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12. 173 Billion bits - published 18.07.2012

It’s now the 18^th July 2012, the blog is posting every two days regularly now and has started to become a little bit more philosophical in parts. This is the blog where I first referenced the book ‘Flow’ which has been inspiration to me in terms of finding a balance. This story is very similar to the one that is spoken by the mindfulness guys who suggest that if you’re 30 years old and are only fully aware for 2 hours a day you’ve only got six and half years of awareness left to live.

Another one for planning your resolutions and what to ‘use your bits’ on.

I have blogged about a few books now but I guess it’s time for me to blog about ‘Flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I was introduced to this book as I read another book, which was also amazing called ‘Healing without Freud or Prozac’ by David Servan-Schreiber. Servan-Schreiber referenced ‘Flow’ several times throughout his book and I never forgot that. I then came across it in several other books that I have read and it became clear that this is a book that is cross-referenced by many authors.

At first glance, any of these books, which talk about “happiness” seem to be a bit twee and designed for hippy weirdo’s but Flow is very different. Csikszentmihalyi’s family barely escaped the Nazi’s in Eastern Europe at the start of the Second World War. His train was the last train to cross the Danube before it was bombed leaving everybody else trapped. As a 10-year-old boy sat on the train he thought that there must be a better way to live and that adults had got it all wrong. From then on, his life story is fantastic (although not included in the book) he is a self-styled self-motivated Professor of Psychology in the United States but his career, spanning decades, has now been responsible for interviewing and researching in hundreds of thousands of people into what actually makes them happy. His research is not some fragile glass house of rubbish, it is bone-fide top level scientific research cross-referenced against hundreds of thousands of subjects. That alone makes the book phenomenal reading and it shows what makes individual people happy and what people strive to achieve in their life.

One of the most important parts of the book, to me, was the concept of 173 billion bits of information. Psychologists have proven that the human brain can only process approximately 121 bits of information per second and to listen to a conversation from a fellow human being takes approximately 40 bits of information per second. Multiplied over an average life, that means that all e can process in life is a 173 billion bits of information if we live to approximately 75 years old. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that really that is it. All we have is 173 billion bits and the really important thing is to try and make as many of those bits as possible count towards self-development and improvement. For example: reading a book, almost any book, is a positive experience, which utilizes your bits to make you better. The information is stored and maintained and can be drawn upon later. Watching television uses most of your bits and is a negative experience, very little of the information is retained and is useable. In the short term watching television is a more pleasurable experience as it is a “no brainer” but in the long term it is a 0-sum game because you don’t win from that and it doesn’t make you better and doesn’t provide you with flow or happiness.

I read Flow some years ago and keep returning to it and reading pieces of it. There is a particular passage where there is a man who works on a production line in an electronics factory and he develops a scheme to make his work so interesting and fascinating by trying to do it in different ways and do it quicker and better each time, as opposed to the other guys on the production line who hate their work. He also uses his time at work to map out how he is gong to do his post-graduate education in electronics to move away from the production line to make him a better person.

As I look back now, I think the concept of this book has really shaped the last few years of my life and my drive towards self-improvement and trying to make each moment count.

I genuinely hope that there is at least one person who reads this blog that gets this point because it’s really important to me. Even writing this blog post is a really valuable use of some of my bits.

Blog post number: 1509