Is anyone familiar with Tom Lehrer? He’s the humorous pianist from the 50’s and 60’s who wrote such racy (for the time) classics such as “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Masochism Tango”.
(Let us let out a small sigh for a time when songs such as the above were considered risqué.)
One of his other, less well known songs was a salute (of sorts) to the Boy Scouts, in the song “Be Prepared”. Witness:
Be prepared! That's the Boy Scouts' solemn creed
Be prepared! And be clean in word and deed
Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice
Unless you get a good percentage of her price
Be prepared! And be careful not to do
Your good deeds when there's no one watching you
I confess that I can’t think of the phrase “be prepared” without thinking of the (now re-titled) Scouts, and I can’t think of the Scouts without thinking of Tom Lehrer.
And it turns out that a tenet of right-sizing your relationship to technology, whether on not you’ve gone full smartphone-free, involves preparation.
So let’s talk about what it means to be prepared, and how it reduce your reliance on technology and help you be more present.
Technology allows you to know nothing
Technology allows you to know nothing.
That’s not necessarily a criticism, but it’s just a truth. When you have a smartphone in your hand (or a laptop at your desk), all you need to know is how to input your query into the appropriate box, and whatever you want to know—where the best pizza in town is, how to get there by train, how to call a car so you don’t have to go by train, and even paying people back for footing the tab—is all given to you.
Knowledge is easy. Where was Karl Marx born? When did the Stonewall Riots happen? Who won the Cup Final in 1949? (That last one is easy: It was in fact, Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1.)
You don’t need to know. You just need to know how to ask.
Since one of the benefits of smartphones is that this ability goes with you wherever you go, when you’re without this ability, you can feel blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.
“I rely on my GPS for everything. How will I know where to go?“
“How do I find out where that store is?“
“How would I catch a cab without my app?“
No one wants to feel dumb, of course. I don’t want that for you.
The secret, then, is to be prepared.
How to be prepared
Being prepared means having as much of the information on you as you can in advance.
Not sure where to go? Bring a map. Print one out. Write it down.
Don’t remember phone numbers? Write them down too.
Think about where you’re about to go and do. Pause and ask yourself: what information would you need if you couldn’t look it up on a device?
Or just ask
“But Mike, it’s not possible to know everything in advance. Plans change. What are we supposed to do then?“
Remember what I wrote above: “You don’t need to know. You just need to know how to ask.“
If you don’t know something, you can always ask someone. A person on the street. A cab driver. The front desk of a hotel. The person at the gas station.
This might seem like an obvious suggestion, but maybe it isn’t, considering how often people assume that their technology is the only way to solve problems.
And yes, people might use their smartphones to get you the answer. But maybe not. Maybe they’ll say: “Oh, you don’t want to go there. That place is terrible. Here, let me tell you a better place to go.“
That little interaction might not just be productive, but it also might feel good, especially if you’re one of the people out there who doesn’t have a lot of people interaction. You might be surprised to hear that, but you might also be surprised at how much of your time you spend not interacting with people.
The New York Times recently wrote that people interaction is increasingly becoming a luxury product. But it doesn’t have to be. All you need to do is ask for directions.
The X factor
I’m not saying that you’ll meet a love of your life at the gas station forecourt, only that there is an “X factor”, an unknown, that comes from reaching out to other people. You might not be used to it, you might not have done it in a while, but it’s still out there, available to all.
And in that respect, you don’t need to be totally prepared. There is a world of information available to you outside of screens. Are you willing to engage with the people in it? Are you willing to try?
