How to Navigate the Information Age with Jason Feifer

In this episode, I had the pleasure of hosting Jason Feifer. Jason's mission is to help you become more resilient and adaptable in a world of constant change. We get into some eye-opening discussions about how misinformation spreads, how to handle the complexities of social media, and the importance of understanding the bigger picture when it comes to change and information. Jason offers insights on navigating the overwhelming flow of information in our digital age and practical tips on approaching change with a more nuanced perspective.

Jason Feifer is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, a podcast host, author, keynote speaker, startup advisor, and a nonstop optimism machine. His goal is to help you become more resilient and adaptable in a world of constant change — so you can seize new opportunities before anyone else does!

Episode Highlights:

[01:00] - Jason shares a story about how misinformation spreads on social media.

[02:17] - The danger of making assumptions based on limited information.

[08:03] - The four phases of change: Panic, Adaptation, New Normal, and Wouldn't Go Back.

[12:32] - The impact of social media on mental health beyond surface-level narratives.

[18:40] - Historical perspective on the spread of information.

[23:41] - Strategies for discerning trustworthy information and the importance of source material.

[31:42] - Addressing the "gotcha" culture and the human tendency to focus on negative stories.

[36:17] – How to control your time and be intentional about information consumption.

Connect with Jason Feifer:

Book Build for Tomorrow https://www.jasonfeifer.com/book/ 

Newsletter One Thing Better https://onethingbetter.email/ 

Thank you for tuning into "SuccessFULL with ADHD." If this episode has impacted you, remember to rate, follow, share, and review our podcast. Your support helps us reach and help more individuals navigating their journeys with ADHD.

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Transcript

Jason Feifer: 0:00

began with a Facebook depression, which was reported as a true condition. It was really never more than speculation. Is it true that teenagers with depression are on social media? Yeah, yeah, that's true. Is it true that teenagers with depression are on social media and have bad experiences? And it makes their experience worse? Yeah, of course. But is it true that like Facebook causes depression? No, it's not. That's not a verifiable thing. If you simplify a problem, you're unable to identify proper solutions. When that problem got simplified down to Facebook causes depression, it led some parents to conclude, then I gotta get my kid off of Facebook. But a teenager could have depression could be on Facebook, and could have found a very productive community who could be really useful to them. If you simplify the problem down to Facebook equals causing depression, you're possibly taking a useful tool away from these teenagers, which is why we just have to have more complex understandings of these things and treat them as more complex.

Brooke Schnittman: 1:00

Welcome to successful with ADHD. I'm Brooke Shipman. Let's get started. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to successful with ADHD. Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Jason Pfeiffer, who is the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, a podcast hosts, book author, keynote speaker, startup advisor and nonstop optimism machine. His goal is to help you become more resilient and adaptable in a world of constant change. So you can see his new opportunity before anyone else does. I love that. Welcome, Jason,

Jason Feifer: 1:38

thank you for having me.

Brooke Schnittman: 1:40

Thank you for being on. And I also had the pleasure to meet you in person. And I know what you speak about is authentic and very knowledge based. I really wanted you on here today because and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. But I saw something on social media that you posted, there was a fire in your neighborhood, you posted pictures, I think you think the firefighters and some random person commented, well, if the firefighters were only there sooner, dot dot dot.

