Ever wonder what the impact is of slowly letting your smart phone do all those things you used to do back in the dark ages? You know, that unspeakable time when Crackberries, Treos and iPhones didn’t exist.

I never really thought about it until my phone ran out of juice the other day and, for the first time in a while, I was forced to do a bunch of the things my phone usually does…and I kind of stunk at them in a way I never did before smart phones came along.

I actually had to write down a simple list of items to buy…and I had trouble remembering them without referring back to the list multiple times. And, I’m fairly certain that, pre-Blackberry, I could have easily remembered them. Of course, I don’t know for sure because my memory of those days are a bit fuzzy. That got me wondering…

What happens to your brain when you transfer simple life-management tasks to your phone?

The four big items on my list include:

• To do items
• Telephone numbers and contact info (including my own)
• Schedule items
• Concept capture - recording ideas

Turns out, the human brain needs to be worked out to stay fit. And, while punching all these tasks into set it and forget it digital form may make managing a hectic life easier, in another way…

It may actually drain your brain long term.

Because the brain needs to be “exercised” or used on a daily basis in order to preserve optimal function. Similar to muscles in the body, certain processing abilities begin to literally atrophy with time if not engaged.

So, transferring much of these simple processing and memorization tasks away from the brain and into smartphones may actually have a backlash effect on your brain function. It may play a role in a longer term inability to effectively handle these functions without your hand-dandy smart phone at your side.

Relying too much on your smartphone may actually make you dumber…or at least temporarily dumb

Speaking to this phenomenon, a cottage industry of brain exercise programs has risen, letting you visit certain websites or even play brain games on the Nintendo DS as a way to stimulate the brain into becoming more active and preserving optimal function. These games are actually fun, though the jury is out on how effective they are.

But, for me, a different approach was in order.

I’ve taken to pulling back a bit on my reliance on technology as a replacement for thinking and remembering.

I’ve been writing things down by hand more, whether it’s a simple list or thoughts and ideas I’d like to revisit or explore more and committing to being more present as I do so. I’ve been taking the time to use certain memorization tools that stimulate, rather than turn off my brain. I’ve been spending more time in deliberate contemplation and problem solving.

And, while I still love the conversational ability my smartphone provides, I’ve been spending less time relying on it to as a replacement for my brain.

FYI - One of the brain-building factors that has been emerging in recent research is physical exercise, I’ll be writing about that in more detail very soon.

What about you?

Have you noticed any similar symptons of smartphone brain drain?

What have you explored as a fix?

And, most importantly…oh man, I forgot my last question!

Let’s discuss…

“Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an opportunity.”  -Benjamin Disraeli-

So, I’m sitting with a friend at lunch yesterday, who just happens to also be a 7-figure copywriter and internet marketer and, after listening to what I’m working on for the better part of lunch, he reveals…

“Jonathan, you have entrepreneurial ADD!”

It hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d never heard that phrase before, but it was perfect.

I’ve never been one of those people who lack interests or passions. My mind is in a state of constant learning and creation. When I work, I am hugely productive. I drop into a hyper-focused flow state with a fair degree of ease and create ideas, products, services, companies and solution extremely quickly.

Productivity is not my challenge, narrowing the number of ventures to be productive in is.

Lately, I’ve been casting my net a bit too widely, with nearly a dozen projects and ventures that range from overseeing a yoga studio and teacher training school to writing a book to launching a marketing and entrepreneurship training company, exploring a handful of health and fitness joint ventures, launching up to 5 new blogs and online businesses and a number of other options.

Even when you have the knowledge and ability to access hyper-productive states, you get to a point where being simultaneously hyper-productive on too many fronts at once causes all activities to slow down, stand still and potentially even slide backward.

Much to my chagrin, it appears that time in finite!

You get to a point where you need to eliminate opportunities, adventures, interests and passions in the name of creating the space to allow the activities with (1) the greatest likelihood of success and (2) the greatest opportunity to make you come alive become your focus. The process of stripping away becomes as important as the process of getting things done.

You need to cull your passion flock to allow a smaller number of pursuits to thrive on a profoundly deeper level.

That’s where I am now. And, I’d love your help in this adventure.

For quite some time, I’ve been struggling with the best way to allocate my writing and blogging interests. The challenge is, I am passionate about a wide array of pursuits and that passion fuels me to write about them.

But, rare is the person who shares that same diverse basket of interests as me.

Many readers with an interest in lifestyles, health and spirituality have little interest in marketing, business or blogging. So, readers with an interest in marketing might have to wait a few weeks until I cycle through the variety of topics that don’t interest them and circle back to a new article on marketing. While I am thrilled at how our amazing community has grown, I also know this approach has led a lot of people to tune in, then quickly tune out.

