Ice Cream Moments
Enjoy life before it melts.
The world is moving fast and we are a distracted bunch. Demand for our attention is coming from all directions and our self-imposed digital addiction isn’t helping matters. There has been more than enough ranting about texting and driving (please don’t do it!), texting and walking (watch out!), and getting lost in our phones while a friend or loved one is trying to engage (sorry, what did you say?). But, we still do it, don’t we? As we fixate, heads-down, while the world is passing by it’s like life is melting around us.
Life is, indeed, good…
That realization reminded me of an Inc. article from last year with the founders of Life is Good. In the Q&A, co-founder Bert Jacobs described the carefree character Jake they created for their early tees as a guy who’s
“…got life figured out.” They put him in all kinds of fun, relaxing, and playful situations to, “…celebrate the simple things people enjoy.”
One simple thing is having Jake enjoy life with an ice cream cone. Bert described it this way, “Ice cream is about now. When you have an ice cream, you really can’t do other things. If you try texting, working or multi-tasking, the ice cream is just gonna melt. When you’re eating an ice cream, you can’t do much else but hit pause and enjoy. We sell a heck of lot of tee-shirts that have a stick figure with an ice cream cone in his hand.”
That got me thinking about an idea that has evolved into the concept of
Ice Cream Moments. What if we looked for those moments in life when if we don’t give them our full attention they will just melt away? How would we differently choose to treat our time, friends, loved ones? What more could we get from our experiences if we made them our singular focus and enjoyed every moment before they melt?
Digital Sabbath…
As I was thinking about this story, Mark Suster posted, Why I Stopped Taking My Mobile Phone to My Bedroom. Mark is an entrepreneur turned VC and a leading technologist. Mark, no doubt, lives in as fact-paced and distracted a world as anyone. What he realized was that even though technology is a huge part of his world, and will continue to be so, there should also be boundaries. He set that boundary around his bedroom to keep out the iPhone that he would bring in there every night. His history of doing so led to thinking about work right before bed, not communicating as much with his wife, and even working less productively on a small device when a perfectly good computer was not far away! Mark seems happy with his decision saying, “So a few weeks ago I made a commitment never to bring my mobile phone into my bedroom at night under any circumstance. I bought a new digital alarm clock so I couldn’t use my iPhone as a crutch. When I wake up I get straight out of bed so I can start my day productively and while “draining my email” early in the morning in bed isn’t “unproductive” it certainly isn’t as productive as the alternative.”
Me, too…
I’m guilty of this, too. My phone is the first thing I grab in the morning and last thing I look at before bed. And, as Mark said, it often leads to my mind racing on work topics when I most need to be shutting my mind down. I also certainly catch myself heads-down when I could be more engaged with those around me. I see it in my kids, too. Their default mode when “nothing else is going on” is to grab a device and get lost in it…while life around them melts away.
What to do?
So, here’s my proposal. Let’s think of life more in terms of Ice Cream Moments. Before we grab our phone and spend what will likely be mindless time down the rabbit hole of who knows what, let’s ask if we’re missing a moment that’s melting away. Is there someone around us we could talk to, or just be with? Is there something to quietly think about, or a project we’ve been meaning to start? Or, even better, go get an actual ice cream cone with someone you love and enjoy doing nothing else but eating them together before they melt. I guarantee that will be way more satisfying than anything on the damn screen.
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