Jason Feifer: 2:17

That's more or less correct. So the setup is that I live in Brooklyn, New York, and I live in an area, it's a lot of standalone houses, but they're all like narrow and very tight together. And a couple I mean, this might have been three or four weeks ago now. But it was around 5pm, I was wrapping up the work day and my wife yells for me, because there's a fire behind our house, or what is basically a block away from us where like the houses whose backs are facing our house. Like behind and maybe to to the left is on fire and like on fire. Like, you know, I don't know that I've ever actually seen a house fire that close blame. Yes, like just like consumed, like the house is on fire. And, and so she just saw it out the window. And she was calling 911. But she didn't know that the address, you know, I just threw my shoes on. And I just ran around the block to get to the house. So I could find the address, I text the address of my wife. But really like 30 seconds later, the first fire firefighters show up or as somebody beat her to calling 911. So now I'm just there. And so I watched the very first firefighters get out of the out of the fire truck, it just got to work, you know, I mean, just get to work, a couple of them, like go at the fire and then a couple more of them just go into the house. You know, it's kind of crazy to see somebody just go into house, the house is on fire, we're going into the house, you know, and this is what they do. professionally. Right. And so I just take a quick video of this to show my wife and kids. And then after after a minute or two, you know more fire trucks calm right like this isn't the only one but it was the first one that showed up. And then I run home and I stand out in my backyard with a hose in the in the event that the fire spreads or some flaming embers, something comes through. And while I'm doing this, I just had to post that video that I took, which is shows the couple firefighters like you know with a hose in front of these, this fire just posted on Twitter or x. I'm going to just keep calling it Twitter. And most people responded with appropriate concern. But there's this one guy who who's an anonymous. He's anonymous on Twitter. He goes by Ned isikoff which I looked it up it's actually just like an obscure Seinfeld character. And so I'll just let us use the fake names Ned. Anyway, Ned tweets. Why were they not preventing fire from spreading inexcusable they were all moving slow and had no leadership. And I gotta say like that tweet. I know Oh, that anonymous idiocy is a central feature of Twitter. But that tweet really bothered me. Because for the next couple hours, what I watched, was ultimately more than 100 firefighters and emergency responders swarming this neighborhood, people risking their lives, the fire spread to another house. I mean, basically, it had spread by the time the first fire truck had had shown up, because these houses are so tightly packed together, they stopped it from spreading any further, you know, and they put this thing out, and well, one woman actually died in the she was trapped in the house, she die. So, you know, to see this guy say this, what he didn't understand, he didn't notice so many things, but like to start, is that he saw a short video that I had taken from truly the first minute or two that these firefighters had shown up. And then he just assumed that he knew everything there was to know about the situation. And he's looking at them. And he's like, why are they preventing the fire from spreading this? They're moving slow, there's no leadership? And it's like, no, you dick, like, they first of all, like, those were the first guys that arrived. So you don't know when this was taken? They're basically assessing the situation like they don't know, they don't know, I don't know, anything they just showed up. And they're figuring it out. And, and some of them not knowing anything have already gone into the house. And and like how dare you judge without seeing the full situation. And then it got me thinking is, I suppose you saw because I read this in my newsletter, you know, it got me thinking about how we all do some version of this, where we, we take a small amount of information that we have, and then we basically fill in the rest of the story for ourselves. And then we take that story is truth. And and the lesson that I wanted people to take away from it was whenever we see anything that we don't have the complete picture on, and this could be something we see online or in the news or, or anything or it could just be interpersonal that you know, like Brooke, I call you and you don't call me right answer, you know, right. Yeah. Yeah, right. Would you hate me? Are you avoiding me, you know, like, we always we take we take a small amount of information. And we fill in the rest of the story based on however it is that we are feeling or whatever our biases are. And that just generally leads to bad assumptions and bad outcomes. And so, so I wish that Ned in that moment had just asked himself, what don't I know about this situation? Just that would be a really useful question. What don't I know about this situation? And the answer is like, everything, right? You don't know anything about this. You don't know when this video was taken. You don't know what the fire situation was likely you don't know anything about this situation. All you know is that there's a building on fire. And there are a couple of firefighters there. You don't know anything else. So as soon as you can recognize what you don't know about the situation. Same Same with example with you. I call Brooke. And she doesn't return my call. What don't I know about this? Everything. I don't know what else is going on in your life? I don't know what you were doing that day. I don't even know, ADHD? And

Brooke Schnittman: 8:03

I forgot. Right? called you a month later?

Jason Feifer: 8:07

I don't know. So I can't start making decisions and assumptions based on the story that I have functionally made up in my head. Yeah,

Brooke Schnittman: 8:16

well, I totally appreciate that. And in your book build for tomorrow, I know that you have a systematic approach and questioning yourself. And like figuring out solutions without making assumptions. And you also talked about the fear of loss, how we're hardwired very often to think that way. Daniel Kahneman talks about that. So where do you think and again, there's so much valuable information in your book built for tomorrow? Luckily, you gave me a signed copy. I have it. I've read it a few times. I shared it with my friends and my clients. Where do you think this guy was in all of this? You also talk about like, you know, the four step theory of Sisyphean cycle technologic technology panics. Where is he and all this?

