Attention, please

What's going on, y'all? It is Friday, the 23rd of June. I had to look at that. I should really get the date down pat before I start recording these things. I've done it in my vlog so many times. So, what are we doing? What is it? What's special here today? Well, of course, today is 5 Minutes of Fire Fridays, FFF, because everyone loves Fridays. Fridays are fun. I'm having a hermit. I'm a hermit at the moment. I'm having a night in. So, I'm going to do a podcast, then I'm going to go cook some food for my family, and I'm going to read a book tonight. I think that's— actually, this camera that I'm using, my iPhone camera, is propped up on the book that I'm going to read. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss. Very, very good book. I highly recommend it. I'll put it— I'll put a link in the description if you want to check it out. Certainly, a lot of life-changing stuff in there for me. But, what's today's topic? Well, I recently did a post about awareness, or no, sorry, not even awareness, attention, another A word. How do I get those mixed up? So that's the topic of today's episode, 5 Minutes of Fire on attention. And now let's get straight into it. So we'll get the timer going. Podcast, obviously you can't see this, but YouTube, check it out. Timer is go. So why did I do a post on attention? Why did I write about attention? Well, I've been thinking about it more and more lately. I've been saying it to a lot of friends, the 5 Chimps Rule, right? And if you've never heard of it, I'll explain it to you quickly. Essentially, the 5 Chimps Rule is an experiment done on monkeys that sort of discovered the psychology of stuff and whatnot, yada yada yada. Essentially, human beings are still monkeys. We all know that, unless you're sort of non-evolutionary theory. And what they concluded is that you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. And I totally agree with that. So, you look at any circle, right? Look at your own friendship circle. Have you got people around you that sort of do one thing, do this, do that? And you're sort of, you're going to feed off them no matter what happens. The more time you spend around them, the more sort of you're going to become them, right? And you ever got, like, you know how you have that best friend who you're completely alike, right? And you sort of get each other, you understand each other. Well, that's because you're sort of growing together. You're understanding each other. And then you look at another relationship, you're like, wow, I could never have that sort of relationship with that person. And so that's, I think that rule doesn't just apply to people that you spend the time with. To me, it applies to everything. So you've got to be very careful where you spend your attention, right? Because attention is our, essentially our most valuable commodity. It's, it's time. Attention equals time. Time. That's— and time is virtually all we ever have on this earth, even though time is sort of relative and may not even exist at all if you're into Einstein's theories and whatnot. But attention equals time, and time is everything that we ever have. None of this, all these materials that we have, whatever, it doesn't, they don't really matter, right? It's the time, time that we spend here, the time that we have with others, the time that we I know we work on things and stuff like that. That's what matters. So, why— what's important about it? Well, because attention equals time, you should be very careful where you spend your attention. I've been thinking this in my own point of view, like where am I giving too much attention, right? Is it making these YouTube videos? Like, should I be paying more attention to writing? Think about it. You're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Also the average of the websites you visit the most, average of the 5 5 foods you eat the most, average of the 5 TV shows you eat the most, oh sorry, you watch the most, you don't eat TV shows unless you're sort of a, I don't know, a Netflix fiend or something like that. And here's an experiment actually, like, if you go to YouTube and you watch something slightly different to what you usually watch, like, say for example, I go on and I watch, I don't know, how to cook a vegetarian meal. I don't usually watch videos on YouTube like that, I usually just Google recipes. The next time I go to YouTube, the— my front page and suggestions will all be what to watch, and it will have something to do with vegetarian there. So, coming back to the Law of Five and the law of sort of the 5 things you do the most, the 5 websites you visit the most, I watch a lot of YouTube videos for education purposes mostly. But now, I find every time I watch something new, the front page of YouTube is completely different. It's sort of pushing me towards learning more about less stuff that I'm learning, which is artificial intelligence and machine learning and programming and whatnot. And I'm okay with that. But think about scale that out to everything. That's Google, that's Facebook, that's every website you visit is going to try and push you towards— the algorithm gets very— has one task. The algorithm that runs these things have one task and that's getting to know you. So they'll push you towards something. You got to be very careful and I've got to be careful, like, where, where you sort of spend your time, because it's just going to add up and add up and add up, and eventually you may be doing something that you, you didn't even know that sort of, um, how, how you got there, right? That's where you get to that stage on YouTube, is like, how did I get this place on YouTube? So algorithms are also controlling your attention. And so what, what is— how can I wrap this all up? Well, essentially the message is be careful with your attention and just be, just be more conscious of where you're spending your time. And more, more sort of, more so than for whoever's listening, whoever's watching and whatnot. This message is trying to, I'm talking, I'm speaking this message so I recognize it, right? I've got a list of things on my whiteboard that say yes to do this and no to do that, right? No is everything apart from what's on the yes list. And the yes list is about 6 different things. That was in my previous vlog. And so, I'm trying to focus my attention on a small, small group of things and this time is about to go off, so that's 5 minutes of fire. 5 minutes of fire done, but just to wrap it up, if we were all as careful, I don't know, with our attention as we were our money, what would change? How would things look different? So, think about this in your life. You've got someone who's negative and you're sort of feeding off those in your life and you're feeding off those vibes and you're finding it's having a negative effect on you. Or if you're someone who's, I don't know, visits certain websites and you'll find it's changing your day-to-day life. Like for me, here's an example. Here's a completely honest example. When I first got a smartphone, iPhone, I was going through puberty and eureka, I had access to the internet, which meant porn. Which meant watching porn videos on my iPhone all the time, like every day. I'm not even kidding. I'm being completely honest right now. And what happened from there? My total, my brain was rewired to have a completely different perception to what sex actually was, right? So this is before I sort of had had sex with any other human being. I was watching these videos and it was creating this image, this mindset, this sort of idea in my head of what it was like, right? And it was completely different to how it is in real life. And so I think that's, that's just one, one example, right, of where I was spending so much time on these websites and it was completely changing my point of view in real life. And I think that can be applied to, to, of course, the internet. So be careful where you spend your time on the internet, how your attention is sort of molded by these algorithms now that sort of suggest these videos and these posts and whatnot that you should look at. So, just be careful of that, because you could end up like I was and just have a completely different view of the world of how it actually is. And sort of, if you are hanging around people or an environment that is not where you want to be and not where you want to go in life and whatnot, well then, change it. Change the environment. Be careful where you spend your attention. And this is Most of all, as I said, this is a note to self. So, I'm 23, I don't know half of, I don't know, half of anything. I don't know what I know actually. I'm just sort of, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants with everything I say here. But, yeah, that's the challenge today guys, actually. Think about where you're spending your attention. Is there a website you could stop going to? Is there a person you could stop talking to? I know it sounds dramatic, but hey, Like, that's— if you want to live your life, that's how you got to do it. You got to cut them off. Is there a food you could stop eating that's really damaging your health? We all know how to eat well. Like, all you have to do is sort of eat food, mostly plants, not too much. But that's 5 Minutes of Fire. I know it's gone over time, but thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for watching and have an awesome day. Call someone, tell them you love them, and we'll catch you next week. Oh, next Friday, episode 105. Peace!