Selective Ignorance and The Attention Economy

I listened to two unrelated but surprisingly similar podcasts during my trip to Virginia. On the flight out, I listened to an iinovate interview with Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week. Ferris makes some fascinating points and I’ll definitely be checking out the book. His topics are somewhat wide-ranging, but all seem to relate to crafting a lifestyle and (at the risk of overusing a worn-out cliché) achieving better work-life balance. At one point in the interview he suggests that people practice “selective ignorance.” Crafting a fulfilling and rewarding lifestyle, says Ferris, requires one to give up any illusion that he can read/absorb all of the most important and/or entertaining information that is available.

On the return flight, I listened to Wesley Fryer talk about 1997 article by Michael Goldhaber called, “The Attention Economy and the Net.” While the ideas sounded interesting, I wasn't dying to read the full article. Instead, the idea that caught my ear and connected me back to the Ferris interview is the idea that “what’s in short supply today is not information, it’s attention.”

In writing this post, though, I remembered my friend Sean Ammirati. As it turns out, Sean has actually blogged quite a bit on the topic of attention. He turned me on to the whole topic and an interesting (though largely theoretical) tool for attention management last year. Check out his stuff - the guy is freakin' brilliant. So, yeah, I guess I will go read Goldhaber's article.

In the meantime, I wish I was allowed to blog about the alpha that Sean's company is running. Very cool and very relevant. Go get 'em mSpoke!