Jason Feifer: 9:10

Well, so look, let's ask the question that I asked a second ago, what don't we know here? And the answer is almost everything. I don't know anything about this guy. I don't know anything. But let's take some of the things that you just talked about. And you know, we can at least we can at least build out just sort of a couple like maybe just a useful theory of the case. So the book that you're describing here build for tomorrow that's that's my book. You can get it for anywhere for anybody's interested audiobook ebook hardcover. And it's it's a book about how to navigate change and how to find opportunity and change and how to develop a unique personal relationship with change, how to understand it, and your own relationship with it. And you describe the four phases I argue that all change happens in four phases, panic adaptation, and Normal and wouldn't go back. And then the book dives into a lot of like how change impacts us and how people generally react to change, you're talking about loss. You know, I argue that we equate change with loss. So when something changes in our, in our lives or our work, we often immediately think of the thing that we're losing as a result of that. And because we, as humans, our brains are higher hardwired, to protect against loss more than to seek gain. It's called loss aversion theory, decades of psychological research confirms, this is, you know, when when change happens, we get pretty spooked. And we, we feel a sense of deep loss. And that can lead to a sense of panic. And when you're panicking, you're not acting rationally. And then, you know, some of the stuff like the Sisyphean cycle of tech panic is so like an interesting example of how that gets applied societally, when society is reacting to new technologies, but let's just let's just take a guess I would look I about about Ned. And you know, again, to be very clear, I don't know anything about Ned, but I'm going to, I'm going to fill in at least one gap based on what I what I've generally found to be true, which is that if somebody is defaulting to negative, it's often because something is missing, or has gone wrong in their lives. And so if somebody is, is a troll online, something's missing, something's happening, something bad is happening in their lives, it could be very lonely, they could be very frustrated that they could have not achieved what they what they want to achieve, they could have been rejected. This is something you know, people don't just naturally become that way. Yeah, it's just it's not a thing. And it's not a thing that a lot of people do just for fun. It's usually because it's filling a gap somewhere. I don't know what that person's gap is. And look, I could also be wrong. I don't know anything about this person. But based on the stories that I've seen and play out and the people that I've interacted with. And you know, I've had people reach out to me who were very negative, and sometimes I engage them in conversation, and I discover they're very unhappy. Something that guy is very unhappy. And I don't know why. But whatever it is, it is it has taught him to see something happening and assume that something is wrong. Assume that there's something there's something missing there. So there's something there's something something nefarious or something incompetent that's happening underneath the thing that he's seeing. And, you know, that's, that's really unfortunate. It's not the way that I want to see the world. It's, but it's the way that a lot of people do.

Brooke Schnittman: 12:33

Yeah, yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I definitely want to go into you know, how that fear that irrational thinking in just a little bit, but I also wanted to bring you on because as someone who lives with ADHD, who helps people with ADHD, and someone who's written plenty of, you know, news stories and, you know, share so much information out there on platforms. with ADHD, we're energized by stressful situations. Unfortunately, they produce dopamine. So negative thoughts produce dopamine, positive thoughts produce dopamine, sticky headlines, also reuses. Dopamine, we have justice sensitivity. So we for the perceived underdogs want to make things right, you know, we're not always the best readers due to coexisting learning conditions, focusing our attention on decoding words, and retaining information, just takes a lot of executive functioning skills, to fact check a story and go back and forth and see what's accurate, what's missing. What don't we know, all of that information? So I'm curious, you had mentioned some strategies on how to figure out what we don't know. But just as a general consensus, do you see because you mentioned in your book build for tomorrow, that there's connections to history to build for tomorrow? So do you see history repeating itself, or really human behavior repeating itself as it relates to fears and new stories?

