I realised something uncomfortable. Shorts and reels have damaged my attention span.
I can scroll through 30 short videos without thinking. But when I sit down to watch a 9-hour course about AI Engineering fundamentals, my brain wants to escape after 5 minutes - not because the content is bad, but because it has been conditioned to expect a new hit every 30 seconds.
And I actually want to learn this.
That is the scary part.
Real skills are not built from random tips and quick dopamine.
You cannot build deep skills on shallow attention.
One more reel. One more meme video. One more productivity hack.
Meanwhile, the people who go deep are doing something much less exciting:
- They are studying.
- For hours.
- Without constant stimulation.
That is the part I forgot.
The ability to focus is becoming rare.
And rare skills become valuable.
So lately, I have been trying to protect my attention instead of feeding every distraction.
The edge is not more content. It is staying focused long enough to truly understand something.