Take Back Control of Your Senses

• 00:04 You have got to take back control over your own eyes, your own ears,
• 00:10 your own nose, certainly your mouth, and what you touch.
• 00:15 That's right, all of your senses, because they are under assault.
• 00:19 They're under assault by the smartest people in the world,
• 00:22 the richest people in the world with the biggest engineering advances, the biggest
• 00:27 advantages in artificial intelligence, and the largest budgets behind them.
• 00:32 I am talking about the major tech corporations in the world.
• 00:35 The Google's, the Microsoft's, the Apple's, the Netflix, the Facebook's,
• 00:41 and I use all of them, I like all of them, but you have to learn how to control them.
• 00:46 Not to mention the Amazons of the world, bombarding you with opportunities
• 00:52 to fill your home, your office, your car, your life with more stuff.
• 00:57 Plus the Coca-Colas of the world, the McDonalds of the world,
• 01:02 the largest processed food manufacturers in the world,
• 01:07 all trying to convince you to fill your body with garbage that
• 01:12 will make you more lethargic, and craving more and more sugar and
• 01:18 fat to get a short-term high energy boost from a candy bar.
• 01:23 But ultimately making you sick, overweight, obese,
• 01:28 diabetic, and on your way to an early grave.
• 01:31 So you got to, right now, decide you're going to control it,
• 01:35 you're going to decide actively what goes into your brain, and
• 01:40 you're going to have to put controls on it.
• 01:42 Let me give you a specific example.
• 01:46 For most of my life I've been someone passionate about news, public affairs,
• 01:51 politics, and for many years of my life I was a full-time talk radio host and
• 01:56 had to spend basically every waking hour following the news.
• 02:00 But that's not my life anymore.
• 02:02 Chances are, unless you're a full-time journalist, that's not your life either.
• 02:07 And yet most of us still waste way too much time consuming news.
• 02:12 We get up in the morning, we check the news,
• 02:15 maybe we turn on cable television, news, radio, constantly checking
• 02:19 news while we have breaks in between meetings or on phone calls with people.
• 02:24 It's eating away at your brain,
• 02:27 it destroys your ability to think for yourself.
• 02:31 So one very specific habit that I follow that I heartily endorse
• 02:36 is a strict time limit for news consumption in the morning.
• 02:41 For me, I pick 30 minutes a day.
• 02:44 Now, there are some personal development experts who say, no news,
• 02:48 no news at all, the news will find you.
• 02:50 I think that's going too far if you want to be a good citizen.
• 02:54 But I do limit it to no more than 30 minutes a day in the morning,
• 02:59 reading news.
• 03:00 Now, I read news, I do not watch television or
• 03:03 video news because I find it takes too much time.
• 03:07 It's a very slow delivery mechanism, and
• 03:10 video news is inherently less able to go into the substance, and the facts,
• 03:15 and the meat of a story that I find interesting, useful, and relevant.
• 03:20 By limiting myself to 30 minutes of news in the morning,
• 03:25 instead of what I used to do, two hours, three hours in the morning,
• 03:31 I now have time to read more books, to write 500 words a day on my courses and
• 03:38 books, to study other aspects for future courses.
• 03:42 To spend my time on personal development, on exercise, on eating healthy.
• 03:48 So much more time, because I took control, and
• 03:53 I shut down the inbound messages coming to me from news.
• 03:59 Now, we'll talk about this in terms of email notifications, text messages,
• 04:05 there's a lot of different ways the media, and big tech companies, and our
• 04:10 friends can take over our brains by coming at us through our cell phone primarily.
• 04:16 But the news is just one of them.
• 04:19 You've got to come up with goals for yourself of what is going into your brain,
• 04:25 because without that, you cannot have goals, realistic goals,
• 04:30 of what's going to come out of your brain in terms of what you're creating,
• 04:35 your projects, your books, your body of work, and your profession.
• 04:42 If everything is about incoming and processing content,
• 04:46 it'll rot your brain, you'll never come up with an original idea yourself.
• 04:51 So this is absolutely crucial.
• 04:53 I want you to give some thought now on how you can put strict controls, how
• 04:58 much time you're going to spend consuming media, traditional news, in a day?
• 05:03 How much time are you going to spend on social media?
• 05:05 How much time are you going to spend checking email?
• 05:09 It's probably more than you think.
• 05:12 Start formulating your goals for
• 05:16 all of these intakes right now.

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