Jason Feifer: 14:09

Yeah, certainly. I think and so thanks for that, that really helpful context. And, you know, I'll just say, as a caveat for everything that I'm going to say going forward is I don't have ADHD and I don't I don't understand it the way that you that you do have no authority there. But what I do, you know, what I do know is is a lot about, you know, how people navigate change, and, and business and technology and the way that systems tend to function. So if you asked about history, I'm very interested in history. And the reason that I'm interested in history is because we don't know how the stories today are going to play out, either in the news or in our lives, you know, just whatever is happening. I don't know the end of that story. But if you look back in history, you actually can see the end of the story and see what happened based on decision That's pretty interesting, useful. It's also useful to see how the things that we are experiencing now echo throughout history to understand that the things that we're experiencing now are not generally original. They're not the first time that we faced them. And they're usually not as, as dire as we often like to make them out to be. So you're asking about, for example, what you're really asking about is trust of information. And so, you know, let's come back, Samuel Morris was the creator of the first commercially available telegraph, which is to say, the very first time in, in human history in human history, that information could move faster than a physical object. Just consider that it's wild. For Samuel Morris and the story, Sammy Morris is actually kind of wonderful. And this sounds like a tangent, but, but I promise it won't be. Sammy Morris is a painter, and he lives in New England somewhere or something and he comes down to DC for business. While he's in DC, he gets, he gets a message, which is to say that a person has shown up with a piece of paper, and they've ridden a horse from New England to DC, who took a while, the only way to get information from one place to another is to write it down on a piece of paper and have it and have a horse carry it right. And his wife is definitely ill. And before he can, before he can do anything about this, he gets a second message on a horse, which is that his wife has died. And, and what he what he thinks is, if information could have gotten to him faster, he could have gotten back home and seen his wife before she died. This is what propels him to become an inventor, and to ultimately create the world's first commercially viable telegraph, which is to say a wire that you can send information on through series of dots and dashes or so he creates Morse code in 1837. And that's the first time that you can send information from from DC to mean, like that. It's kind of magic, right? Like Sammy Morris could not have envisioned this. But almost immediately, almost immediately, this starts to raise questions about truthfulness of information. Because you somebody can send somebody else a wire, where did it come from? Is the information correct? Newspapers start printing things that are that are wired to them. But they're not true. People are sending people or sending reports of armies on the move. And newspapers are printing them and getting everybody worked up about about past possible war. And it's just it's not true. So we just made it up. So you know, you think, Oh, we were dealing with this kind of information crisis, we've always been dealing with an information crisis, always. It's not a new thing. Fascinating, our need to engage with it, and to be smart about how to navigate it, and how to understand what information is trustworthy. That that's a that's a worthwhile conversation to always be having. But don't don't think like you're the first person in human history to have to face this. Because that's, that makes it scarier that makes it make makes it mean like, Oh, baby, there's no solution to this, maybe you know, it's like, aliens have come down. I don't know how to solve it. We've been doing this for literally hundreds of years we've been we've been having this conversation. So it's worth having. It's worth having. But but let's put it in context. It's, it's not a new one. And we'll get through it just as we have in the past. I love that.

Brooke Schnittman: 18:41

So basically, we could use history, things might end differently, but nothing is new here. So because there was information that was received via telegram and then it turned into different ways of spreading information that was real or not real, like how do we decipher between fiction and nonfiction? news stories and information? All right,

Jason Feifer: 19:08

let me first just offer one more bridge from history. And then we'll just talk about the experience today. The mistake that people generally make about introductions of new technologies is that they think some things are fixed, and some things are variable. Here's an example. Right now we're having a conversation about deep fakes, you know, AI generated voice video images, how can people trust it? Generally, the way that people talk about deep fakes is, oh, well, you know, how will we ever know now and nobody's going to know what's real or what's not? That is based on the belief that some things are fixed and some things are variable. The things that are fixed in this scenario, is how we process and distribute information. Right? We're kind of imagining our current world and our current models, and then we're saying that Technology is going to change. That's the variable, the technology will come better it will become it will create these defects. So now how can our existing systems the existing way, and when I say existing systems, I mean, you checking social media and believing what you see on social media, that's an existing system, right? Is this personal as much as it can be national or international, we're thinking the existing systems will stay exactly the same. And the technology will change. That's not true. That's not what happens. Nothing is fixed. Everything is a variable. Everything is a variable. So the information systems change, the way in which you interact with the information changes the way in which you understand the information changes the way in which the information is distributed changes. Today, a newspaper, at least if it's a responsibly run, one, does not just print anything that somebody tells it. They just don't do them. What will happen as a result of deep fakes now, you know, I don't know, I would, I would guess the starting point is going to be that there will be an increased skepticism of what you see online, which frankly, sounds good to me. I don't think that we're skeptical enough of it. But if there's more and more fake things out there that that are indistinguishable on first glance from real things, more people are gonna have to start to think, I wonder if that's real. Maybe that's not real. That that's healthy. That sounds like this sounds like a good change. But that's also a variable, that's also a shift that's happening. That's not a static, right? That's not a fixed way of engaging with the information, because you're not engaging with the information the way that you did 10 years ago, you're changing. So yeah, let's give ourselves credit. We can adjust as we go. But now let's let's talk about, you know, like, what, what happens, what do we actually do on an individual basis. But there are people who study this for a living like just this, and I'm not one of them. But I have a bunch of things to say about it. So the first thing that that I think it's really important to understand is that most of the means of distribution of information, which is to say, social media, or cable news, they're not providing you with original source material. They're providing you with what somebody has to say about something or somebody's opinion on something. I never watch cable news, like 0% of my time is cable news. But I would bet that if you turn on cable news at any time, what you're going to be served is people's opinions on things where you are not going to be served is firsthand information source material. What you'll find when you go to source material, which is available, it's just that it's sometimes it looks boring, sometimes it's in the form of reports is that the information that you get there is often at once simpler and more complex than whatever it is that you heard, it's often less scary. It's often calming. Give you an example. I was having a conversation recently, he was asking what I thought about voter ID laws. I was like, I don't want to talk about this because I don't know. And you don't know. So why why would we debate it? But let me go find some source material. So I did, you know, I went back to Bill and I was like, Look at this. Like, as it turns out, this is a far more nuanced conversation than like either side is actually having but also once you look at original source material, it's also less freaky than then you know, it's like, original source material and calm. conversations don't really make for good arguments on cable news. It's worth remembering the incentive structure of wherever you're getting information. Cable News is designed to keep you coming back to cable news. They have to make you feel like it's important that you watch this. I got to stay glued to this because otherwise, dot dot dot, I'll tell you what. I stopped watching that stuff. years ago, nothing bad has happened to me. Nothing. Nothing bad has happened to me. The world continues to turn.

