conditioning.

Our phones buzz every couple minutes and interrupt us.

Social media feeds offer infinite content, so if we are bored within two seconds we have another option with a swipe or scroll.

It’s hard to imagine a world in which our attention spans could ever survive this.

What Can We Do?

There are two areas focus on given this knowledge:

The first is severely limiting how much our phone control our time.

I do this by living on do not disturb.

The second area is resetting our environmental conditioning.

This can be focusing on longer form content like books, podcast and YouTube videos, or simply allowing yourself to feel bored instead of immediately seeking a distraction.

Time is our most precious asset, it is the only thing we can’t buy more of (yet).

So I encourage everyone to start using their time more sparingly and spend it like you would large amounts of money.