Freedom from an addiction to distraction. Well, here’s what the latest research says. On an average day, the average producer in business spends 2.1 hours in distraction. On an average day, the average performer is interrupted by technology or distraction every 11 minutes. And did you know according to research, it takes 25 minutes to refocus your brain on the work you’re doing before you were distracted. So victims love being busy. They are busy being busy as I mentioned earlier. They’re doing fake work. Leaders are all about being productive. It’s not fake work, it’s real work. It’s not spinning your wheels. It’s doing the work that moves the needle on their deliverables and on the objectives of their organization. You might find this fascinating, but the brains and mindsets of geniuses like the Mozarts and the Edisons and the Galileos, many of them were studied. And here’s what they found. What makes a genius is not this natural talent. They were not naturally gifted. Instead, it was the way they ran their days and the way they used their brains. And a lot of the great writers and a lot of great creatives and a lot of the great geniuses, they had a few things in common. One of them, they weren’t addicted to distraction. They built routines that allowed them to avoid interruption. I was reading a book of Ian Fleming, the James Bond author, and he literally when he was writing in GoldenEye, that was his retreat in Jamaica, he structured his entire environment so that he couldn’t even see someone walking on the beach. Why is that? Well it’s because most people at work every day, they are using a part of their brain that is not their center of genius. But when you allow yourself the time to be alone, and when you allow yourself a space where you’re not distracted, your brain drops into what researchers call alpha state and neurochemicals like dopamine, and like anandamide and like serotonin start to pulse through your brain. And what happens is, and scientists call this, and this is very powerful, they call it transient hypofrontality. The prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for thinking, but also your inner critic actually becomes silent for a few hours. And what happens is you actually tap it into your inner genius. Tome, that’s a game-changer. If you structure your routines right, if you avoid distraction, if you give yourself at least a few hours of thinking time and quiet time and solitude every day, or at least once a week, you actually start to slow down your brain and access the part of your brain responsible for game-changing ideas. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he was at the University of Chicago, he calls this state that you can get your brain into the flow state. And if you can access the flow state by practice and by structuring your routines and getting the right rituals into place, you actually start to get the results of genius on a regular basis.
