Josh Allred's Blog

When we prune a tree, it allows for the limited resources it has put to good use. Instead of wasting time on areas that are not bound to grow.

The other week, I wrote about the power of the delete button. But we can’t forget there is also an unsubscribe button. Quite literally, we can choose what comes in. Time is constant. And so, how do we choose to fill it? Taking a moment to figure out how to curate the inbound sets up the rest of the days going forward. Regular maintenance would be required, like an oil change. But 15 minutes a quarter will save so much of our attention in the aggregate.

Perhaps the greatest asset we have in this economy is attention. Each newsletter, blog, notification, and viral video chips away at that attention. And if we say yes to clicking this, we are saying no to something else. Digital clutter is 100 percent real. The question is how we manage it. Saving two minutes a day over a lifetime adds up.

Peter and Rosemary Grant report that finches with longer beaks do better in wet conditions in the Galapagos islands. This allows for the discovery of more food and a higher reproduction rate. Finches with shorter beaks, however, do better in dry conditions. So, based on the environment, the species and population respond.

Having an umbrella when it rains is helpful, but not so much when it’s 72 degrees in the spring.

Every creature must respond to the environment around them. So when unemployment rates go up, people will react. Desperation can kick in when someone is caught in a vicious debt cycle. The same can be said about the old marshmallow experiment. It might signal that patience can be rewarded with two marshmallows. But someone without the resources, who lives in scarcity, may think it is very reasonable to take what is in front of you.

We can’t correctly evaluate why individual players do what they do. But we can step back and examine the system and its operation, examining the feedback it gives us and adjusting.

Reminder: Holding a microphone too close to a speaker causes the noise to amplify over and over again to give a rotten sound for everyone to hear. When one suffers, we all suffer.

In each of us, there is a pull. The pull towards freedom. The open road. The pull to climb a mountain.

On the other end is the pull to settle down, to be responsible, to plan for the future. To be prepared.

Most of us try to thread the needle of living both lives. When we are living one, we yearn for the other.

Our biggest fear is that deep down, we know we won’t be successful in either realm.

The downside of a hyper-individualistic society, where the priority is one’s happiness, is that it leads us to believe we should pursue one’s own appetite.

You could look at retail therapy as a temporary fix. But after a while, when one awakes, all they will find is a closet full of Nikes and an emptiness in oneself the size of the Grand Canyon.

We struggle to get out of our way. But rarely do we examine why we got here in the first place. Each path leads to nowhere extraordinary. But few paths lead to peace. And yes, it is often the less traveled path.

The devout Buddhist and stoic work overtime to shed the self.

The addict, however, shortcuts this process to “kill” the self.

The person struggling to find inner peace isn’t comfortable with the world they have built. They are looking to escape the very walls they built. In the end, pleasure only provides a temporary escape.

The true Bodhisattva understands there is no escape. One prison leads to the next. One must transcend the boundaries we humans fight to maintain.

A cluttered phone can slow down the performance of your digital device. So can an untidy mind.

Don’t underestimate the power of the delete button. Apps, relationships, a job…you have more say than you realize about what you allow in your life.

No law says you must have a smartphone or a certain job. Sometimes, all you need is ten seconds of courage to delete it. Courage often doesn’t need to be sustained like we think it does. Instead, I am just pushing through moments of brief discomfort.

And when something is deleted, you leave space for something else.

People are not the past. That was the old me.

If you want to become a runner, just start running. The moment you decide to start, you are now a runner. Obviously, not a good one at first. But “good” is different from the label we put on ourselves.

We are who we decide right now. The person we are is what we do next.

Ideals are essential. They give us a direction for people to go. They serve to compare the “now” to “what could be” in the future.

Ideals, however, can interfere with decision-making. If the ideal choice were always available, we would take it.

Unfortunately, that isn’t how life works. Often, we are met with less-than-ideal choices in less-than-ideal circumstances.

So, what do we do?

Instead, we are pragmatic. We make the best choices and move forward, hopefully, towards better. Sometimes, that is ten steps back, about facing, running away, or persevering. Ultimately, what matters is that we try again. Progress doesn’t always look linear. Rivers don’t flow in a straight line, and neither does progress.

Food spoils. Buildings eventually change. And so do cultural phenomena. Game shows died with streaming. And it is time to lay the rest of the All-Star game for the NBA. Saturday Night Live has survived 50 years—an incredible run by any measure. Seinfeld still survives and is relevant even in the cell phone era.

We can’t expect the things we do to change the culture to last forever. This is good news, too. Dogmas, caste systems, the status quo, old tropes, false proxies…they all die, too.

A good idea isn’t enough to consider. You must also look at the possible lifecycle of the change you seek to make.

It would be rude to pull out a newspaper and start reading it while in the middle of a conversation with someone. Culturally, however, we don’t feel the same pressure when pulling out our phones and scrolling while having the same conversation. We are still figuring out these rules. But what I think is worth noting is how much of a hold these devices have on us. If we ignore real connections right in front of us instead of the chance to find them online, we are kidding ourselves about what this tech is.

“Sorry, this might be important,”—phrases we would never have said in an analog world. Thirty years ago, unless the phone rang, there were fewer interruptions. You turned off the TV when the company came over to give your full attention.

Something is missing today. It’s not an external component but a promise to give someone your attention. We are so used to having our attention hacked that we can’t see how much it affects our outcomes.

If you haven’t tried in a while, delete social media from your phone—not your account, just your phone—and see what happens. See what you notice.