Ordinary people seek entertainment

Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.

Benjamin Hardy

The meaning of the quote

You open your phone to check one notification. 40 minutes later you’re watching a stranger rank fast-food fries, and you couldn’t explain how you got there. That gap between the one notification and the 40 minutes is what this quote is getting at.

Hardy’s line is deliberately sharp, but the point isn’t that entertainment is bad. It’s about what becomes your default. Entertainment is easy to consume and usually asks little from you. Learning asks you to pay attention, think practise and sometimes struggle before anything changes. One gives you a pleasant hour. The other can leave you able to do something you couldn’t do before.

Hardy used the line in his 2017 Inc.com article 30 Behaviors That Will Make You Unstoppable, where he wrote about the habits of people who keep developing rather than settling into the same routines.

Warren Buffett has made a similar point about knowledge compounding over time. He once advised students to read hundreds of pages a day because knowledge builds gradually, much like compound interest. One afternoon of reading changes very little. Years of deliberate learning can change what you know, what you can do and what opportunities are open to you.

The useful question isn’t whether you ever watch a movie, play a game or scroll through your phone. It’s what most of your spare attention is building. Entertainment can help you rest. Learning can leave you with knowledge or a skill you can use again. The difference becomes visible slowly, one hour at a time..

Try this

1. Notice where your spare attention goes.
   
   For 3 days, notice how often you reach for entertainment when you have a spare 10 or 20 minutes. Just keep count.
2. Replace one slot with learning.
   
   Choose one of those slots and use it for a week to read, practise or study something you genuinely want to improve. At the end of the week, write down what you can now do or understand that you couldn’t before..

About the author

At 20, Benjamin Hardy was sleeping on his cousin’s couch and trying to work out what to do with his life. He wanted to write, but he had no book deal, no established audience and no obvious path from where he was to where he wanted to be.

He kept writing while studying industrial and organizational psychology at Clemson University, where he later earned a PhD. His work eventually reached a large online audience and led to books on how environment, identity and future goals shape behaviour.

His personal life changed just as dramatically. In 2018, Hardy and his wife Lauren adopted three children through the foster care system. Soon afterward, they learned they were expecting twins, taking their family from no children to five in a remarkably short time. Hardy has spoken about fatherhood as a powerful change in what motivated him and how he thought about his future.

Hardy is now an organizational psychologist and the author of books including Willpower Doesn’t Work and Personality Isn’t Permanent. This quote appears in his Inc.com article 30 Behaviors That Will Make You Unstoppable, where it forms part of his larger argument that growth depends on what you repeatedly choose to do with your time and attention.

Resources

• 30 Behaviors That Will Make You Unstoppable (Article, Benjamin Hardy)
• Read 500 Pages Like This Every Day (Quote Investigator, on Warren Buffett’s reading advice)
• The Buffett Formula: Going to Bed Smarter Than When You Woke Up (Farnam Street)
• Willpower Doesn’t Work (Book, Benjamin Hardy)
• Benjamin Hardy (Psychology Today contributor page)