💡 Skills & Mindset #18: Peers (w/Social Media)

Last updated over 3 years ago

8 questions

Watch the video carefully and respond to the questions, prompts, and other items.

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What do you think it means to choose your peer group really well?

Reflect on whether or not your current peer group encourages you to grow and develop habits that support current and life-long success?

Do you encourage your peers to be productive and hold them accountable for their success? Explain.

How can surrounding yourself with successful, hard-working people help ensure your own success and productivity?

If you surround yourself mostly with people who like to "play the victim", are unproductive, or gossip a lot, you are more likely to behave similarly.

What do you think? Does this make sense? Explain.

Finding these types of hard-working, productive, positive, and motivated peers in your own school can be challenging. Fortunately, you have access to the YouTube, podcasts, and social media of all kinds. While media like this really can be harmful, it can also be used productively.

Can people use social media feeds to achieve many of the same benefits described in the video? Explain.
In other words, can streams and feeds be cultivated to reduce time-wasting distractions and low-density fun while also increasing positive, encouraging, and uplifting content that promotes personal growth?

Do you cultivate your social media feeds to reduce your exposure to whining, complaining, "victims", time-wasting, and general negativity?
If so, explain your process and how you identify and decrease that content.
If you don't do this, why not?

Do you cultivate your social media feeds to increase your exposure to positive messages, productive and driven individuals, and people who are successful in ways you would like to emulate?
If so, explain your process and how you identify and increase that content.
If you don't do this, why not?

Here's my personal social media management strategy:

I really do not want social media to waste any of my time. If it does, then I feel that I am wasting precious moments of my life that I can not get back. Beyond that, I want social media to enhance and improve my life...or get out of the way!

To help make those things happen, I try to ensure that at least 8 out of every 10 posts on my feeds are actually useful to me. Posts do that by being useful, positive, interesting, or inspiring.

If a person or organization I follow isn't meeting that threshold, I simply stop following them. I also immediately unfollow people and organizations who post negative posts, make wild, unsubstantiated claims,
 or who state their personal opinions as facts! As you can imagine, I do a lot of unfollowing during election years!

It is not easy to unfollow family and friends -- well, sometimes it is 🙂 -- but years ago, I became committed enough to reducing social media junk and negativity and confident enough that it is the right thing to do that I am ALWAYS prepared to defend and justify those decisions.

This not only increases the quality of the feeds but also reduces the overall number of posts in my streams. That reduces the amount of time I spend checking social media. Once I have scrolled through the new posts, I'm done. 

Also, I always try to avoid the time-wasting traps of the "home" feeds and suggested content. Those are literally designed to keep you in the app as long as possible. Remember that the apps and social media accounts are free because your attention is the product that is being sold! The longer that you stay, the more money is made. The psychological strategies and machine learning algorithms that figure out just what makes YOU keep scrolling are incredible! Check out The Social Dilemma if you are interested in learning more. It's fascinating!

👍 I encourage you to check the first 10 posts in each of your social media streams. Count the number of posts that have a genuinely positive impact on your life.

👎 Then, consider if any of the posts are time-wasters or have some other type of negative impact on your life. If these posts are from sources that consistently create posts like that, consider whether unfollowing them will, even in a very small way, increase the amount of time you have for high-density fun, productivity, and other positive and productive life experiences.

💡 Skills & Mindset #18: Peers (w/Social Media)

What do you think it means to choose your peer group really well?

Do you encourage your peers to be productive and hold them accountable for their success? Explain.

How can surrounding yourself with successful, hard-working people help ensure your own success and productivity?

If you surround yourself mostly with people who like to "play the victim", are unproductive, or gossip a lot, you are more likely to behave similarly.What do you think? Does this make sense? Explain.

Do you cultivate your social media feeds to reduce your exposure to whining, complaining, "victims", time-wasting, and general negativity?If so, explain your process and how you identify and decrease that content.If you don't do this, why not?

Do you cultivate your social media feeds to increase your exposure to positive messages, productive and driven individuals, and people who are successful in ways you would like to emulate?If so, explain your process and how you identify and increase that content.If you don't do this, why not?

🧠 Retrieval Practice:Summarize the content of this lesson. What topics, ideas, and vocabulary were introduced?

If you surround yourself mostly with people who like to "play the victim", are unproductive, or gossip a lot, you are more likely to behave similarly.

What do you think? Does this make sense? Explain.

Do you cultivate your social media feeds to reduce your exposure to whining, complaining, "victims", time-wasting, and general negativity?
If so, explain your process and how you identify and decrease that content.
If you don't do this, why not?

Do you cultivate your social media feeds to increase your exposure to positive messages, productive and driven individuals, and people who are successful in ways you would like to emulate?
If so, explain your process and how you identify and increase that content.
If you don't do this, why not?

🧠 Retrieval Practice:
Summarize the content of this lesson. What topics, ideas, and vocabulary were introduced?