#11 - Don't Be Owned By the Internet | Strategy Session II
Andrew and Sammy kick off the second Strategy Sessions episode with practical tips about how to take control over your time on the internet. Talking points in this episode include evaluating our relationship with the internet, being intentional with the content you pursue, and turning your phone into something that can help you rather than hurt you.
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love: Welcome back to another amazing day here on planet Earth. And today is strategy session number two. And it's really cool. We're going to talk about your relationship with the Internet at large. And the internet just is something that appeared on the scene one day, and gradually started taking up more and more real estate, in terms of our time and energy. And now a lot of people spend the vast majority of their day online. And so few of us have ever decided, oh, wait for a second, how do I feel about this? And how do I, how do I want to define my relationship with the Internet? So we're going to give you some really cool ways in which you can stay ahead of the curve and always make sure to be the master of the Internet rather than be mastered by the Internet. So let's get into it.
Sammy Uyama: Welcome, welcome, ladies and gentlemen to our second part of our strategy series. It's your host, Mr. Sammy Uyama. Together with
Andrew Love: Andrew Love for you.
Sammy Uyama: Oh, am I supposed to keep going after that?
Andrew Love: That's just my name.
Sammy Uyama: All right. All right. So I just let you say your name and you're happy with that. That's all you need.
Andrew Love: That's all I need, baby. I'm a simple guy.
Sammy Uyama: All right. Well, it's Sammy Uyama here in Seoul, Korea with Mr. Andrew Love in...
Andrew Love: Indonesia, Bali.
Sammy Uyama: And we're both here in different parts of the world together with you, wherever you are. Technology is amazing. And so for this part of the series, we want to talk about being intentional with your Internet use. And this is something that Andrew has put a lot of thought into and has a lot of really great wisdom to share. So I'll let you take it away.
Andrew Love: Well, yeah, so it's it's kind of a step back. The first strategy session was all about details, like the type of apps you can use to curb your use of certain other apps, you know, and just to, to kind of be your habit tracker so that you can develop good habits. But what I want to talk about is like the intentionality with the Internet at large and how important that is. Because I think a lot of people don't even realize that they are online until it's too late. And you tell me if I'm right, tell me if I'm wrong. Tell me something here. But how often have you just ended up with your phone in your hand, and then all of a sudden you're on Facebook or you're on Instagram and you've been there for minutes and then 10s of minutes and then sometimes even hours. And you've gone from this website to that website and you ended up buying something or being, you know. And the entire time, your emotions are just being pulled and pushed every which way. And this is, this is not how we're meant to live. And I was thinking about this a lot because yesterday I was, I was out and about on my scooter. And it's like nobody just leaves their house and starts walking and just, you know, go take the left, takes the right, takes the left and then just gets lost and then sits down and you start crying. And then you just feel helpless because you're like, why did I leave my house? Like, no, nobody does that. But that's what we do online pretty much. Every time we go online, it's very unintentional, unconscious. And when you go online, in an unconscious way, you're, you're prey. Just consider yourself a delicious bunny rabbit, to the marketers, to the porn industry - to whomever who know how to manipulate your emotions. Because you haven't chosen any emotion. You're just kind of like this empty vessel and other people are going to fill you up with what they want you to be. So consumers of content, consumers of products, consumers of whatever. Think about it. Just think for a second about the last time you were on Facebook; have the range of emotions that you felt because of the fear from the virus, the anger from some political posts from somebody you disagree with, or the funny things that you saw. You saw a cat video where a cat was wearing a pair of pants. Awww! And then there's a range of emotions and you didn't choose a single one of them. You're just totally being led by the next swipe up, swipe up, swipe up and that is a recipe for disaster. And this is what causes us to actually end up feeling pretty crappy every time we pick up our phone. And so, I mean, have you ever felt that Sammy? I mean, I guess that was a bit of a monologue, but like do you, do you, can you relate to this one? I'm talking about apps.
Sammy Uyama: Yes, absolutely. It's a, in the first episode of this, it's why I talked about how I, why I made all these restrictions for using social media on my phone is because it is such a crappy feeling. And that's, I love how you express that just now is that even you can feel positive things. But there's a difference between you know, you created that yourself and you're intentional about seeking that versus it just fell in your lap and you got lucky to see something else funny. Absolutely. And you're just led left, right, up, to down and you have no control.
