Name: Why you can't pay attention: takeaways from the book Stolen Focus
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T17:33:22.000Z
Duration: 4 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Oh my God, Bestie, I just read this new book, Stolen Focus, by Johan Hari.

Teenagers in the United States can only focus on one task for 65 seconds.

For office workers, it's an average of only three minutes.

To make matters worse, when you get interrupted, it takes you 23 minutes to get back into the same state of focus.

Most office workers never even get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day.

But if you work at the White House, great.

May you continue to get interrupted, amen.

Even Professor Roy Baumeister, the author of a book named Willpower, who has studied the subject more than anyone else alive, said he couldn't focus.

If that man can't do it, why am I even trying?

One portion of the book that really freaked me out was just how nefariously social media has been designed to degrade our attention.

Like, we know it's bad, but Tony Fadell, who co-invented the iPhone, wakes up in cold sweats thinking, what did I bring into the world?

So many people who have changed life as we know it, like Azaraskan, who invented the infinite scroll, they are all speaking out against their inventions.

Dr. Frankenstein is campaigning against his own monster.

Seriously, one of them spoke at a conference featuring all of the world's leading tech designers, and he asked them, how many of you want to live in the world you're designing?

And not a single one of them raised their hand.

Chemicals in the air are inflaming our brain, our food is poisoned, we're in a constant state of stress and survival mode, and every time we pick up our phone, which is 2,617 times a day on average, we are fighting against the dopamine hits designed by thousands of engineers to keep us up.

Okay, so everything is fucked, what do we do?

Well, on a societal level, Johan says we need to band together as a community and call for change.

We need to hold Silicon Valley accountable, ban the chemicals in our air and in our food, and demand a four-day work week, because surprise, all the studies show it's proven to be more effective, but do I think this will actually happen?

But in your everyday life, the single best thing you can do to fix your focus is to get into flow state as often as possible.

And one of the most simplest and common ways to get into flow state is to read a book.

The irony that I'm summarizing a book that is encouraging you to read a book is not lost on me, I get it, I am part of the problem.

Sorry, the average American spends 5.4 hours on their phone and only 17 minutes a day reading. 57% of Americans don't even read a single book in a typical year.

There are about 54 studies that show that you could read the same information on a screen or in a book, and the screen is infinitely inferior for you to understand and retain the information.

So you won't remember this, pick up the book.

We have two choices when it comes to nurturing our focus, Bestie.

Fragmentation shrinks us, whereas flow expands us.

So put down your phone, get into flow, and focus.

No, you interrupted me, so it's gonna take me 23 minutes to refocus.

I'm already gone, Bestie, get into your book.

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