Many years ago, I realized that New Year’s resolutions don’t work. This year, instead, I created a ritual. A resolution is a hope and a prayer. A ritual is a highly specific behavior done at a precise time, so that it becomes automatic over time.
My ritual is to read 25 pages each day of a book that advances my knowledge in the work I do, and 25 pages a day of a literary classic. The first I’m doing at lunchtime, and the second as soon as I get home from work.
When I returned to my office after New Year’s Day, I had a community meeting with my co-workers so we could reconnect. One of the questions each of us answered was the personal challenge we intended to take on in the new year. Before I said anything, four people on our team mentioned their desire to read more this year, and more substantively.
I’m craving more depth in my life, and so are they. My strong suspicion is that it’s because we’re drowning in so much trivia â€" a tsunami of texts and tweets, instant messages and Gchat; Facebook posts and bookmarked websites we mindlessly cruise; and multiple Google searches to get answers to the endless, often useless questions that happen to pop into our overcrowded minds.
The hunger we’re all feeling is for instant gratification. It’s not unlike the siren call of a fragrant chocolate chip cookie â€" or, for that matter, the allure of any drug that promises a frisson of pleasure.
But the dopamine squirts we get from these drugs are short-lived. They mostly prompt a craving for more â€" a compulsion to match the initial buzz by upping the ante in the face of diminishing returns. What we chase through our digital devices is instant connection and information. What we get is no more nutritious or enduringly satisfying than a sugary dessert.
We don’t need more bits and bytes of information, or more frequent updates about each other’s modest daily accomplishments. What we need instead is more wisdom, insight, understanding and discernment â€" less quantity, higher quality; less breadth and more depth.
I have a Twitter account, because I’ve reluctantly accepted that it’s part of marketing a modern business. But I don’t tweet very often, I rarely read other tweets and I’ve never read one that stayed with me for more than a moment. Nearly the same is true of my relationship to Facebook. I do succumb to both, but they mostly leave me feeling empty and distracted. Mostly, I wonder if the costs are worth the benefits.
The reality is that we each have limited working memories, meaning we can only retain a certain amount of new information in our minds at any given time. If we’re forever flooding the brain with new facts, other information necessarily gets crowded out before it’s been retained in our long-term memory. If you selectively reduce what you’re taking in, then you can retain more of what you really want to remember.
Over the holidays, I couldn’t resist seeing “The Wolf of Wall Street†â€" precisely because it sounded so seductively over the top. Within 30 minutes, I felt saturated by its pointless, numbing excess. Even so (and embarrassingly), it took me 90 minutes â€" half the movie - to finally get up and leave. I avoided “12 Years a Slave†for weeks because I knew it would be difficult and disturbing to watch. But once I was there, I found it utterly mesmerizing, The movie has stayed with me for weeks, and I feel deepened and enriched by it.
One of the most frequent complaints I hear at all levels in companies is about priorities. The tyranny of the urgent crowds out the work in our lives that requires more time and reflection, but has the potential to generate more long-term value. Relentless demands make it impossible for many of us to stop what we’re doing long enough to decide what most deserves our attention.
Going deeper does mean forgoing immediate gratification more often, taking time to reflect and making more conscious choices. It also requires the capacity to focus in a more absorbed and sustained way, which requires practice and commitment in a world of infinite distractions.
I’ve got nothing against simple pleasures. I love chocolate. I still watch “Gray’s Anatomy.†I read celebrity profiles in magazines. I’m just arguing against them as a steady diet, and for doing the more important and valuable work first, and the trivial stuff later.
Taking on a long and challenging book may not provide the instant pleasure I derive from scarfing down a big bowl of Ben and Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. But it does make me feel instantly better about myself. And once I’m reading Dickens, or Faulkner, or the history of psychoanalysis, the experience is more nourishing and lasting than most of what I do, most of the time.
Tony Schwartz is the chief executive of the Energy Project and the author, most recently, of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.†Twitter: @tonyschwartz
