Michael+B’s+Final+AmEx+Speech+2016

Patience People nowadays have such limited patience. Attention spans are diminishing. Everyone is constantly checking their phones, their emails, snapchats, twitters, facebooks, instagrams. There is so much stimulus in the world now. When a person is deprived of overwhelming stimulus they start to get anxious. They can’t concentrate. They are constantly going from one thing to another. Different apps. Different web pages. They can’t focus on a single video for more than a few minutes. Games are made to fill time and catch attention. Here. There. Back and forth. Never stopping. I think the world needs more patience. (wait)

Patience. That is what I see as important. Waiting for things is crucial. If our goal is to make everything easier and faster because we can't focus on doing one thing at a time, we will not turn out well. Drive thrus, self-checkouts, online shopping. All made to shave off precious seconds of what we are doing. I want to see a world where everyone isn't running from place to place. Jobs are becoming more efficient and free time is increasing. People don’t need to rush. Everything in life is not a competition on how fast you can accomplish it. There is a time for relaxation. Just sitting down, reading a book, drawing a picture, listening to music. That is where genius comes from. Waiting. Thinking. Focusing on one thing, and one thing only. That is what it takes to make someone great. Personally I don’t like waiting for things. I have a problem. It is however, not a big problem because, while I do have concentration issues when doing something I don’t like, say writing a speech, I can concentrate on doing something I love. I switch from tab to tab, take breaks every couple of minutes to watch a YouTube video, or just stand up and walk around. Not being able to concentrate leads to procrastination… like on this speech. No matter how hard I tried to write this before yesterday, I couldn’t concentrate. I think the problem has to be worse for others though. I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t use social media. I actually enjoy reading a good book or drawing a picture for hours. It seems to me that everyone else is in a rush though. They don't like waiting in line. They swerve through traffic to get to the stoplight 3 seconds earlier. They’ll get impatient when a webpage doesn't load instantly. They can’t wait for anything. Patience has been ever decreasing. In the last 15 years, attention spans have decreased from 12 seconds to 8 and a quarter. It’s only going to get worse. The odds that you will have paid attention to this whole speech is low.I will save you some brain cells and finish off my speech. But I have to leave off saying a few more things. I want a world where patience is normal. And yes, you can learn to be patient. And yes, you have to take time to learn. So that’s it. Thank you.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/
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