If I ask you about the biggest scam of this century, you are likely to mention the 2008 banking scam, CWG, 2G, Coal, Madoff, etc.
It’s none of these.
The biggest scam, in my opinion, is the loot of your attention. You keep giving it away to several entities constantly on the prowl to steal it from you.
The advent of mobile and the numerous free apps have only ensured that you are a captive, constantly trading your information for the FREE servings.
Frankly, there is nothing FREE. You pay with your time, with your precious attention.
When you are not paying for something, you are the product.
It’s true for Google’s search engine, the funny CAT pictures on FB or videos on Youtube and it’s true for all your FREE gaming apps too.
It’s true for any thing that you consume – physically or mentally – that demands your time and your attention. You are paying for it, dearly.
You would not believe that most mobile apps are designed to get you increase your frequency of usage. They want you to be back again and again.
See those stock tickers showing live prices! Ah!
Our attention is getting worse
Ask any wise person – what is the most precious thing?. The answer most likely is going to be – TIME. Yet, we constantly give away our most precious thing to anyone and everyone.
Attention is a scarce cognitive resource. When you pay attention to one task, it necessarily requires an offset against some other tasks.
In a study a couple of years ago, humans now have lesser attention span than that of a Goldfish. A goldfish can be attentive for 9 seconds in one go. Humans, on the other hand and on an average, can be attentive only for 8 seconds. This is down from 12 seconds recorded in 2000s.
Lack of attention has actually been called a disease- ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
The impact of this ATTENTION SCAM is greater than you can believe. Our attention is now slave to what is important to other people and their tools.
You DO NOT pay attention to what is important to YOU. This hurts you big time in the long run.
How are you affected as an Investor?
When it comes to investment decisions, you are dealing with vast amounts of information. You can’t but give limited attention, thus increasing the scope of investment errors.
When faced with huge information and limited attention capacity, you will most likely focus on things that appear easy to understand. You may even avoid asking questions that matter.
Take for example, thousands of mutual fund schemes and their variants. It will require great attention to go through even ten of them in great detail. So you follow a simple criterion, past returns.
Forget mutual funds, what do you know about a ULIP, endowment plan or a money back plan? Let me take a much simpler one – NPS.
It is amusing to see how many people overestimate the tax benefit on their NPS investment.
How did Mark Zuckerberg become so rich?
You used Facebook, gave him your attention and he used it to build all the wealth that he has today.
The question is if he could become so rich by using your attention, what could you do for yourself?
You need to claim your attention back. Pay attention to things that matter and will serve you. Things that will add to you and not take away from you – such as learning new skills.
It is time to pay attention to yourself.
Between you and me: I look forward to any ideas you can share to claim our attention back from Mark Zuckerberg and Google.
What an absolutely radical thought Vipin! I must compliment you’ve blended truisms with financial behaviour quite well !
While you took it from an investor’s point of view, I extend a philosophical take on your observation – no.1 regret recorded of dying people is that they allowed others/ society/ spouse/ parent etc to be master of THEIR time and not became a master of it !
Thanks Mohit. You have added a great thought. I, for one, am not going down that path.
Excellently written Vipin
Thanks Sreenivasan.
A good point, as usual, and I agree with your conclusion to not randomly give our attention to every company that wants it.
However, regarding “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”, while you have a point, it’s not an actionable statement: are we willing to pay for each app we use and each web site we visit?
Kartick, Your first statement is probably the answer to the question you have raised. Thanks.