How to Beat Distraction Forever

95% of people are just searching for something they don't have

Distraction is not the problem.

It’s very easy to think that it is. On the surface-level, f*ck yeah.

You can’t keep your gaze sharp and narrowly-focused like the tip of an arrow head. Your default brain-state is a ping-pong ball bouncing from Snapchat, to TikTok reels, to anxious thoughts.

Your mind is always distracted and that’s why you can’t focus. But here’s the real secret.

Your mind is searching for something it doesn’t have.

This is why you can’t sit down and give your attention to anything.

When you lack purpose, your mind turns to cheap pleasure to comfort your soul just to pass the time. The only way to stop letting distraction ruin your life, is by feeding your starving mind what it desperately needs.

Distraction is your mind searching for something.

If you’ve stayed reading for longer than 3 seconds, let me explain.

It only takes 3 seconds to lose it

That’s how long it takes to lose your attention, or have it stolen.

If you’re not putting your attention to use in actualising a vision that’s important to you, you have nothing to fight with against those 3 second hooks. The bait will be too appealing.

Seriously.

My short form video analytics track whether users stay past the 3 second mark. Your attention is getting hunted for with this timeframe.

3 f*cking seconds with 100s of reels an hour?

And you say you just “cannot focus?”

The printing press was a bloody behemoth. But it wasn't just about spreading information. It cultivated a specific cognitive skill within the mind; the ability to maintain attention with intention. Books train your mind to give your attention to something deliberately, that is, the pursuit of knowledge towards a dedicated vision (the improvement of life and the reduction of life's suffering). Action motivated by a clear goal.

The beautiful art of using your attention for something that creates compounded profit.

This is definitely worthy of your attention.

Books are excellent teachers. Masters, apt in helping students give their attention to something deliberately and actively. Books teach you how to focus, and thus, help to weaken the persuasiveness of distraction - those damned 3 seconds.

And the good news is this: focus is literally a skill that can be improved. You cannot become distracted if you’re in a state of obsession.

But then came the television.

Watching replaced reading. Passive consumption naturally arose and fought to replace active engagement. Naturally, there was clear winner.

So what’s the need to read?

That’s way harder to do than watching a screen.

Thinking? F*ck the imagination, then.

I don’t need to sit here and imagine the complex, intricate world of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I can just watch it; “less thinking for me!”

You can probably see where this is going. I’m not discouraging TV, or films, or any of that. I f*cking love watching stories unfold on a screen, but only when I choose to do it.

Our relationship with information has completely changed. The emergence of short-form video has intensified this change.

The most important part of any piece of content today is the hook.

The first 3 seconds.

With the amount of noise there is online, with AI-generated garbage and bots encouraging the dead internet theory, this is what everyone uses to fight for your attention; those first 3 seconds.

Every time you swipe and see a new reel you lose a small amount of your focus even if you don’t decide to stick around and watch the whole thing.

The bad news is this: your focus reserves are limited and need time to refill.

6 hours of screen time a day is not giving your ability to focus time to allow itself to recharge. Social media is structured in a way as to exploit this weakness and all it needs is 3 seconds.

Once your attention gets hooked your mind enters a seemingly feel-good environment that secretly drains your focus, and your soul.

The digital content ecosystem has one purpose: to attack you with as many of those “3 seconds” as possible, across all platforms, to hook, or steal, your attention, and to keep you on those platforms for as long as possible so that they can make more money from showing you ads.

Now, hold on a second.

F*ck the screens entirely?

Social media is not inherently bad.

It’s actually great when used in the right way.

There are lots of excellent creators online. Exquisite content and raw, artistic work. Consuming the right sh*t in the right amounts is golden because there’s purpose there.

Start thinking about and using what you consume to change your habits? Now you’re f*cking cooking.

If what I’ve just outlined above is you, you’re a creator, not a consumer.

What I’m talking about here is the common person, the consumer.

99.4% of the population: you sit on your ass scrolling mindlessly for hours upon end, wondering why you’re anxious, depressed, and cannot focus.

I’m talking about people who have no goals and use social media as a means to soothe their souls from unconscious but agonising pain; the people who cannot fully understand why they feel distracted all the time.

If this is you, keep reading. And I want you reading this.

I wanted to hook you in. I want you to read beyond this sentence. But I want you reading this in hope of sparking some meaningful change by giving you new (and hopefully half-decent) knowledge and urging you to change your habits.

F*ck.

Mindless.

Scrolling.

And if you don’t believe me in my intentions, then don’t. But here’s the thing:

obsession happens when you give your attention to something that you believe is profitable, to you and perhaps others, deliberately.

I’m saying all this because we’ve atrophied our minds from being skilled at giving our attention to actualising goals, to having it easily stolen by screens and reels (while still lacking goals).

If you don’t live for building something meaningful, it will be easy to get pulled into the void of brain rot. You have no reason to fight against the pull.

No clear vision means that your focus is starving. Your mind is screaming. Then you look around for a bit of f*cking hope or an answer to ease your pain, and you fall for the first piece of bait you encounter (or pull out of your pocket, the piece of bait sitting in your pocket 24/7, that you’re probably reading this on right now).

Easy bait for an fragile-minded target. But only if you don’t know how to prevent it.

The way to prevent this is through solving the problem of purpose through obsession.

Distraction is just obsession without a purpose

This is distraction: you have no vision to move towards, and feel anxious and lost, you have no purpose as a result and your thus your attention is easily persuaded stolen, and you deceive your own soul with cheap pleasure.

This is clarity: focus is obtained once you’re at least moving towards some type of vision, thats continually adapting and changing based on feedback loops to yourself, and and you give your full attention to this pursuit.

You feel aimless, depressed, anxious, and lack focus, purpose and meaning; no f*cking wonder.

