3-2-1: On The Dangers Of Social Media, People Pleasing, And Goal Oriented Thinking
Wisdom Wednesday #4
Hey fam,
It's time for your weekly dose of wisdom!
Here's 3 idea-bites, 2 quotes from others, and 1 big-idea to think about this week.
3 Idea-bites From Me:
Goals are for losers. Systems are for winners. People care way too much about getting good results, and not enough about building good systems. No result comes right away. They come from repeated effort over time. If you obsess about your results in the now it will always be at the expense of your results in the future. Thus, you will remain stuck indefinitely. If you instead create systems based on your long term desires, and design it so that maintaining the system every day is implicitly rewarding, you will not only feel awesome every day but your long term goals will happen automatically.
People pleasing is selfish and destructive. When we people please, we think it's because we care about others. It's not. We do it because we feel unsafe when other's have a feeling. We inflict our own desire for approval or to be liked on to others, assuaging their short term emotion at the expense of everything else (the relationship, their long term well being, our long term well being, etc). If we really care about others, we must be willing to occasionally upset them in to short term for the best interest of the long term. (Note: Want more on this? Check out my previous post: How People Pleasers Can Learn To Love Saying No In 90 Days Or Less)
How to stop dwelling on mistakes: Replace externally focused questions like "Were people impressed?" "Did I look good?" "Was I admired?" "Did I upset anyone?" with internally focused questions like "Was I creative?" "Was I courageous?" " Did I try hard?" "Did I make an impact?" "Did I learn something new?".
2 Quotes From Others:
"Success is like getting struck by lightning. It's extremely rare and no matter what you do, you can't guarantee it. But the more "right things" you do (eg go outside -> go outside in a lightning storm -> go outside in a lighting storm with a lightning rod -> go outside in a lightning storm at the top of a mountain with two dozen lightning rods all linked back to you) the more you increase the probability of the chances you get hit." - Scott Adams (Paraphrased from this interview)
"Staying up-to-date on current events is overrated. Unless you make money from the mischief, your quality of life goes down as your news consumption goes up. Take a break for a while and see how it feels. " - Ed Latimore
1 Big-Idea From Me:
๐๐ค๐๐๐๐ก ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐จ ๐ข๐๐ ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช ๐๐ช๐ข๐๐๐ง, ๐ก๐๐จ๐จ ๐ฉ๐ค๐ก๐๐ง๐๐ฃ๐ฉ, ๐๐ฃ๐ ๐ข๐ค๐ง๐ ๐๐ฃ๐ญ๐๐ค๐ช๐จ
The most controversial content gets the most engagement (because everyone's sharing, commenting, arguing about it).
The most engaging content gets pushed to the top of algorithms.
Leading to the most biased, one sided, or wrong content becoming the most popular.
Thus, when you go on social media, you mostly only see things which outrage you or which confirm your preconceived notions.
And this loop feeds back on itself. As you see more and more content that agrees with you, you become more and more entrenched in your position. And then you get even more outraged at how "they" could "be so stupid as to believe something so obviously wrong and irrational".
Social media is making you dumber, less tolerant, and more anxious about the instability of the world.
Get off social media for a week. Change your inputs to "the real world" for a while and you'll realize that its actually doing mostly fine and is pretty boring.
And then you'll get bored of it and go back to social media.
After doing this enough, you may realize that you actually like the outrage because it's stimulating; that the problem is not "them" but instead your own psychology; that you seek out and create controversy to cure your own boredom.
And that you can "fix the worlds ills" any time you want by simply taking a break and finding healthier outlets to get stimulation from that are more reflective of base reality.
Maybe. ยฏ\(ใ)/ยฏ
That's all for today!
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Catch you next time,
Matt