Your Brain Wasn’t Built for the Internet - And It’s Costing You

Read time: 6 minutes

Hey, welcome back.

Last week, I wrote about why success is mostly boring - and why the ability to stick with dull habits is the real competitive edge.

​You can read that (and all past issues, here).

Today, I want to get personal about something I’ve wrestled with for years. Distraction.

BUT FIRST (cos, distraction, obvs) - I'm starting to tidy up the personal brand with a bit more design intention and energy. I've moved my primary colour for my personal brand into this sort of peach vibe for girl dad/different to other business bros to stand out a little - what do you think? Ok enough about me, lets distract our way back to you.

You, you you.

If I’m honest, there were long stretches of my career where I felt productive, but I wasn’t. I was busy, but scattered. Always on, but rarely present.

And it wasn’t because I was lazy. It was because my brain was fighting a battle it was never designed to win.

The Internet is Beating You

Here’s the truth.

Your brain wasn’t built for the internet. Mine either.

Every time you switch from deep work to email to Slack to Twitter, your focus doesn’t come back clean. Part of it gets stuck on whatever you were just doing. Scientists call it “attention residue.”

I call it the silent tax on success.

It means you’re never working at full capacity. You’re dragging around fragments of every half-finished task. And after a hundred context switches in a day, your brain feels fried, even if you haven’t done anything meaningful.
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The Dopamine Loop I Fell Into

Let me paint a picture.

I’d open Slack. A few pings. My brain lights up. Quick win. Then I’d check LinkedIn. Someone liked a post. Another hit. Then I’d refresh sales numbers. Maybe they’ve moved.

Before I knew it, an hour had gone by. Not in one big chunk, but in a thousand tiny cuts.

That’s the trap. The internet dangles little rewards, and your brain chases them like a slot machine. The cruel part is it feels urgent, so you keep doing it, even as the real work piles up untouched.
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What It Cost Me

Here’s the part that hurts.

I can look back at entire months where I thought I was “working hard” - but really, I was just spinning plates. Answering messages. Checking dashboards. Clicking around.

It felt like effort, but it wasn’t creation. And the cost of that isn’t hours. It’s years. It’s millions in lost ideas, products, and opportunities.

That book you never finish. That pitch you never polish. That podcast episode you never recorded. Every distraction compounds.
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How I Broke the Cycle

It wasn’t discipline. I tried that. Didn’t work.

What saved me was designing my environment to make distractions harder.

• Phone in another room when I write
• Notifications off by default
• Deep work blocked into the calendar before anything else
• Email and Slack batched, not on-demand
• A short walk whenever the itch to scroll hit me

Boring stuff. But once I started doing it, I realised something important: my best work had been trapped under the noise all along.
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What This Means For You

If you feel constantly behind, constantly busy, constantly exhausted - it may not be your ambition or talent holding you back.

It may just be your attention.

Because here’s the thing. Ideas are cheap. Execution is rare. And execution only happens with focus.

Protect it. Ruthlessly. Because in a world of infinite distraction, the ability to hold your attention on one thing is no longer normal. It’s a superpower.

To undistracted success,
​Dan

PS: yes of course I also got diagnosed with acute ADHD like most entrepreneurs recently. I've not yet taken the plunge on popping pills to try stay focused but am starting to get tempted because oh wow do i frustrate myself! Presume some of you get this too so - any pros/cons?

SOS (Science of Success) Curated:

Listen: All In Podcast - Elon and Optimus​

Read: 10 reasons High Performers Quit​

Watch: We're not ready for superintelligence (this vid was epic!)

Research Worth Reading

In 2009, Sophie Leroy published a paper called Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work? The Challenge of Attention Residue When Switching Between Work Tasks in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Her experiments show something brutal: when you switch tasks before fully disengaging from the first one, part of your brain still thinks about the first task. That leftover focus-attention residue drags your performance on the next task. The more often you switch, the worse it gets.

To tie back to this letter:
This is exactly what happens when you let the internet fragment your attention. Every time you open Slack, check email, or scroll social, you leave residue on the work you were doing. Your best ideas, your deep writing, your momentum-all get taxed.

Quick Takeaway​
Distraction doesn’t just steal minutes. It steals parts of your brain. If you want to reclaim your focus-and your future-learn to complete before you switch.

​→ Link to stud​y​

PS:Thanks to everyone who applied to see me and Dr Tara Swart on Monday at The NED private members club - its sold out, see many of you there - and will continue to share opportunities to hang out IRL right here in this newsletter!

Want to take your success (even more) seriously? 👇​
🧠 Fuel your brain and feed your gut, try Heights here (use code 'SOSDMS' for 15% off your first month of any subscription​

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