Daily Inspiration: “The future belongs to those who scroll fast!”

“The future belongs to those who scroll fast!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

We live in an attention-starved world, and you’ve got micro-seconds to get your message across. You are probably just about to stop reading this message. That’s ok, move along, I’m going to continue telling my story. I might reach some others.

One of my sisters caught a typo in my morning motivational quote yesterday within seconds of it being posted, and let me know about it. I fixed it. 60 seconds later, all was well in the world

And that’s when she mentioned this phrase to me. And I knew it would be the focus of today’s quote!

Check out the picture I’m using on stage. I’m talking in this case to a group of insurance brokers about how attention spans have collapsed, and the manner by which they explain, support and sell their product has forever changed.

The context of the picture is a blur of a shopping cart in a store – which I use as an overview of collapsing attention spans. It’s said that in a store we now scan some 12 feet of shelf space per second. We hyper-scattered, darting our eyes from product to product, glancing down at our phones, checking our feeds.

What does it mean? Sorry, are you still here? It means we have to work harder to get our message out. It means that as a consumer, maybe we need to slow down a bit.

It also means that the manner by which we access and consume new knowledge has forever changed. Scrolling fast? I’ll often talk on stage about the fact that success will come to those who master what I call ‘just-in-time knowledge’ – the ability to get the right insight at the right time for the right purpose.

Which relates directly to the issue of scrolling fast, accessing bits of information here and there – giving the quote a bit of profound, realistic resonance!