Are You Living or Suffering a Digital Lifestyle?

What is a digital lifestyle? Let this little story be an introduction.

Some time ago, an image caught my attention while visiting a local restaurant. At a table close to ours, I believe two parents and three teenagers, a family of five persons, showed a behavior I could not get rid of. They did not study the menu. They did not discuss the decoration, which was quite special and unique. Well, they did not talk at all. But they were all with a particular expression on their faces.

The gentleman, I suppose the father and the husband show a face of preoccupation and concern. With her smile on her lips, the mother transmitted a message of pleasure and joy. The three kids were just laughing artificially while they all worked skillfully with their fingers. There was absolutely no communication between the five family members. However, they were sitting so close that they could easily touch each other.

This true scenario tries to describe a normal family visiting a restaurant together. They are heavily occupied with their mobile phones and connected elsewhere. This is a common view nowadays, and it seems rather increasing in intensity. Is this what a digital lifestyle is all about?

I am an old-timer trying my very best to be as digital as possible in my daily life. But, I raise the question,

Where goes the limit?

In my daily life, I use my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I need these devices to perform. When the Internet connection is down, you notice how vulnerable you are and how much you depend on modern technology.

For example, this blog post and communication would not be possible without digital technology. Too often, we take it all for granted, the same way we take for granted that the room will lighten up when moving the electrical switch. Before Thomas Edison invented the electric bulb, it was a project to get light into a room.

Before writing this post, I googled a bit about the Digital Lifestyle Definition, and only under that search phrase showed 5,170,000 different results. So, it will take some time until we can come up with a definition we all are willing to agree upon.

It is fun reading and viewing all these different definitions out there; of course, each definition depends on which angle you take it from. However, a common word popping up everywhere, no matter the focus of the definition, is…

Freedom

With your digital devices and an Internet connection, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, and wherever you want. A good example is how we do our bank transactions. With the Internet, we can literally do all kinds of transactions with just a few clicks. The competition among the banks is more focused on user-friendly web pages than the traditional marketing activities commonly used a decade ago.

New Ways of Doing Business

How many reading this have purchased something from Amazon? I am pretty sure that almost all of you have an Amazon account. The company was founded in 1994 as an online bookstore, and today a multi-billion company quoted on the New York Stock Exchange, and a good example of how an entrepreneurial idea can be realized by taking advantage of the huge change in the world´s consumer habits, thanks to the explosive evolution in the digital environment.

When I started my career some decades ago, and suddenly the telefax machine was introduced as the tool to turn upside down the way of doing business up till that point, I could not in my wildest fantasy imagine that I today should belong to the group of digital entrepreneurs doing business online. In the same way, Bill Gates made the computer accessible to all people and not only to IT-educated professionals by launching his famous program Windows, the Six Figure Mentors have made it accessible for “normal” people to do business online.

Almost done…

Everything is set up with the unique platform offered to all members of the SFM community. You can start immediately focusing on marketing and driving traffic to your business. My three working tools to make this possible, my Mac laptop, my iPad, and my iPhone, are always with me, one device at a time or all together.

The freedom to be wherever I want and still be connected to my business cannot be bought for any money. I can be at home with my children and grandkids or visit exotic and interesting places worldwide together with my wife.

The old traditional way of thinking about work as one part and vacations as another separate part, when you rest from your ordinary work, has been completely changed. You are always working or always on vacation, depending on how you view life. If you love what you are doing, then life is rather a long vacation. No more “Monday again!” or “Thank God it is Friday!”.

Living the true digital lifestyle, all days are great days.

Master Your Digital Access

As the digital world has rapidly developed and many different segments of society are becoming increasingly digitalized, this evolution has also dangerous downsides. Technology today allows us to communicate with whomever we want practically. Communication is the essence of all human relationships and represents the necessary bricks in such construction.

From our very first steps in life, we learned how to communicate by talking in different ways and expressing ourselves with gesticulations. The different tones in our voices and the different ways of moving our bodies are the important emotional parts of a conversation.

Digital devices still need to complete some homework before emotions can be properly transmitted. In the meantime, we are heavily using different icons to cover this emotional part.

We who are dedicated to marketing and sales know that a successful deal with a customer is based more on trust than the product itself.

A dialogue with the customer or prospect will be essential to create the necessary trust. The difference between a dialogue and a monologue can be expressed very condensed as,

Interaction

In an interaction, which is exactly what we achieve when talking face to face with somebody, we use all available means. We talk with different voice levels, we use gesticulations, and we can even use a pause as an effective communication tool.

Sending an e-mail, WhatsApp, or whatever application we are using is a monologue communication where we lack interaction, or at least it will be very poor. This is one of the main reasons why, for example, live events such as webinars are becoming more frequent in our daily work. We need interaction, which will be very difficult to achieve unless a dialogue is in place.

A visit to a nice restaurant is something else than a place to fulfill the need for food. It is where we socialize under pleasant circumstances, whether a business lunch or a family dinner. The communication part is an essential ingredient of the whole event. Anyone who ever visited a nice restaurant alone? I don’t think so.

Smoking is no longer allowed in restaurants because it will harm other guests’ health. A table of guests fully occupied with their mobile phones and obviously not dedicated to the social part the restaurants are created for, are they influencing negatively other guests with their behavior? This is a very provocative question but worth thinking about.

We all know what an alcoholic is, and from there also, the word workaholic was created. Could it be that we rapidly run into a new phase where “digitholics” start to appear?