Our 2020 bestseller “The Victory Project: Six Steps to Peak Potential” espoused simplicity and decluttering as essential behaviours for improving productivity and performance. Supreme Court lawyer and our favourite Indian Express columnist, Menaka Guruswamy (whose father’s friend is a client of Marcellus) has written a piece supporting this point of view. Interestingly, however, this support comes from an unexpected source: “For much of his captaincy and career as an international cricketer, Mahendra Singh Dhoni aka Captain Cool, did not carry a mobile phone. Or if he had one, few had his number. Ravi Shastri, who was the Indian cricket team’s manager and head coach for a significant part of MS’s tenure as captain, speaking to India Today, says, “Till today, I don’t have his number. I have never asked for his number. I know he doesn’t carry his phone with him. When you want to get in touch with him, you know how to get in touch with him. He is that kind of a person.”
Now, I have at various points in my life envied MS. When he was younger, for his helicopter shot, and as I grew older, his calm temperament. But when I read Shastri’s comments on him not being glued to a mobile phone, I was amazed. How had MS escaped the invasion of his mind by technology — in this case, the mobile phone?
Today, mobile phones are used to take calls, answer emails, watch movies, check social media, shop online, use messaging apps like WhatsApp or Signal and take pictures with the built-in camera. It’s common to see a couple out for dinner in a nice restaurant, glued to their phones. Or lawyers like me running between the 16 courtrooms of the Supreme Court, while checking our phones…”
Research shows that if you want to have a career like Dhoni’s – rather that that of a typical IPL slogger – you have to ditch your mobile phone: “Technology has made the virtual world easily accessible and so engaging that doctors now worry about the addictive nature of our activities there. In 2018, Jessica Brown, writing for the BBC, reported that around 3 billion people or 40 per cent of the world’s population, use online social media. Importantly, we spend on average two hours a day “sharing, liking, tweeting and updating on platforms”. This is roughly half a million tweets and Snapchat photos every minute. She says that a study published in the journal “Computers and Human Behaviour” found that people who report using seven or more social media platforms were three times more likely as people using 0-2 platforms, to have higher levels of general anxiety symptoms.”
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