My solution, over the last few months, has been to very intentionally shift the energy of this blog to focus more on lifestyles with an emphasis on empowering and enabling conversation. Many of you have noticed and appreciated this. While others have asked where the hardcore marketing, business and blogging articles have gone.

Well, not so secretly, I have been developing a number of more highly focused small business, marketing, career and blogging blogs.

The first of which was days from rolling out, when my lunchtime awakening to the siren taunt of entrepreneurial ADD led me to question whether taking on the burden of launching and maintaining multiple blogs was really the best use of my time, energy and focus.

What wold be the impact on my bigger picture ability to move forward on other projects that, in all honesty, were a higher priority to advance?

With a brick and mortar company to oversee, a book to prepare to launch and a number of other still non-public ventures in the works, does it really make sense for me to share all my other writing in the form of new blogs that would also take substantial amounts of energy to cultivate, write for and build?

Or, does it make more sense to share those same thoughts, insights and writings in the form of articles on other well-established blogs with already well-developed niches and communities?

Would contributing to other blogs, and not running my own blog network, allow me the space, time and energy to focus not on the substantial job of running a small blog network, but on devoting more time to fewer endeavors and allowing a smaller number to flourish more quickly and fully?

All of which leads me back to you guys.

Have you experienced similar entrepreneurial ADD? How have you handled it?

And, most importantly, I’d love to know your thoughts on the decision that lays ahead of me. Become a blog network dude and share my marketing, entrepreneurship and copywriting on my own family of niche blogs.

Or, keep cultivating this blog alone and pursue the less “ego-satisfying, asset-building,” but also far less burdensome and likely equally impactful role of contributor to a handful of other well-known blogs, while freeing up time to focus more on other projects?

What do you guys think?

As always, let’s discuss…

So, I am driving my daughter to a friend’s house and she says something that makes me realize kids are a absolute masters in the art of marketing and persuasion.

It was all in the way she framed what she said.

“Daddy,” she shared, “ice cream got on the seat.” Until that moment, I never knew ice cream actually had the ability to do anything. Now I learn it not only has the power to be eaten, but to jump up and get onto things.

Contrast this with an earliier conversation we had about her art, where she revealed not that a beautiful painting “got drawn,” but that “she” drew this gorgeous vision with oil pastels. What am I getting at here? It’s subtle, yet powerful.

One of the most powerful tools in guiding a discussion, be it marketing or negotiation is tense-shifting.

Consciously choosing to associate specific tenses with either benefits or detriments. The tense I am talking about are subjective (personal), objective (impersonal), past and present.  The example above is about the effect of shifting between subjective and objective tenses.

Use the subjective to associate

When you want to make a feature, benefit, detriment or action more relevant or impactful, you personalize it, convey it using the subjective tense. You put it into the experience of the person listening or reading. You associate it with that person, like my daughter did with her art. She wanted to be associated with the benefit and accolades of being a great artist, so she stepped into the role and used subjective language. She took credit for it.

Objectify to dissociate

When you want to raise certain negative issues or detriments, however, but minimize their impact, you use language that takes them out of the reader’s personal experience, objective language like “the” ice cream and you may even take it a step further, giving inanimate objects seemingly human abilities to “act” in an effort to remove yourself from being associated with that negative outcome or trait.

Seven year olds figure this out pretty quickly and dial it in.

But somehow, along the way, our rational grown-up minds move us back toward strict narration when we describe situations later in life. Being aware of the impact of tense-shifting, though, allows you to better position certain facts and circumstances when presenting an advertising or marketing message, communicating with colleagues or adversaries or conveying information that requires an element of persuasion.

Little linguistic techniques, like this, bring you closer to your desired outcome.

But, what about the effect of past/present tense-shifting? I’ll share some thoughts on that in an upcoming post.

So, I am curious, who else has noticed this type of patterning, either in their kids or day to day life?

And, an even bigger question, while these linguistic patterns seem pretty natural and harmless coming from the mouths of kids, is there any ethical issue with tapping a knowledge of linquistic patterning in a later life or professional setting in an effort to help accomplish a goal?

Let’s discuss…

How would you finish it?

The question arose the other day, when talking with a friend about setting aside a fair amount of time to just play, goof around and enjoy the people around you.

His comment to me was “life’s too short to screw around all the time.”

And, my reply was, “life’s too short to NOT screw around all the time.” Most people bottle up a lifetime’s worth of play on the promise that later in life, if they make it that far, remain as physically and mentally able as they are now, THEN it’s finally time to play.

My friend responded, “if you spend all that time messing around, you never get the important stuff done.”

My response to this was, “first, messing around IS the important stuff, at least a part of it, but I also get more of what he’d consider the “real’ stuff done in a given day that the vast majority of people I know BECAUSE I swing between bursts of play or relaxation and ultra-intense bursts of hyper-efficient work…which is enabled by the fact that I’ve been playing between them.

