Yael Shahar Talks about the Pine Cone Theory of Life and Success

What do you do for a living?

I research phenomena related to human behavior in the modern world.

University research?

It started in college (Emek Yizrael) and now I’m doing it on my own.

Give me an example.

Here’s the precious one. I wanted to understand why people don’t listen to each other any more. It seems like everyone these days has ADHD. And everyone admits it, “Yeah, I have ADHD”.

So I went to the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) and got into a round table discussing how we can improve the startup/entrepreneurship scene in Israel.

What needs improving? We are supposed to be a world leader.

There are places where youngsters don’t get a chance to participate in incubators and accelerators for start-ups.

Moneywise and coaching wise. Women are not involved enough.

But women aren’t involved enough in startupism. Anywhere…

So we’re talking about how startups lose by not having more women involved.

There you go. You just changed topics on me.

That was you.

So what do you do?

So I sit there as a researcher and write a lot. And then i do two things. I work with a timer, measuring the time that people sit around the table without touching their phones. It turns out that in the government round table, three minutes was the minimum, 17 minutes was the maximum. The average was seven minutes.

Seven minutes? That’s a lot of time not to touch a phone.

We’re finally sitting in the parliament, listening to people talk about such an important subject, and there you are. People are diving into their phones.

But that’s not all. They didn’t just touch the phone. They spent an average of four minutes on the phone, and this was during the government debate. I’m talking members of parliament and invited guests.

I guess that technology makes it difficult to concentrate on one thing.

Yeah, that’s the obvious conclusion. We are crackheads of stimulation. This is what we are. It only gets worse. People need the fix. The rush. The excitement. People are smartphone dope heads. I was trying to figure out when they do it. Once there is a ‘dead moment’ in the discussion, no huge stimulus, as soon as it goes below a certain level, people have to do something. They check the phone.

Like picking your nose at a red light?

In a way. There was a lady who talks slowly, at that moment sixteen of the twenty people I was observing looked at their phones. That feeling of ‘touching the on button’, that in itself, like a dog in a Pavlov experiment, does the trick.

Who wants us to keep touching the button?

Them. “They” consists of the technology companies and the social media websites. Both go nuts making it even easier for us to press the button. The flipper phone was not good enough – you needed two steps. Now we have one. But it’s us too. We need the fix.

Soon, we won’t have any buttons. The stimuli will reach directly into our brains.

This is definitely where it’s going.

Now let’s get back to life, success and pine cones.

You need to do only two steps to reach success and happiness in this world. Only two. The first is to be aware of the conditional training that we have undergone. We are all dogs, pigeons in the modern Pavlovian phone technology era.

Once you realize that, the second step is to take action. Only in those places where you think you’re unhappy. This is what I do for a living. So if you come to me and say “My marriage is not so good”, or I can’t find a mate, then maybe you have been thinking that pressing on buttons is going to provide the prize. The instant people get frustrated. Pressing buttons can get you a like, but not a love. A date but not a mate. Pressing button can get you a job, but not a career. A direction but not a profession.

People will notice, but they won’t pay attention. Unless you get that fix, that dose.

You mean pressing the button.

No, I mean the behavior that overrides the button effect.

In order to grab people’s attention away from the phone buttons and the instant life, you have to be super engaging. Much more so than in the past. You have to much more stimulating, energizing, innovative, creative, different that you once did.

People talk about innovation all the time. They get excited but they don’t know why. They think that innovation is enough of a catchword to draw people’s attention. But even that doesn’t work anymore.

So what works?

Pine cones.

Why?

My pine cone is like your saxophone. You take it out of your purse, and magic happens. You stimulate the instant people, you grab their attention. Then you have their attention.

For three minutes?

Until the next big thing comes along.