# 11 - Social Media Is Not a Tool for Your Best Future

Episode 11

Well, hello out there, my friends! This is Rick Lewis with The Follow Through Formula Podcast, Episode 11. I almost didn't make it. Today it is 10 o'clock at night where I am. Today is Sunday, and Sunday is a device-free day for our family. We put all computers, all electronics away, and we don't touch them for the day. It's a wonderful, wonderful habit that we've got. We make exceptions, but it helps us have days together as a family that are undistracted.

I knew this was coming up and because I have this commitment to do one podcast every day, I made a modification to the contract for myself and I said, “All right, I'm going to use my iPhone to record the podcast, and that's all I'm going to do for the day.” In addition to that, I didn't want to interrupt our family time with the podcast, so I decided to do it early. Sunday is the day I do our grocery shopping. I get up at 6 a.m., go to the store and do all the shopping before anyone else is in the store when it opens because it's quiet and I can get it done with minimal contact with other people in this time of covid.

To get the podcast done early I decided I would do the podcast on the way to the grocery store, while I was driving. So that's what I did. I recorded the whole podcast and we went on with our day. We had a wonderful day together as a family. At the very end of the day, just now, I turned my attention back to upload the podcast I recorded. I went back and listened to it, and I was not happy with it. It was rambling, it was distracted, and it was noisy in the car. So here I am, back in my blanket covered shower stall, recording the podcast in the very last minutes of the day.

Follow through is not always easy. Sometimes it's messy. I almost missed today. Hopefully this will still work, and we'll get the podcast in today. But follow through is not a Hollywood story. It's not always going to work. We're going to miscalculate sometimes.

I want to talk about the value of daily practice. For some reason throughout my life, I have always found that if I want to set a new habit in motion or work toward a goal, doing something every day, making an effort every single day is very, very useful. It makes it really easy to track whether or not I'm on the mark or not, because I can look at the day and see, “All right. Did I Practice X today?”

For example, I've been meditating every day for an hour a day for over 40 years. I've had a couple periods of time in there where certain life circumstances made it difficult to practice consistently or vigilantly, but more or less for 40 years, I have practiced meditation every single day. It is such a profoundly useful and helpful practice for me. I pretty much do the same thing with exercise every day. Whatever it is you're thinking about pursuing, consider scheduling some aspect of it just once a day. If you're doing that each day at some point in the day, then you're on the mark.

Many people who have been listening have been telling me about how they are doing in their particular projects. One person has actually written a book. It took her many, many years to get to the writing of the book that she knew was inside of her. Now she has finally produced the book, and the next thing she found herself up against was marketing the book. Because writing a book is one thing, but getting anyone to actually read it and acknowledge that it exists is another thing. So now she's working towards that. John Souza, who I interviewed for this podcast, who's a clinical psychologist and marriage and family therapist, just texted me before I hopped on to this podcast, with a new song that he's created. So he's producing. And others as well.

So there is movement out there for some of you. A daily practice, doing something every day in relationship to a way that you want to grow something or learn something is a super useful way to keep track of your progress.

The other thing that was really interesting about today was that I scheduled the very last day of sign-ups for The Follow Through Formula Course for today, having forgotten that Sunday is our family’s no device day. On any other day of the week I would have been sitting there on my computer hitting refresh every five minutes to see who signed up for the course. I did not check in at all today. The first time I looked at my computer to check and see was at about 9:30 tonight when I sat down to get this podcast up and running. It was compelling for me to want to go check in and see how things were going, but because of this other agreement with my family, instead I just trusted.

The last thing that I wanted to mention during this episode that is related to this idea of being off of devices for one day a week, this practice that I have with my family, is a movie we just watched. I know you probably all know about this already, but it was a Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma, which provides a vivid look inside the industry of social media and how these platforms and the devices they work on are designed to engage us in such a way that we can't put the device down.

The algorithms that govern them are designed to grab and retain our attention for advertisers—that’s the purpose of the industry in economic terms—so they make it very, very difficult for us to look away from the social media feeds that we're getting. Once we start looking at certain things we begin to get fed more and more of those sorts of things. It’s quite convenient for shopping, since it takes a lot of the work out of our search. What we like or find interesting is already curated and ready for us to enjoy. This means that the material that gets pushed our way confirms what we already like to look at, confirms the things we already like to think, confirms and supports our belief systems that we already feel strongly about. This is the function of the algorithms that generate our feeds. They are designed and updated constantly to keep us looking at the screen, because the way the social media companies make their money is by providing their customers, the advertisers, with people to look at their advertising. 

We then become a product as well. Our attention is being sold to the customer who is the advertiser. The advertisers want to reach us. The social media platform connects us, the products, with their customers (who then sell us products as well). This is a very effective system! So much so, that many people who worked in or even started up these platforms have left the industry because it works too well. They realize that it works so well that it is going to have disastrous effects not in line with what their original intentions were in creating it.

This is really important. I really want to convey this. The job of the social media platforms is not to present us with information that is most useful, relevant, factual, logical or aligned with our highest aims for ourselves. It has nothing to do with any of that. The social media content that gets pushed to us is designed to be patterned after what we have already spent the most time looking at so far.

What this means is that if you want to make a life leap—which involves a shift of your way of thinking, your attitudes, your perspective, and the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what the world is like—if you want to make a life leap and you keep looking at the social media feeds, what's going to happen is you're going to keep getting reinforcement for your previous and old ways of being and thinking and behaving, instead of help to shift them.

You may think that you are going to your social media feed to get inspiration for your change, for things that are going to help you to evolve and grow. But underneath the surface of what you see is that algorithm, which feeds you things that correspond with who you were, not with who you want to be. The movie includes interviews with some key people, ex-CEOs and data engineers and executives from these big social media companies, many of whom have pretty much defected from the industry and are blowing the whistle on it. They are describing how they created these systems and the platforms that they work on, and they want everyone to know just how addictive they are and just how difficult it is for us to reassert our own command over our attention. It's a fascinating glimpse and I highly recommend that you go watch this documentary.

When it comes to a life leap, what we're up against is our own stories, the stories that we have always repeated to ourselves about who we are in the world. And those stories generally come in the form of limitations. They're how we talk about what we are or are not able to do, who we are or are not able to become or how we're able to show up. We have a set of limitations we believe in that are reinforced by how we think about ourselves and our world. These social media platforms are all about compelling us with stories, and reinforcing the stories that we already know and like.

There's some food for thought for you here in Episode 11. I'm going to sign off right now so I can upload it to iTunes so that it shows up before the day is ended. It may not be my best episode so far, but we're keeping the flow going, and my commitment to you is to demonstrate what follow through would look like and be right there with you as you follow through and take your small actions in relationship to whatever you're pursuing. We are pursuing the Holy Grail of continuity of effort and presence so that we can make what matters most to us occur in our lives. Thanks again for listening. I'll be back tomorrow. Game on!