Brooke Schnittman: 23:41

I stopped watching news in 2020. My husband told me that I think it was Robert Kiyosaki had mentioned that, like your friend, who are a source that you trust, if it's really important will tell you and it's a time suck. Yeah, I stopped watching for like past four years as well. It is

Jason Feifer: 23:59

I mean, you know, I'm not like ignorant of what's happening in the world. But I tend to want to focus on the things that are most relevant to me like last point that I'll make on like this scattered monologue is from Samuel Morris's telegraph to now there's never been a time in human history where it's been easier to access information. We don't need all that information. You just don't You don't need it. All right, I'm not saying like stop information. Information is great. Put it all out there. But you personally, you don't need to spend your whole day consuming it. You just don't Sure. It's other things for you to do. Like live your life like live your life like to take care of the people who you love and who rely upon you. You need to make better decisions about the information that we're we're investing our time in because just because it's there doesn't mean that you need to spend all your time with it. So

Brooke Schnittman: 24:48

yeah, I I would second that and thank you for all of that information. It's clear that a lot of people get more information like you said then they need and a lot of them information is in bite sized chunks on social media, but to fact check the information to get it from multiple resources, resources that you trust. But I know in your book, you had mentioned the Facebook depression in 2011. Right where the American Academy of Pediatrics published a paper called The impact of social media on children, adolescents and families, and basically saying that Facebook was causing depression, but there was no research that proved that normal exposure to social media harms adolescents, psychological well being

Jason Feifer: 25:34

they're actually wildly there still isn't. That's, that's fascinating. That's that's taken for granted. Now in the public conversation. There's no causational data to prove that. A lot of there's a lot of correlative speculation, there is no causation or data. It just doesn't exist.

Brooke Schnittman: 25:52

So what is it? Do you think because you know, there's some fear and emotions right now. I feel it from my listeners, I feel it from people, my family like Israel, Palestine, Huberman. Sure I wore mental health, we're in like high stress situations, and they're pretty much is nothing you can say that won't piss someone off? Oh,

