Garbage in, garbage out.
Food-wise, it’s an uncontroversial statement.
But the mind? The idea sometimes easy to accept but hard to swallow.
I am better off without social media, without television, and all that they deliver. Calmer, for sure. Pretty much the only social media for me is YouTube at this point, and selected channels and topics only. Mindset stuff.
People might come around to the idea but it’s my experience that giving up Netflix or cable TV or Instagram or Twitter . . . people don’t understand that this is far more important than giving up Cheetos.
They are horrified by the prospect of losing the ability to see that episode of Law and Order for the third time. So they continue to eat mental poison.
Let’s extend the idea a bit further. The things around me. Physical objects. Are they moving me forward? Holding me back? Or merely barnacles attached to my hull?
Time for careful curation. Or . . . a purge. Curation is a word that gives room for half-assed effort in this context. Wholesale disposal is what I need. Some day I will be dead and will have none of this stuff. What’s the difference if I throw it away now?
What about people? Or to be more specific, what about the consciousness of the people around you? Consciousness or mindset cannot be distilled away from the body that encapsulates it, so we are talking about choosing the people around you.
I don’t see athletes surrounding themselves with slugs. I don’t see physics professors choosing to talk sports with a beer-filled Dodger fan in the right field bleachers.
Like attracts like.
Birds of a feather flock together.
Note how often you’ve seen two people walking down the sidewalk together. If one is slightly lumpy, so is the other. Clothing so often identical or at least close enough to rhyme.
That means if you want to change (and most people don’t) you are fighting gravity when you hang out with the wrong people.
I’m not particularly fit and I have a little roll of fat around my middle. I need to be around people who are fit. If I surround myself with fat people, I have to exert enough effort to fight myself forward to my goals and resist the gravitational pull of those around me. That’s why I go to the gym. I see role models there and perhaps will meet people of like mind there.
The idea extends as far as you want to go. But ultimately the Jim Rohn saying has to be respected: you are the average of the five people you are around most.
Just be sure to remember the idea that you a whole person contains many things great and many things awful.
Would I want to experience what Tiger Woods experienced as a child to reap the rewards he reaped? And look at those rewards—a mixed bag, at best.
That’s why envy is so poisonous. You want the mountain’s pinnacle without the rest of the mountain, or the effort of the climb. (And envy is looking outside of yourself, instead of looking within, to the Kingdom of God).
Nevertheless. Curate the collection of people around you. Allow for flaws, even as you are deeply flawed. Role models show you what to do . . . and what not to do.
The right people encourage, direct you towards your goals. They do this as much by silent example as by explicit instruction.
I saw this with my kids’ high school. It was default normal, expected, and approved to be smart and study hard. This means that the kids with less natural drive is would be pulled along by the current to achieve more than they otherwise would have achieved.
There were plenty of chuckle-heads and dumb adolescent stunts, as you would expect. But I think almost all of the kids (not just mine) did a bit better than their default ability because of their surroundings. And surroundings means people, not the buildings.
But beware. Don’t think you’re going to be the Savior and help everyone. You have seen where that leads. Horse/water/drink. You can only share, not shove. Don’t be a self-appointed bwana, recently arrived to civilize the savages. 🙂
And thoughts. Don’t allow poisonous thoughts to become rooted in your mind. Thoughts fly through and land all the time. No problem with that. Just don’t entertain them and let them rest. Move them out if they are unproductive. But that’s for another day. This is long enough already.