Is it just me or do you notice that every social media feed has experts and frameworks for everything in life? Starting a business, growing one, sports coaching, life coaching, financial advice, marital advice, 5 ways to get rich, 5 life hacks to save you time, 5 tips to reduce customer churn, 5 yoga hacks, 5 brain hacks, 5 tips to get you a college scholarship, 5 ways you should not be brushing your teeth, the list is endless. Our attention spans have observably shrunk, fueled by increasing short form media and the desire to summarize everything. Much to Angela Duckworth’s disappointment, it’s getting harder to substitute nuance for novelty. While there are many studies on the detrimental effects of a diminishing attention span, my biggest concern is how unreal a picture of life it paints for a growing teenager — making it hard to evaluate opportunity costs, losing the virtues of a work ethic, and getting engulfed in a stream of success bias.
The economist John List talks about how we’re horrible quitters, the thought process behind opportunity costs and what he terms “optimal quitting.” The problem with this is that if we’re barraged by hundreds of choices that all seem achievable, how can a teenage brain even start to think about opportunity costs? How would you know when to quit and what to pursue when your most precious resource, your attention, is for sale?
It’s easy to get absorbed into this feed of choices and become a couch potato, switching channels endlessly. Doing meaningful work takes time and the basic principles of life haven’t changed. You can’t replicate success just by following someone, liking their posts, or sharing endless soundbites. What’s worse is that this constant exposure tilts the pain pleasure balance in our brains, making it harder to develop a work ethic to restore homeostasis. Encouraging teenagers to develop a work ethic early can be a powerful antidote to the micro hits of dopamine that otherwise surround them.
Unfortunately, a work ethic in and of itself doesn’t guarantee success. Most social media posts glorify success artificially, ignoring both the journey that led to success or the multitude of failures that may have preceded success. Reflecting on success by tuning out bias and acknowledging serendipity can be as empowering as learning from failure. Learning from success is hard; there may in fact be no lessons to impart that can be replicated. In my experience, very few people acknowledge this. Instead, they use their serendipity-based success to dispense endless advice cloaked in click-bait soundbites.
My hope is that teenagers learn to treat these channels of information overload as entertainment and focus on a handful of things they can control: a work ethic, a circle of trust and influence, and being discerning in their quest for wisdom.
Rabbit Holes
It’s now hard to remember what my original triggers were for this post, but a large part of it was success bias and my displeasure of people using their one-off success to draw in an audience — from LinkedIn gurus to Nextdoor enthusiasts. I was (and continue to be) fascinated by the Hidden Brain podcast. John List is a guest on the Success 2.0 Taking the Leap episode and you’ll find a lot more food for thought there. Angela Duckworth talks about substituting nuance for novelty as a key component of grit. I found Anna Lembke’s theory on dopamine and pain pleasure balance after having chewed through “Unwinding Anxiety” by Jud Brewer, which has so much more to unpack than dopamine. I’ve seen enough teenagers within the family struggle with identity to be concerned about that age group the most.