Jason Feifer: 26:17

yeah. For sure. Well, look, let's let's, you know, I mean, for anybody who started get worked up at when I just said that there's no causative data. That is not to say that people don't have bad experiences on social media, right? Like, if you go onto Instagram, and you see a bunch of stuff that pisses you off at that, yeah, you just had a bad experience. But that's the same as going to a dinner party where somebody says something that pisses you off, right? Like, let's just let's just not confuse kind of systems of information distribution, with individual bad experiences. Yeah, you can have, you can have a bad experience on social media. I've had plenty of bad experiences on social media. You can also have good experiences on social media. My wife right now, her name is Jennifer Miller. She's, she writes books and is a freelance journalist, and actually has been working for the last almost a year now on a book is really fascinating where she is, it's a young adult nonfiction book. So it's written for young adults, but it's real. It's reported, she has been spending the past year, following three high school kids with different mental health issues, to just get a get a year in their life and what they do and what's their interaction with mental health services. And, and it's been really, really interesting. And when we talk about this with friends, one of the first questions that they always ask is, oh, well, social media must be a terrible problem, right? Like that. You must see that all the time. And my wife, who actually is not my wife does not like social media. She's not on social media. I mean, she has like accounts, but she doesn't she doesn't use them. She doesn't check them. She said that actually, very interestingly, like it's far more nuanced when you actually spend a year with these kids and see what their experience with social media is. Yeah, sometimes it's bad or like sometimes one of the kids that she was following like, it's, you know, he was bullied on social media, but also, that same kid then used Instagram to share how much this is hurt him. And it rallied incredible number of people to him. And and then he used social media to find a community that that he that he's connected with, it's just like everything. And this is the primary point that I'm that I'm making throughout all of this, like, just like everything is just more complicated. It's just not a simple narrative about about any so the thing with the Facebook depression, which was reported as as a as a true condition, go back to like, news 2011, you'll just find all these reports about Facebook, depression, Facebook, depression, it was really never more than speculation. Is it true that teenagers with depression are on social media? Yeah, yeah, that's true. Is it true that teenagers with depression are on social media and have bad experiences? And it makes their experience worse? Of course, of course, but is it true that like Facebook causes depression? No, it's not. It's it's just there's just no, that's not a that's not a verifiable thing. And so if you simplify a problem, you're unable to identify proper solutions. And in the case of the Facebook media, the Facebook depression thing is like, when that problem got simplified down to Facebook causes depression, it led some parents to say, to conclude, you know, we'll, then I gotta get my kid off of Facebook. But there's another way that I could have gone, which is that a teenager could have depression, could be on Facebook, and could have found a very productive community, and could have found peers that unlike the people, that they're meeting at school, who can be really useful to them. And again, I'm not saying that that's the only outcome but I am saying that that is an outcome. And if you simplify the problem down to Facebook equals causing depression, then you're you're possibly taking a useful tool away from these teenagers, which is why we just have to have more complex understandings of these things and treat them as more complex because because Facebook or social media is not the only thing that happens in somebody's lives. Think it just think about the last 10 or 15 years. And what else is happening in the lives of young people? It's a lot. Oh, yeah. A lot of economic instability

Brooke Schnittman: 30:16

911

Jason Feifer: 30:19

breakups families, yes, there's just, there's there's endless things that are happening in people's lives, it's very hard to separate just because something seems new, doesn't mean that it is the sole cause or even a cause of a thing that you're seeing. So I'm not here to tell you that, like social media is, is perfect. It's very clearly not. But I am here to tell you that it's a far more complex story than we often give it credit for. And that when you spend a lot of time with with teenagers who are on social media, yes, some of them will have only bad experiences, some of them will have only good experiences, a lot of them will have a complex mix of experiences, a lot of what they're experiencing is not like it wasn't created by Mark Zuckerberg, it's just a reflection of what life already is just kind of amplified and recorded. And we should we should keep that in mind.

Brooke Schnittman: 31:10

Yeah, yeah. Such amazing information. The last question I have is, again, with lots of stress, and I'm not saying that now is different than 10 years ago, but it just seems like there's a lot of like, gotcha games, right? Like the guy who was on your social, and like, who's wrong? So I'm just wondering, like, you know, people always think there's a better story to make someone wrong or bad. Where do you think that comes from? From? Do you agree with that?