Because you haven't realised that the antidote to distraction is clarity.

“If you could have the ideal life, right now, for free, what would it look like?”

This question is for getting deathly specific about what you want. F*ck any practical constraints, this is what gives your vision.

If you have no idea where to start in defining your vision, I have a prompt that will help you discover your true purpose in life. It will help you to start moving in a better direction at minimum. It takes a bit of work from your side of things but it’s worth the effort.

Once you have a vision, you need two things.

Distraction loses its power when you have (1) a container, a defined domain to work within, and (2) a trajectory, tasks that will help you to reach your vision and make it a reality.

This will help you to get into a constraint-enabled flow, and you this happens for 3 reasons:

• When you have container to work within, boundaries prevent the mindless wandering

• When you have tasks to complete you have movement, which prevents stagnation

• When you have a vision you give yourself a direction to move in with a feeling of meaningful purpose

Whenever I write my weekly newsletter my mind seems to just, like, turn off. Anytime I get into this flow state my brain feels cloudy and fogged by feel-good positive emotion that blocks out any noise and warns me away from anything that could remove me from this.

And naturally, anytime I get removed from this state via a task or another person, I tend to become very unpleasant and I start suffering.

Sometimes I'll be at breakfast with my girlfriend and I'm just thinking ideas, ideas, ideas.

In some sense, it's terrible.

But for me, it's my therapy.

If something gets in the way of what your mind obsessively wants, your going to feel intense suffering.

Before I started my newsletter, it was jiu-jitsu. I used to tell my friends not to even bother asking me to go out on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Sunday. I had to go training; it was non-negotiable. That's just me.

The biggest insight I gained from this was that:

most of life isn't so much making yourself happy, but staying away from the pain.

Having a clear vision of what you want in life will steer you away from anything that would prevent you from getting it. If you do truly want something, focus and desire will replace distraction.

Anyways.

Enough rambling.

How to stop distraction from ruining your life

(1) Vision Clarity

You don't need to restrain your distractive tendencies or try to silence your mind. You need to direct it.

You'll never stop being stranded in a desert if you do not move. If you don't have an ideal life to strive towards, your mind will try to soothe and ease your silent desperation with expedient pleasure. Worse than that, you won't even consider tomorrow when the present is what "feels" good.

Our positive emotion systems work in relation to you moving towards a defined goal. And here's the beauty of it. You are the one who creates the goal. You are in control of how much positive emotion you can create.

As soon as you've finished reading this framework, sit down and write a vision of what the ideal life would look like in 3-5 years if you actually worked towards it. And remember, you can have what you want if you define it, and work towards it. Again, the Discover Your True Life Purpose prompt works like a charm here.

Your vision will always be adapting, and this is not to be feared. Whatever you think you want right now, it's going to change. The more you act and reflect, the clearer you'll be on what you desires truly seek. If you want a thinking partner to help you reflect and question your assumptions about what you want in life, I have a Socratic Questioning Partner prompt that can help you with this massively. This will get you absolutely certain about what you want, and what you truly believe to be valuable to you.

(2) Strategic Boundaries

You can let your mind overthink and go ballistic, but only within the confines of a strict container. Willpower is finite. Discipline is finite. Instead, create a playground for where you can work on a specific focus point in your life.

Without organising your life into domains or areas, you act with no honest intention. You move, but it's never deliberate or as maximal as it could be. This is why you find yourself scrolling on TikTok for 6 hours a day wondering why you never peaked once you left school.

Your brain craves adventure. It seeks novelty and experience. Let it run wild, but towards a specific part of your vision. When you give your mind endless options it becomes overloaded and it finds the first thing it can find which is safety and comfort. Boundaries eliminate aimlessness and move your energy in a direction, even if the energy is chaotic.

Create your first container. Turn off your notifications on your phone. Give yourself one specific workspace to let your mind play. Complete one 60-90 minute time block to complete tasks that would move you a single inch closer towards your ideal life in a one weeks time. Then, reiterate the process and repeat the following week. This will feel restrictive at first, and it's supposed to. Constraint creates the environment for controlled flow and dedicated action towards a specific goal.

(3) Movement

You feel good when you achieve a goal, but you feel sustained when you're always moving towards a goal.

You can set as many goals as you want, but you will never achieve them without movement. You need to move towards them. No movement means stagnation, laziness, and comfort-seeking. This is why people can't seen to get off the phone or the couch. It really is a limbs-problem.

Your mind needs evidence that you're moving closer to your vision. Confidence stems from competence. If you can actually move your body in physical space towards forging a dream into a reality, you'll gain self-confidence. There is no difference between risk and opportunity. The obstacle is the way.

Once you’ve created one container, you can start to make more. Don’t go anymore than 2-5 domains. You have your vision for each, and your list of tasks. Now it's time to schedule time into your routine to complete the tasks. 60-90 minutes blocks across the week are ideal to really fall into flow. If not, do 15 minutes for each domain, just one time during this week. This is your start. Build on it, reflect, reiterate. This is a continual process of building and shaping towards a life of direction, clarity, and focus.

You cannot become distracted when you're obsessed with your journey.

Thanks for reading legend.

- Profound Ideas

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Just a quick one (f*ck self-promotion).

If you want access to any prompts I’ve mentioned, free subscribers get access to one prompt for free. The first 6 prompts are up in my Prompt Library.

They help you to:

• Build habits with Aristotle as your habit coach

• Improve your life by 1% in 7 days guaranteed

• Make you become obsessed about anything

• Become a genius in any topic in 30 days

• Discover your true life purpose (and build a direction to start moving in immediately)

• Separate your beliefs from assumptions with Socrates as your thinking partner

Let me know in the comments any prompts you’d like me to make, or you can leave a suggestion for a newsletter topic.