The importance of curating what you consume
I was inspired to write about the importance of curating what we consume by one of my favorite Brits, Derren Brown. Derren is an “English mentalist” (a more sophisticated term for magician) and an all-around national treasure. Over the past 30+ years, he’s been doing everything from mind-reading and hypnosis to driving people temporarily insane and playing Russian roulette on live TV.
Take a look for yourself:
I recently went to one of his live shows at the Apollo Theatre in London, where he hypnotized the entire crowd (including me!)—it’s a long story and I won’t get into the details, but essentially, 15 seconds of my life are unaccounted for… All that’s to say is his tricks are powerful.
Derren is a master manipulator
All of Derren’s tricks rely on psychological manipulation (and he’s very open about this). He preys on deceiving the subconscious and is a master of misdirection, suggestion, and reading body language. His tricks show the extent to which our minds can be manipulated and taken advantage of in subtle, seemingly harmless ways.
In the extreme case, Derren’s tricks show how subtle manipulations reduce our free will (the ability to make choices based on our own desires and beliefs). When he hypnotizes a person by using certain words, changing the tone of his voice, and making eye contact, their thoughts and actions are entirely under his control.
We can be manipulated without realizing it
Let’s take a look at an example. In one of Derren’s recorded live shows, he threw a ball around the audience, and each person who caught it shouted a word to use in a sentence. The end result was “Camilla Parker Bowles, holding a small dog, sits on a cucumber and says, ‘you’ve grown since I last saw you.’”
By the end of the show, Derren pulled out a Sunday copy of The Daily Mail (England’s most-read Sunday newspaper) from several weeks prior and opened the newspaper to a picture of Camilla Parker Bowles holding a small dog. A few pages later, there was an article about the British cucumber-growing industry, and later on, an article with a headline saying, “you’ve grown since I last saw you, Charles.”
While it’s a silly example, the point Derren made was that The Daily Mail influenced people’s thoughts and choices without them realizing it. Our brains pick up significantly more information than we’re aware of, which is why the media can be dangerous. And by presenting a particular (and often times sensationalized) perspective, the media can shape our thoughts, beliefs, and actions (our free will) in ways that aren’t aligned with our true interests.
Everything we consume impacts our thoughts and decisions
What I’m getting at here is that everything we watch, read, or listen to sways us to some degree, so we need to be intentional about what we consume. Especially when the source has ulterior motives. Nowadays, we’re constantly being manipulated to buy stuff—the whole point of advertising is to convince consumers they have a problem only their product can solve, which can impact their ability to make unbiased decisions.
Use the power of consumption to your advantage
On the flip side, we can curate the materials we consume and cut out the negative ones. In Derren’s book Tricks of the Mind, he describes the methods behind his tricks and highlights that his success relies on people’s expectations: “Hypnosis works not because of a carefully worded magical script from a self-help book, but because the subject believes the process is effective.” Our minds are so powerful that if we wholeheartedly believe something will happen, we will it to happen.
What we believe manifests into reality in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, if we feed our minds with positive, uplifting content and concentrate on our aspirations rather than falling prey to other people’s agendas, we can craft the life we want and turn our goals into tangible realities. Imagine what would happen if instead of scrolling through social media or reading the news you spent that time visualizing and strategizing how to make your goals possible.
To end, here are some suggestions for positive consumption
To read: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill – the quintessential book on the power of our minds and the subconscious
To listen to: Naval – he has a great podcast series on happiness'; Bob Proctor and Tony Robbins – both are motivational speakers/life coaches with frameworks for positive thinking, happiness, and success
To watch: Derren Brown – of course I had to put his show here, most episodes are very uplifting!
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