Jason Feifer: 31:42

Well, I, you know, you're bringing together a lot of possibly disparate things that, you know, that we're seeing, right. So, you know, like I said, my thesis of the case there is that I think that a lot of people are missing something, we're all missing something. And, and it drives us to do it drives us to make decisions into into to pursue things that we feel like are, are going to fill that gap, some of the most famous people, some of those famous thinkers, I mean, I have access through entrepreneur to a lot of very, very noteworthy people. And if not them, then a lot of friends of theirs. I hear some bad stories, you know, people who are just not kind clearly have just a hole in their lives. I mean, you know, it's, why does someone come out of somewhere and just like, become famous on social media, I mean, sometimes it's by luck. Sometimes it's because something is missing. It's just missing in their lives, and they're trying to fill it with fame, all of that stuff can be true. All of it, like the world is complex, we contain multitudes. Again, that's why it's like, the drive to simplify things, is just is just a problematic one, right? You should create room in your life for it for tolerance for complexity, I just think a really useful way to think about things is, if you hear us out something, it feels like knowing more about that will improve your life, then spend some time getting to getting to know it, talk to people, there are experts out there, they'll talk to you, or they've talked to somebody else, genuine people who not just who like repeat things, right? You know, a lot of people who go on podcasts like health podcasts will talk about testosterone or whatever, like, do you research testosterone in a lab? If you don't, I'm not that interested in what you have to say about testosterone, I'll wait for the person who researches it in the lab. Also, it's helpful to know the way in which you learn I would imagine this is probably something that comes up in conversations about ADHD a lot. I learn almost exclusively from conversation, like I read books, and I forget them. But when I talk to people, and I'm able to ask questions, that's when the information becomes sticky for me. So I've optimized for that. If I want to know something, and it's really important to my life, then I'm going to talk to somebody and try to understand it in generally speaking otherwise, if I if I read something, and it's concerning, I think, well, that that doesn't sound good. There's probably more to that story that I don't know, I'm gonna have to make a decision about whether that's worth my time. And it's probably it's probably not, but maybe it is, and I'll spend more time on it. People on Twitter who are yelling at each other, what's their incentive? I think their incentive is probably to make themselves feel better about something that's lacking in their lives. And it's your, it's your choice about whether to engage with that or not. I don't think that it's a really good use of time. But everyone can make decisions about how they spend their time themselves. I

Brooke Schnittman: 34:38

like that. I like that for you. It seems like you're separating the motion from the information and seeing whether or not you want to learn more about it. And if you do then asking reliable sources and kind of just sifting through the data rather than taking everything for face value.

Jason Feifer: 34:54

Yeah, it's funny I was at the I was at the airport waiting for a flight recently and was next to this Like retiree couple and the husband was was looking at some news site or something like this thing just kept happening, which is he'd be like, oh, did you see that? Like, you know, this, this, this is happening and this person just said this? And the wife would be like, Oh, no, I'm not going to have to look into that. And I was like, why are you going to look into that? What are you going to gain from looking into that you're going to, you're gonna solve the problem? Why are you doing that? You know, and I think that like for those people, that is, it's become a sport, in a way, it's become something that they're they're doing to feel something that they don't feel in control enough of the world, and they feel like kind of like digging into every terrible thing they hear on the news is somehow satisfying to them. I don't know what it is. And if that's how you want to spend your time, fine. All I'm asking is that you are intentional about how you use your time, don't let something else or somebody else dictate how you use your time, there's a lot of distractions, everything seems appealing to to dive into, you have a limited time on this planet, and you alone, get to choose how you spend that. And I would just say whatever it is that you want to do with that time is what you should be doing. And don't lose control of it. Yeah,

Brooke Schnittman: 36:17

love it, you be in control of your day, rather than the day running you with all the noise and notifications. Jason, this is so valuable. Thank you for all of this, I knew that I was gonna get a lot more than I thought a lot of information that I didn't know about from your brain. And I know that this is going to lands really well with a lot of people because we all want to know how to find information, and how to research what what works for us and what doesn't work for us. We just want to be more productive and smarter humans. So thank you for adding to that with the valuable resources that you shared. If anyone wants to reach out to you, where can they find you? Yeah,

Jason Feifer: 37:05

my, my pleasure. I um, if you want to know more about me, you can subscribe to my newsletter, it's really the best thing to do. It's called One thing that are one thing that are each week one way to be more successful or satisfied at work and build a career or company that you love. And you can find that by going to the website, one thing better dot email that just plug that into the browser, one thing that or dot email, and it'll take you there. Thank

Brooke Schnittman: 37:31

you, Jason, thank you for your time. I know it's valuable. And I hope that you get to be in control of the rest of your day and do the things that you love.

Jason Feifer: 37:41

That's a that's a high bar. Well, this was this was a delight. I was very happy to do this. So thank you for having me.

Brooke Schnittman: 37:49

Thanks for listening to this episode of successful with ADHD. I hope it helps you on your journey. And if you need any additional support for you or a loved one with ADHD, feel free to reach out to us at coaching with brooke.com and all social media platforms at coaching with Brooke and remember, it's Brooke with any Thanks again for listening. See you next time.