So, what do you guys think about this question?

And, even more importantly, in the bigger scheme of your life,

How would you finish this sentence: “Life’s too short to…”

It could relate to anything or everything, doesn’t have to be what I was talking about above. Just think about it in the context of your own life, then…

Complete sentence and share your thoughts below…

P.S. - the photo above is the view from my patio at sunset…where I just zoned out for a half hour with my wife and daughter…doing absolutely nothing useful beyond watching the sun go down.

Driving home the other day, I was fascinated by an NPR story on the use of cell phones to share pictures at concerts.

While a number of concert-goers phoned in to say how annoying it was to see thousands of small blue screens held overhead and people screaming into cellphones during the show, that wasn’t the real issue.

Turns out, it was the bands who were complaining, but not about what you think…

It wasn’t about stealing footage or intellectual property protection. Or, even putting images and movies of the concert immediately up on YouTube the moment the cell-phone bandit got home. The complaint ran much deeper than that.

And, it has it’s corollary in the explosion of social media.

Instead, the complaint was about the impact of live photo and video journaling on your ability to be present in the moment, drink in the juicy energy and participate fully in the extraordinary “collective conciousness” that infuses the crowd swaying, singing and connecting with a common experience.

It wasn’t a money thing for the bands, but a consciousness thing. As long as people were focused on “documenting” the experience, they couldn’t be fully “in” the experience.

I wonder if a similar thing is happening the proliferation of micro-messaging?

Millions of people now live-journal nearly every happening, thought and moment in their lives on Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, Socialthing and dozens of other services. So much so that I know a number of folks who literally rush to the computer of cell phone the seconds something remotely interesting begins to happen, out of an almost addictive need to report what’s going down.

Question is, is this activity turning us more into journalists of our own lives and less into participants?

When we tweet everything we are experiencing in a conversation, concert or gathering of likeminded people, does the very activity of tweeting somehow take away from our ability to enjoy the bigger activity?

Does it diminish our ability to be fully present in a way that lessens the power, the value, the enduring impact of the live experience?

Does it stop the core conversation about which we’re reporting from going to the next level?

Does it place documenting over experiencing?

This is what’s on my mind today.

As always, let’s discuss…

I have to confess to having a soft-spot for stories and people who are driven to give of themselves in an effort to not only make their own lives come alive, but change the world along the way.

But, I am also pretty short on time, so when people ask me to read and recommend e-books, I usually take a pass. But, when The Art Of Nonconformity blogger, Chris Guillebeau, asked me to take a look at his new manifesto on world domination, I was quickly drawn in by both his very compelling personal story and his approach to life.

As Chris shares, this is not for everyone. The tone is bold and the advice, though powerful, would also likely require a fair degree of disruption.

But, the quest laid out is, at a very minimum, one worthy of exploration and discussion.

You can download Chris manifesto completely free here.

Give it a quick read, it’s only 29 pages, then share your thoughts below…

As I watched my 6-year old daughter update her blog this morning (yes, she has a blog, no, you can’t see it, it’s passworded for family only), I noticed her doing something pretty unusual.

Between each word, she’d hit the space bar four or five times.

I’d seen her doing this before and told her she only needed a single hit of the key between each letter, but, for some reason, it wasn’t sinking in.  Until I finally realized what what happening.

She couldn’t get past the finger rule.

Turns out, in learning to write sentences this year, she’d been given a very specific guidelines to figure out how much space should come between each word. Just put your finger between each word and the spacing will always be right.

So, it was ony natural that, when it came time to type on the computer, she applied that same rule, hitting the space bar until it approximated the width of a finger. At first, I thought it was pretty cute, but then it made me wonder…

How many rules do we follow that have outlasted their original intent?

They’re all around us. How many people work 9 to 5 (7 to 7 in NYC), when they know their most productive, creative hours are 4 to midnight? How many people pour the coffee first, then add milk and sugar second, when pouring the coffee last avoids the need to stir? How many scrub the dishes before putting them in a dishwasher that’s been good enough to clean them for decades? How many top off the gas tank to avoid waiting for change, even when paying by credit card?

Question is, I get why we do these things as kids, but why do we keep doing them as grown-ups?

Is it just habit? Is it a need to fit in? Is it about working around other peoples’ rules who have power over us?

If the circumstances that gave rise to these have changed, why do so many of us still live by the finger?

Let’s discuss…

To all those who want desperately for me to succeed.

To all those who want me never to experience the pain of failure.

To all those who watch and wonder if I really know what I’m doing.

To all those who stand in judgment, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

To all those who look to me for proof of what’s possible.

To all those who only want the very best for me.

To all those who love me, unconditionally.

I share these words…

Have a little faith.

