112: How to Keep Your Phone From Eating Your Brain w/ Jorge Selva of Minium

(www.artsynow.com/112 for shownotes)

For the last couple years, your smart phone has been eating your brain. It has been your best friend, your library, your GPS, and a medium for blasting music, face-timing, or even hardcore stalking your friends.

We are ALL guilty of allowing our faces and brains to be devoured by our phones. Sometimes, we sit without thinking, constantly refreshing feeds over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. The phones are designed to be addicting. The designs are working.

In a way, we’ve lost the familiarity with what it truly feels like to be alive and connected to this incredible, beautiful Earth.

“Mental minimalism gives you that space to get rid of everything else that is causing unnecessary stress, distraction and lack of focus and lets you do what it is you love.” – Jorge Selva

As a child, Jorge was obsessed with the rocks, formations, and the natural Earth, and it eventually led to a passionate degree in Geology.  One day, he caught himself in the middle of a chronic brain-frying refresh session, and he realized that his smart phone was depleting his focus and relationship with nature.

Longing for a larger sense of aliveness, Jorge decided to test his strength away from the smart phone.

It felt good. Really really really really really good.

It felt so good that he decided to dedicate his future to helping others rediscover what it’s like to feel alive, focused, less distracted, and more aware.

Jorge is the co-founder of Minium, the creators of the world’s first modern minimalist phone. The phone is designed to maximize focus on areas that matter the most, allowing more time for real-world interaction, aliveness, and extreme clarity.

In this episode, learn about Minium & the process of creating the phone, and the underlying magic of minimalism. 

Highlights 

• 05:47 : How Jorge and I got connected through a Twitter advertising,
• 08:35 : A rundown on his personal experiences from being born in Nicaragua, to moving to the mid-West, realizing his passion for the outdoors through Geology, how it dawned on him that he was addicted to iPhone and finally moving into a stress-free life by coming up with a minimalistic phone,
• 18:06 : Why he thinks less can be so much more,
• 20:30 : The research they have done to gauge the state that we are in in terms of entertaining distractions,
• 25:45 : The process of creating their phone and how they put their ideas out,
• 28:26 : The Minium phone’s core features and how they trimmed down to these main items,
• 34:47 : How their project aims to develop mindfulness and meditation and
• 45:39 : Timelines from prototype to launch.

To defeat Godzilla with his talents…

“I will run around and find quicksand or some unstable rock ledge where he will fall while trying to grab me.”

Advice from the show…

• “Mental minimalism gives you that space to get rid of everything else that is causing unnecessary stress, distraction and lack of focus and lets you do what it is you love.”
• “There are a lot of feelings of discontent for a device that should be helpful.”
• “Technology is amazing, and we are not saying that people should entirely disconnect, we are just finding ground where we have felt we are more productive, creative, happy and able to experience connections more deeply.”
• “Phones should not be as distracting as they are.”
• “Technology, if made in a more mindful way, can have a more positive effect in our lives.”

Jorge’s Links…

• Minium Website (sign up to be a beta tester)
• Jorge’s Email (give Jorge your thoughts on the minimalist phone)