Welcome to Wise Men Wednesday, your weekly dose of wisdom to thrive at work and at home.
Posts published this week:
- Forget Taco Tuesday And Try ScreenLESS Sunday:
How much time do you spend staring at your phone, laptop, e-reader, tablet, and TV each day?
I average over eight hours of screen time per day… Ugh! Just typing this made me sick. I don’t spend much time watching TV, it adds up to only about one hour per day (the national average is 4 hours a day; according to a 2017 Nielsen report), but I do spend a lot of time on my computer and phone working, writing the newsletter for my site, sending emails, and reading. Does the hours I sent reading on my Kindle count too? I hope not.
If you answer this question honestly, I think you might be embarrassed too.It has become an awful twitch for me to navigate to my LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter ten times each day and refresh my email inbox hundreds of times. I’m not proud of this habit, I constantly crave new information and it’s hard to break.
The father of the digital minimalism movement Cal Newport writes in his book by the same title Digital Minimalism, “The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.”
Just like when trying to quit social media (which I failed to do), quitting cold turkey or decreasing screen time dramatically rarely works. It is better to be intentional and deliberate with a plan of attack. A strategy to get back control of your life from your screens.
This is why I created ScreenLESS Sunday…
- Create Opportunities By Thinking Outside The Box (which includes the story of how I was selected by James Altucher for his mentorship program):
When Jesse Itzler was building his private jet company he had a jumbo jet-sized problem. Only wealthy people will spend $250,000.00 to purchase a share of a private jet, and Jesse didn’t know any wealthy people. So he thought, “Where do rich people like to hang out?” It was then he discovered the Ted conference held in Monterey, California.
Jesse’s company was called Marquis Jet which was later acquired by Warren Buffet’s NetJets. Marquis Jet sold prepaid flight time on private jets which allowed its customers to fly around the country quicker and more conveniently than commercial flights and for less money than owning and operating their own private jet. But Jesse didn’t fly to California on a private jet. It took him 16 hours to get to California which is almost as long as it would take you to fly from New York and across the Atlantic to Italy and then back again.
When Jesse arrived in California he ran into another complication. He couldn’t get into the conference without a ticket and he didn’t have the thousands of dollars he’d need to buy one.
So he went to the local coffee shop to come up with a game plan on how he would get into the conference and meet his potential customers. This was when he noticed that attendees from the Ted conference were coming into the coffee shop on breaks to buy coffee and muffins.
Then he had a brilliant idea and the next morning Jesse woke up early before the sun came up and went to the coffee shop to buy every single muffin they had. When customers came in from the conference the employees at the coffee shop said, “I can get you a coffee, but I’m sorry we are all out of muffins.”
“You’re out of muffins? This early?”
This was when Jesse sprang into action, “Sir, I overheard you’re wanting a muffin, I have an extra you can have.”
“What do you do?”
“I own a jet company called Maquis Jets.”
“No way! I’m in the market for a timeshare on a jet. Do you mind if I sit down and learn a bit more?”
Skip The Line mentorship update:
In this episode of the Make You A Millionaire podcast James Altucher puts me on the spot to conduct two interviews with successful entrepreneurs and provides immediate coaching.
Listen in now and please reply to this email and let me know what you learned: Make You a Millionaire! James Quandahl EP01: The Skill of Interviewing.
Have a great rest of the week!
James Quandahl