Have a little faith that I’ll make mistakes, but be able to recover.

Have a little faith that, more often than not, I DO know what’s best for me.

Have a little faith that I have within me the will to rise against adversity.

Have a little faith that I’ll know when to soldier on and when to walk away.

Have a little faith that I will not put myself at unjustifiable risk.

Have a little faith that my heart is in the right place.

Have a little faith that the mainstream path isn’t always the right path.

Have a little faith that I will succeed beyond my wildest imagination, even where those before me have failed.

Have a little faith…and a lot of love.

Now…PASS IT ON!

My daughter goes to public school in New York City. And, while the Big Apple isn’t known for having a super-stellar system, she happens to go to one of the top-rated schools in all 5 boroughs.  We love it, she loves it, everyone loves it.  The parents are massively involved and care deeply about the school, its programming and the teachers.

So, why did the city just cut $250,000 from it’s budget for next year?

That’s 5% of the entire budget and the school already relied upon substantial fundraising from the parent association to keep it humming along.

Before you say, “well everyone is hurting and every school has to share in the burden,” let me add one more fact.

Our school budget was cut disproportionately MORE than others, BECAUSE of its stellar performance.

It seems the quest for exceptional family involvement and the pursuit of excellence are not rewarded, but rather punished.

What kind of message is that sending to the administration, the teachers, the parents and, eventually the kids?  Hold us all accountable for exceptional performance with one hand, then smack us with the other every time a kid gets an A.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? How did you handle it?

Am I missing something?

Let’s discuss…

The books are:

• Internet Riches: The Simple Money-Making Secrets Of Online Millionaires by Scott Fox
• The Word Of Mouth Manual: Volume II by Dave Balter

Internet Riches:

What’s It About? Making money online, nuts & bolts

What Makes It Different? Before I get to what makes the book different, I really have to address something…the title and the promise. Um, how do I say this, the title is just plain cheesy (normally, I love cheesy, especially if there’s a strong marketing purpose behind it, but this time, no). And, the promise is a bit sketchy, Fox defines online “millionaires” in a variety of ways that others might not agree with.

But, once you get past these pretty trivial matters, the content is actually pretty solid. It is very accessible, it lays out a wide range of business models that people are using to generate real money online and it shares a wealth of case studies with links to websites, so you can check out the websites and see the models live in action.

The book’s focus is more on defining and illustrating the models and providing general instructions on setting them up. To his benefit, Fox delivers a lot of info in a very easy to understand, user-friendly way. He demystifies much. And, the wide variety of options is great for stimulating ideas.

He also offers all the basic online marketing strategies, but you’ll definitely want to take your marketing knowledge deeper through blogs, trainings or other books to get the most out of each model. There’s a lot more going on in the world of online marketing these days.

Still, lots of great, very useful information.

Who Needs To Read It? Anyone who’s been curious about all the different ways to make money online, especially relative newbies.

The Word Of Mouth Manual: Volume II

What’s It About? Word of mouth (WOM). Spreading ideas through person-to-person interactions.

What Makes It Different? Before you even get to the content, two big things make this book different. One, it was written by Dave Balter, who runs Bzz Agent Inc., a marketing firm that taps its network of more than 400,000 volunteers to help spread the word about ideas, products and services.

And, two, the way he launched the book is pretty innovative, giving 20 select bloggers the privilege of offering their readers a FREE PDF version of the book (see above link), then making a limited number of bound copies for sale for $45 at Amazon.com. This strategy, alone, got a lot of people talking about the book. The man knows his industry.

Now, about the content, what makes it different? Dave’s experience. It’s safe to say, there are few people who earn their livings figuring out how to facilitate word of mouth. Dave knows how to get people talking and he’s analyzed a ton of WOM campaigns, both successful and failed.

This experience shows through in the many interesting case studies, stories and techniques revealed in the book. From this comes a lot of big picture advice, but not a lot of highly-specific, nuts and bolts tactics and strategies. Which led me to believe it would’ve been more aptly names a manifesto than a manual. And, I still am not sold on Dave’s proclamation that their exists a clear difference between viral and word-of-mouth. Seems to me they are still two points on the same spectrum.

Who Needs To Read It? Anyone who is interested in developing a better understanding of how ideas spread from person to person.  That’s pretty much anyone with a point to make or a product to sell. Plus, people, it’s friggin’ FREE. For crying out loud, go download it now.

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As always, if you’ve got a book you’d like me to review, please first e-mail me at jonathan [at] jonathanfields [dot] com to make sure it’s on topic. If it sounds like a good fit, then we’ll talk further.

Well, that’s a wrap on this week’s Drive By Book Reviews.

Have you guys read either of these books? I am curious to know, also, what you think about the distinction between WOM and the viral effect…

What do you think?