After thumbing through my Twitter feed for too long, every new thought becomes a tweet. Every observation, every overheard phrase can be twisted into 140 characters of clever.

Which makes me wonder, how much is our output affected by our inputs? When we feed ourselves a steady diet of snippets, sound bites, snapshots and tweets, do our creations begin to take on the same form?

Is it really garbage in, garbage out?

If this is true, then it’s worth considering how we curate our inputs. If we want to develop the focus, patience and persistence to do great work, how does that affect our choices of inputs?

In an age of continual distraction, ignoring the urge to flip the channel or refresh the feed is more difficult than it seems. What if we made a conscious choice to sit through the entire song, read the book cover to cover, be fully present in a conversation?

Maybe this kind of breathing exercise is just what we need if we want to train ourselves to think deeply, to stick with problems and do great work.

This kind of deep breathing might make us better people, too.