The Gift You Give Yourself
Remember that Christmas morning feeling? The joy of sprinting downstairs and tearing into your presents, discovering what new toys, movies and video games would captivate you that year?
I say “remember” because Christmas morning presents are no longer the highlight of my year. Far from it. The thrill of opening presents has faded. I love Christmas for new reasons: gratitude, giving, quality time with family. But the intense child-like excitement is gone.
A little sad, right? The joy of my first Gameboy Color, Christmas ‘02, will never be matched. Unless -- what if you could recapture the youthful joy of Christmas morning, daily? What if you reframed your notion of presents from something you received to something you deliberately give yourself?
Our Most Valuable Resource
“Time is the most valuable thing we have.” We all “know” this. But few live our lives as if this statement were capital-T True. We bleed away precious minutes on digital autopilot: browsing our newsfeed, ingesting the latest political spat, skimming clickbait puff. We stream endless television. We text lazily.
We’re addicted to passive consumption. And it’s not entirely our fault! All 7.7 billion of us are living through an unprecedented media transformation. Information used to trickle to us like a gurgling mountain brook; it now gushes like Niagara Falls. We’ve been swept away in the deluge -- at best we’ve just broken the surface in this flash flood of clicks and content. Disoriented, we gasp for breath and desperately tread water, looking for a shore to swim toward.
My life is a good case study. The iPhone debuted my freshman year of high school, right on the heels of Facebook. Snapchat and Instagram arrived my freshman year of college. My class was among the first students to take the plunge into an ocean of infinite information. Then as now, social platforms and websites preyed on our amygdalas in ways that should require a Surgeon General’s warning. The allure of bite-sized blog posts and endless friends’ pictures washed me away. For years I was a full-blown digital addict.
I had little respect for my time. I would casually surf between dozens of tabs, my mind flitting between tempting headlines and haphazard Google searches. I had trouble focusing. I sacrificed sleep, grades, and my well-being to the screen-gods I unknowingly worshipped.
After years tumbling downstream, I finally snatched the shoreline. In February 2016, I quit Facebook cold-turkey. I never made an Instagram to begin with. Do I get questioned about why I’m not on these platforms? Plenty. But three-and-a-half years later, I feel joy thinking about the precious hours I’ve rescued from these temporal tree shredders. Instead of endlessly swiping my thumb upward on glass, I’ve harnessed that time reading books, studying a language, and learning to play an instrument. I still waste time online - the flow of information is relentless, and sometimes I find it irresistible. But I’m proud to have spent much of my time on activities that align with my values, not Facebook’s. Which brings me back to presents.
The Gift You Give Yourself
Recently I thought about that kid-on-Chrismas-morning feeling. As sweet as it was, it feels limited when viewed through my adult lens. It only came once a year, twice if you count your birthday. And despite what the mall Santa told you, you had no final say about what you got. The ultimate decision was up to your parents.
But the excitement was real. The anticipation, the joy, the overflowing enthusiasm. What could generate similar feelings in me today? And then I thought about leverage.
There’s two categories of time usage: low-leverage and high-leverage. Low-leverage activities are obvious: cruising your newsfeed, binging Netflix, reading the comments. This type of passive media consumption treats your time like burning oil -- it pollutes your mental landscape and you never get it back. It’s a dopamine prick and then...nothing. It leaves you feeling vaguely anxious and dissatisfied.
High-leverage activities treat your time like renewable energy. When you write a post or create a video, you induce a flow-state throughout the process of creation, so you feel great in the moment. But your time also now serves you in perpetuity. Your article might be read thousands of times in the years to come. Your video could hit a million views. As Naval Ravikant says, “An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers. Use it.” Server farms are powerful levers.
High-leverage isn’t limited to the digital. You may struggle for three hours mastering a new guitar song. But once you’ve learned it, you can play it as often as you’d like, perhaps even for the rest of your life. Through focused struggle, you’ve given yourself a gift. You’ve transformed your precious time into a new skill that enriches your life. Same for media you create, or software code that you produce. In each case you’ve given yourself a gift whose dividend you reap each day going forward. Work hard, and suddenly your time works for you.
As we rush down the river of the Information Age, it’s easy to be sucked under by the turbulent current. Much of our time is washed away by screens and swipes, never to be heard from again. Instead, I aim for high-leverage activities. I recapture and redirect the enthusiasm of childhood Christmas mornings toward gifts produced by the thoughtful use of my time.