“In a digital-first world, where millennials obtain all their answers to problems at the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger, the reliance on technology to solve every question confuses people’s perception of their own knowledge and intelligence. And that reliance may well lead to overconfidence and poor decision-making,” says Rony Zarom, founder of the video collaboration platform newrow.8 The ubiquity of information about everything also means that there’s a ubiquity of opinion about everything. If you want to know how to feel about a hot-button issue, you can just go online and collate the opinions of others. If you want to know the implications of an event or a trend, a quick online search will provide
endless amounts of analysis. The upshot is that deduction—an amalgam of critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity that is an essential skill for being limitless—is becoming automated.
There’s a certain amount of value to this, of course. Before the Internet, we were limited in our access to the opinions of others. In an ideal world, being able to get as many perspectives on a topic as possible would be enormously valuable in helping us to form our own opinions. Unfortunately, that’s rarely how it plays out in the real world. Instead, we tend to identify a handful of sources with which we align and then give those sources extreme influence over our thinking and decision-making. In the process, the “muscles” we use to think critically and reason effectively are atrophying. We’re letting technology do the deduction for us. And if technology is forming our deductions, then we are also ceding much of our problem-solving ability—something so important and something we will discuss at length later in this book.
Psychologist Jim Taylor defines thinking as, “The capacity to reflect, reason, and draw conclusions based on our experiences, knowledge, and insights. It’s what makes us human and has enabled us to communicate, create, build, advance, and become civilized.” He then goes on to caution that there is “a growing body of research that technology can be both beneficial and harmful to different ways in which children think.”9 Patricia Marks Greenfield, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA, has been looking at this issue for more than a decade. In discussing the impact on education, she wrote, “What is the effect on learning if college students use their laptops to access the Internet during a classroom lecture? This was tested in a communication studies class where students were generally encouraged to use their laptops during lectures, in order to explore lecture topics in greater detail on the Internet and in library databases. Half of the students were allowed to keep their laptops open, while the other half (randomly assigned) had to close their laptops. Students in the closed laptop condition recalled significantly more material in a surprise quiz after class than did students in the open laptop condition.”10 Because they were engaging their minds in the lecture rather than looking for what the Internet already thought about the subject, they were much more responsive when it was time to reason for themselves. Greenfield analyzed another study that showed that college students who watched a
news program without the crawl at the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more of what the anchors were discussing.
Playwright Richard Foreman fears that this reliance on the Internet to do much of our thinking is changing our very selves. “I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West But
today I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available.’”11 Do you remember what it was like when you were approaching your teens and you first started formulating thoughts and opinions independent of your parents? My guess is that this experience was extremely liberating for you and that it might have even been the first time in your life when you truly felt like your own person. What had happened to you, of course, was that your critical faculties had become refined enough to allow you to regularly employ reason to navigate through life.
Why, then, would you want to turn this liberating skill over to a device? Think about it: How do you feel when someone tries to impose their thinking on you? If a family member, friend, or colleague came up to you and said, “Don’t think about this; here’s your opinion,” you’d try to get away from that person as soon as you possibly could. Yet, when we immediately reach for the Internet to provide us with information, we’re essentially inviting the same thing.
In Chapter 15, I will provide you with a powerful set of tools that will allow you to supercharge your thinking and expand your perspective on any topic or problem.
While these four horsemen are the ones we need to contend with most vociferously, there’s another digital danger that is worthy of our attention. I call this digital depression, a result of the comparison culture that emerges when we let the highlight reels of the social media feeds of others cause us to perceive ourselves as less than. Now, I enjoy social media. I love staying connected with our community of students and podcast listeners and staying updated with the everyday lives of my family and friends. I appreciate it so much as not only a source of entertainment, but also education and empowerment. But I only recommend using it consciously, not mindlessly
out of habit, and in a harmonious way so it doesn’t highjack your productivity and peace of mind.
In the upcoming Part II: Limitless Mindset, I share ideas to mitigate these feelings of not being enough, as well as fears of looking bad or missing out. Those are the same limits that stand in the way of personal growth and learning. In Part III: Limitless Motivation, I will show you how to add, break, or change these habits.
