2021 January - Digital Minimalism, The Lost City of Z, & Everything You Need to Know About Saving for Retirement

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

I believe the core concepts of this book have the potential to make us all less stressed and more focused. Cal refers to Digital Minimalism as “A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

Anyone who uses a smartphone or computer is immediately subjected to a hyper-scaled version of mainstream media of radio and television. It is essentially an arms race for your attention. Your Attention = Their Money.

You can regain control of your attention by adopting the principles of a Digital Minimalist:

  1. Clutter is costly. “It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.” This is why digital clutter is dangerous.

  2. Optimization is important. Rather than succumbing to seduction by convenience, he recommends we optimize our use of technology so that we expend just enough energy and time to digital screen technology. Doing this leaves us with significantly more time to pursue our own goals & values… as opposed to the goals & values of the app or digital company.

  3. Intentionality is satisfying. A lesson from the Amish: “The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use.” Intention trumps Convenience. In other words, just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Once you have made a list of your deepest values, you can then ask yourself the all-important question of: “Is this the best way to use technology to support this value?”

How to conduct a Digital Declutter:

  1. Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. Consider “the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.”

  2. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful. THIS STEP IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!

  3. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.

    1. To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: 

      1. Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). 

      2. Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). 

      3. Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

Some Practices to help you develop an intentionally beneficial relationship with your digital devices:

  • Leave your phone at home. Or, at the very least, go through long stretches of time (hours) without access to your phone.

  • Take Long Walks… either without the phone or with your phone on airplane mode

  • Write Letters to Yourself

  • Don’t Click “Like”

  • Consolidate Texting

  • Hold Conversation Hours

  • Fix or Build Something Every Week

  • Schedule Your Low-quality Leisure

  • Join Something (In Real Life)

  • Make & Follow Leisure Plans

  • Delete Social Media From Your Phone

  • Turn Your Devices Into Single-Purpose Computers

  • Embrace Slow Media

  • Dumb Down Your Smartphone

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

David Grann does an excellent job in this book digging into the most famous “missing explorer” story in the last 100 years. The story is about Percy Fawcett, an accomplished British explorer who becomes obsessed with the famed South American city of gold - El Dorado. Grann manages to weave in a number of side stories and side events into the book. Some of them include characters such as Theodore Roosevelt, Francis Galton (a relative of Charles Darwin), a member of Shackleton’s crew to the Antarctic, and famed American explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice. Additionally, Grann gives very granular context to the act of exploring uncharted lands in the Amazon. This includes the struggle for food, the fight against nature’s many predators (the most dangerous of which were the myriad of unrelenting insects they encountered), mutiny, death, competition for fame and fortune, and more.

The ultimate question of the book: What happened to Fawcett?

The second question of the book: Was Fawcett right about the prior existence of vast civilizations in South America that supported very large populations and built megalithic structures in the Amazon?

Author speaks about his book at the Museum of Science in Boston: https://youtu.be/sTqCMxNvah0.

Something else that threaded the book was the attitude British Colonialists expressed toward South American Native Americans. I went through the book twice - once read, and once heard via audiobook. Hearing of the atrocious attitudes of Europeans somehow impacted me more than reading about it. They were almost always perceived and treated as animals meant to be enslaved by white Europeans, referred to as “savages”, and thought of as “uncivilized” and “uneducated.” Although much of this changed on a superficial level, it reveals how much more work needs to be done to convince humans to treat fellow humans as human beings.

The book was also the basis of a movie of the same name. You can check out the trailer here. I have yet to watch the movie.

Everything You Need to Know About Saving for Retirement by Ben Carlson

If you aren’t sure about how or why to think about financial health in your retirement years, then this book is a good place to start. But first, here are a few things this book will not provide you:

  • Specific recommendations on which stocks to choose

  • How to catch the latest financial trends and strategies

  • How to diversify your investment portfolio

So, what makes this book a worthwhile read? It’s strangely simple:

“There are three big things you need to get right in order to give yourself a chance at financial independence one day:

1. Save at least 10% of your income (preferably 15%-20%)

2. Make your saving and investing automatic

3. Think and act for the long term”

Following the framework of this book can provide you with foundational understanding of how to build yourself a nice nest egg. Once you’ve put these simple principles into practice you can then move on to reading a handful of other books (recommended at the end of the book) that will help you dig deeper into the specifics of investing for your retirement.

Links!

Jason Boddu