 This is an 80-year-old boy installing an operating system, and he doesn't even speak English. He's part of what they now call Generation Alpha, a demo cohort succeeding Generation Z, the Zoomers, and are oftentimes labeled as short attention span people. But what if I told you that having a short attention span is actually a skill? If you're living in modern society, your attention span is probably really low. You have to deal with corporations talking to each other through markets while freely sharing their APIs, injecting their brand identity into our human social protocols, hijacking our attention, and this is kind of an old cliché by now, but still most statements are labeled those clichés because they are ultimately true. Now, with increasingly lower attention spans, there's always that feeling that you have to do something, that you have to engage in some capacity with the world, while simultaneously doing something else that maybe you consider as a low-energy task. Browsing social media while waiting in line, texting while driving or shopping or working or listening to a podcast or an interview while playing a game, eating while watching a quick episode of your favorite TV show, the one you've probably seen tens of times already, and the list goes on. But you can reframe this and turn it into your advantage, because thanks to these modern technologies, you have plenty of knowledge-related materials opening to cross multiple mediums at the same time, so you have physical books on your desk and an unlimited Kindle supply and PDFs on your computer and all across the cloud, and you can view this as a buffet, the place you can go and select only what you need and know you can digest, and my idea is to get to a point where you are skilled enough so that you can rapidly dive deep down a specific topic, learn it, collect your payment in a way, your knowledge base, get out and move to the next thing, and I found that this constant need of unifying everything you want to do under one single bucket and juggling with multiple activities at the same time can sometimes be, well, kind of overwhelming, as it can be hard for your brain to do any type of deep work in such a fashion. Now, we all kind of know that multitasking doesn't work very well and what we are actually doing is switching from task A to task B to task C really fast. Whenever you need to say Alt-Tab and quickly send a message while you are waiting for one of your files to get downloaded straight into your computer or when playing a video game and you have multiple accounts with multiple characters and doing some maintenance tasks such as crafting some potions for your future raids and dungeons where you will actually have to pay attention. But again, what if you could use this quasi multitasking to your advantage? If you can sort of like reframe this whole attention span and review it as an actual skill. The reason I say this is because we started becoming more and more adaptable to this new flux of information flow. With this new generation of Gen A's coming through, this new set of individuals are hardwired to learn and navigate information faster than ever before. The boomers, the millennials, and the Zoomers had to adapt to this new world, whereas the Gen A toddler was born in it. And by briefly looking at it, you can actually understand why. The most popular apps and platforms where the new generation spends their time on are founded on low attention spans. This is their framework. This is their foundation. They are sort of like training individuals to want the next thing as soon as possible. But they also construct a sort of offense around the creators and constrain them to create quick and digestible pieces of content that can spark interest, keep one engaged for 10, 15, 30 seconds, and then have that someone engage with something else. If that particular someone is looking for further exploration, ensure you can view this as a negative thing where you can actually switch the framework and change the framework and view yourself as a speed learner, a speed consumer, someone who can quickly adapt to the unknown and swiftly explore this environment in such a way that you can eventually absorb everything you need to know to operate within that environment. You don't actually need to become a specialist, but more of an expert generalist, an expert diver, an expert miner, because there's this idea that the modern worker is becoming a knowledge worker, a data worker, a thread consumer. And working with knowledge is kind of hard. Our brain is not in a state currently where it can operate decently by being connected to the amount of information we are facing on a daily basis. We are spending three plus hours every single day on our mobile devices. And even if we are not reading a scientific book while using the device, we are exposed to large amounts of information anyway. Memes, DMs, gossip, videos, articles, and much, much more. But as a knowledge worker, you are able to quickly adapt and follow through five social media platforms and through like the deep web and the deep libraries and the tweets and so on, you know how to connect things. So instead of having to deal with the fear of missing out, you may have the ability to quickly flip through the page of some new book, digital article, piece of news and Twitter thread, hunt down the pieces of information you want to pay attention to, close your book and move on. And my solution is to make a habit out of speed juggling with this information by adapting and learning what to filter out and what to keep. And this comes through experimentation and is actually about, you know, consuming a lot, but also knowing when to stop, you know, pause, digest, reflect. And there's kind of like a personal blend of an approach. There is no ultimate recipe. And one thing you could do to get used to this type of flow and keep your ego in check is to take a piece of content, spend 30 seconds scanning and doing this thing and then spend a minute talking or writing about what you read. And the kind of reminder that I view writing as crystallized thinking. It's simply a way for you to see if you understood what you absorb or if you need to come back and do it again. But in the end, you are getting yourself into a flow where you are searching for ideas, absorbing ideas, digesting ideas, reflecting on ideas, hunting down concepts you are trying to understand and not necessarily aiming to finish the whole thing. You are searching for knowledge and understanding. Again, think of yourself as a minor whose aim is not to bring down the mountain, but to find the particular golden nugget you're interested in and get out of the mountain as fast as you can. So before engaging with anything and slowly making it as a default, you may ask yourself, what is my goal? What do I want to get out of this piece? And remember that not everything needs to have a goal, but keeping this framework in mind where you are able to just switch things on and off is a decent start, a decent approach. And once you start swimming through the sea of ideas and manage to find something that might be interesting, then you can spend your time diving deep down that topic and attempt to follow the role of a specialist because it triggered your interest and made your attention switch. Deconstructing that particular something and using first principles to ask, what is it in itself? So again, nowadays I am more inclined to hunt down ideas I can further investigate if they sound promising to me. And it's a personal thing. I know myself and I do know that in a few weeks I might be moving on to something else that I want to explore. But learning how to pull out trustworthy resources and knowledge, repositories and ultimately connecting the dots faster than anyone else is again, a skill. And I believe that an individual who will be able to navigate through these intricate webs will be the valedictorian of the future.