Page 22 - CSA Speaker Bulletin June 2019 | CSA Celebrity Speakers

CSA SPEAKER BULLETIN TECHNOLOGY
P h o n e l e ss l yThe Year of Living
Martin Lindstrom is one of
the world’s foremost branding
and business transformation
experts and author of 8 New
York Times best-selling books.
He is a frequent keynote
speaker at the World Business
Forum and the WEF. In 2019
Thinkers50 named him one of
the top business thinkers in
the world. He talks here about
living his life without a mobile
phone and the positive impact
it has made on his life.
When the iPhone came out
in 2005, I wasn’t among
the first in line but I did has relied on for centuries. We also
buy one. Two weeks later, surprised
that my new device was doing
exactly what it was designed to do—
addicting me—I replaced it with a no-
frills Nokia, which I used for the next
thirteen years. On January 15, 2018, I
put my Nokia in a drawer forever.
Why? Because I’m haunted by
the image of myself looking at my
phone to the exclusion of everything
else around me. Mostly I remember
resenting that a cartoonish cube of
metal and glass had taken control of
my life. The “endless and proper work”
of paying attention is an essential
part of the work I do. Why would I
use something that compromised my
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ability to be great at my job? or text clients or friends and tell them
I’m stuck in traffic. In my experience,
A year after deep-sixing my phone, cell phones have contributed to a
the benefits in my life have been worldwide delinquency around time,
huge. They’re also ongoing. Here are oddly enough. And yes, without a
a few observations. phone I’ve gotten lost, but when I
do, I ask around and people set me
Creativity. Our phones and our brains straight.
are enmeshed—they’ve become
indistinguishable in many ways. Just Likeability: At first my colleagues
as we’re unwilling to turn off our weren’t exactly overjoyed when I
phones, we’re no longer giving our told them I was retiring my Nokia.
brains a chance to reboot, or refresh. Today, they love it. They tell me I’m
As a result, we pay less and less nicer, more relaxed and much more
attention to our intuition, our senses, agreeable to be around. In the past,
our memories, our experiences—the if I had a spare half hour, I would use
pattern recognition that our species it to fire off numerous emails, most of
them confirming stuff my staff already
risk losing the capacity for boredom. knew. Today, whatever free time I
Boredom may seem, well, boring, but have I use to reflect and prepare. My
it’s also the incubator for creativity real-life friendships have also become
and innovation. deeper, richer—better. Read more.
Without a phone, and not that I’m
keeping score, my productivity has—
I’m guessing—doubled in the past
year. I see the world clearly (at least
I think I do), and as more and more
people duck inside the tent-flaps of
their own cell phone addiction, I’d go
so far to say that not having a phone
has become a competitive advantage.
Promptness. Even when I had my
Nokia, I often ran late, but these
days I’m pretty much always on time.
Why? Because I can no longer call