Music sucks. I trusted Bill and things changed for good
We all know that the rich and successful people whichever category they fall into — whether businessmen, entertainers or even politicians — all have some sort of habit that makes them unique and highly productive. Some of it may sound really extreme, but it somehow helps them achieve the things they want in life. Taking it into consideration, it is a worthy sacrifice though, or at least I think so.
It was a long time ago when I read about the fact that Bill Gates did not listen to any music, or watch any TV show when he was young in his 20s. He said he did nothing in this youth that could distract him from what he does best — coding. He even admitted it in his blog as he writes:
“It sounds extreme, but I did it because I thought they would just distract me from thinking about software”.
He did not waste any time that weren’t meant to be devoted to his future. Many of us, including myself when I read this, may get into the thinking of something like “that only because he is a genius, a prodigy”. But we all forgot that he is also a human. He lives like us. Hence, why don’t we spare a second a listen to the man who achieved everything a man can wish for. I tried it and it improved my life so far. In the article, he said the most important thing to your success both in life and career is focus. Hence, he did all of it just to maintain his focus.
That seems to work really well for him as, during those years, he was such productive that within three short years, from 1976 to 1979, he turned his little start-up in New Mexico into a fast-growing Microsoft as we know it today.
In the beginning, I highly doubted that cutting back any form of entertainment can truly have any impact on productivity. Gradually, my little one started to connect the dots and things became to make sense. Back in the 70s, music or any other kind of entertainment was like the toxic addictive social media that we are having right now. So can you imagine any successful person that uses social media most of the time or keep checking his feed every 15 minutes? Music is like social media as human have the tendency to become addictive if the time we spend for it increase over time. Unless your goals depend on either, you should minimize (or even eliminate) your dependency on them, and direct that time towards things that can enrich your life. Both of them are diseases and will have a tremendously negative effect on you. If you don’t trust me, I have a way for you to double-check it for your own sake. Whenever you are in your typical-listening-to-music environment, it can be in your car, when you are taking shower, try to turn off the music for about 15 minutes. In that short 15 minutes, pay attention closely to your thinking. You will be amazed by how many things your brain can think about. Just imagine how much you will progress if you can intensively think about the thing you are trying to achieve all that time you spend listening to music. If you listen to music for about 30 minutes a day, you will lose nearly 20,000 hours being distracted and daydreaming.
Although the damage that music brings is very severe to your life’s well-being, you can hardly recognize it. Even if you are listening to music while you are working, it is still very unproductive because your brainpower is constantly being distracted by the mesmerizing and ear-catching rhyme. You will get a lot less done at the same time comparing to when you are distraction-free. Hence, a person can be very incompetent if he loses his focus all the time. Even an ordinary activity is still very out-of-reach if you are listening to music. Just close your eyes and think about the time when you have to pause the music just to look for a lot in a crowded parking lot and you will know what I mean.
I know blocking out music entirely is extremely hard for us, even for me. That’s when “white noise” and “instrumental music” came into my life. “White noise” is mostly a set of curated sounds from nature, such as bird chimes, sea breeze and so many other sounds that doesn’t interface with our thoughts or distract us from work.
Things have changed since Bill’s time. Today, there are tons of distractions around us — especially your phone. For me, music is the therapy for blocking out the distractions of outside noise, such as people talking, car sounds, or just about any displeasing noise that can cause a distraction for me. I even have a collection of songs that I play whenever I want to swing to work mode as it turns off distractions totally, these are songs or soundtracks that hardly have someone singing over the beat, and in a case where the artists do sing over the beat, it doesn’t distract me.
Every since I do this, my productivity has skyrocketed and I seriously get things done in a lot faster time.
This way, I can effectively maintain my focus while syncing both sides of my brain for better productivity.
As for Bill Gates, he remained totally neutral as he never used any of these tools, although now he has started doing what most of us would like to do in the nearest future or probably already doing. “Meditation” is a great way to refresh our minds and stay highly focused.
Conclusions
I know it’s very hard to stop doing something that we have been doing for a very long time. But if you think give it a thought about all the things that you are sacrificing in your career and life, you may have to change you mind.