Andrew Love: No control. You don't control when you go online, how long you stay, what you do. It's, you're totally out of control. And that's you have to understand this is not just you. This is most people's relationship with the Internet. It's not something that we, we have to get a license to use or that we ever take a course on how to optimize our experience online. It's just something that we expect. We expect the WiFi when we go to the area port, or to a coffee shop or whatever, but we seldom really evaluate our relationship with the Internet. So this episode, I really wanted to peel that back and offer you the opportunity to reevaluate your relationship with the Internet itself, whether it be on a phone and tablet or a computer, whatever. Even if you have some crazy Minority Report technology, or like Oculus Rift, or whatever you use just to evaluate that. So that you can choose every time you go online, you say, I'm going to go online. And I'm going to do this online for this amount of time. And then I'm going to put my phone away, I'm going to go away and I'm going to go to the next thing. And when you start doing that, I'm telling you, you start to feel like the Internet is there to serve you, because that's actually what it can be. It can be a service to humanity, rather than something that dominates our minds and dominates our emotions. We are servants to it presently in our society. And so to turn the tides, and to regain dominion over the Internet, we have to be hyper-aware of our relationship with it and hyper conscious as to how we participate in this experiment of this ever-evolving technology. So some practical tips are: use your phone only on purpose, okay. And if you're really, really struggling, like if you're out of control with your phone, then you need to lock it. And you need to have probably a pen and a piece of paper next to your phone. And every time you're about to go online, you need to write down the websites that you're going to go to or the apps that you're going to be on; what you're going to do on these apps, and how long roughly you're going to be on these apps for so that you can guess how long am I going to be on my phone on my computer. And so this could be, hey, I just need to check my emails. And then you go in and you check your emails, but you don't get lost in your emails because you can easily just get consumed by emails. Or Facebook because of a specific reason I need to do this, I need to reach out to this person or I need to post this thing. And then I'm going to get out and even Instagram, even if you really just need to unwind and like just zoned off. That's not the worst thing in the world. There are better ways to unplug from you know, stress and anxiety. But even if you have to feel you have to at least do it for a concerted amount of time, like a specific amount of time. And when you write it down, you know on a piece of paper, every time you've gone to that website, you cross it off, and then you go to the next thing. And if you stray, become conscious of it and write it down. I strayed; I went to this website for this long. And the point is you don't have to do that forever. The point is you developing the habit of being hyper-conscious of your use of the Internet. How's that done, Sammy?
Sammy Uyama: That sounds hyper-conscious. Yeah, that is, that next level of taking control of your life is that you keep a pen and a paper next to your phone and you've physically write out what you're going to use your phone for on the internet.
Andrew Love: Yeah, you'll see all sorts of mental, like, if you try this, if you really sincerely try this, you will see that your mind will play all sorts of tricks on you. And it will want to deviate from that plan every which way from Sunday, like it will want to know just go to this app, or just go here and just click on this link and you will. But to bring it back, you realize it's just like learning how to control your thoughts. They're, they're all these thoughts. I want to take you into, you know, fear and anxiety, you have to just gently guide them back to a positive place. Same with your use of the Internet. And, again, what you're doing is you're ultimately developing a relationship to where, you know, when you're picking up your phone, why you're picking up your phone. And when you put your phone down at the end of a session, you've really like done exactly what you wanted to do. You got in, you got out of the matrix, and then you move on with real life. And you're smarter because of it, you're richer because of it. You have more close connections because of it. Instead of the opposite, which is usually we're poorer because we've just spent money. We, we got, we fell for some marketing. We feel further away from people because we're just looking at their pictures on Facebook instead of actually talking to them. We feel lonelier, right? So it's like a way to totally reverse all this negative gunk that we inherit from our bad relationship with the Internet and turn it into super positive experience so that we start to love our phone and we treat it like you know the servant that it should be for us. It's not, we're not to be, it's, we're not meant to be its a servant.
Sammy Uyama: Great! The only thing I would add is if you want a little help along the way with this, you could refer back to our prior episode about putting up restrictions on your device that works perfectly for this. You can, the two apps I'd recommend for your phone is for Apple for iOS, you can use freedom. And for Android, it's also available to create app for Android. Focus Me, that's a great app. It's what I use. It's completely free. And you can set up all kinds of great filters and timers. That's what, that's what I'm referring to here is that put timers in these apps, even if they'll help you. You want to just be able to use certain apps for certain time period or a certain web page for certain amount of time and that can send a reminder to you and help wake you up with oh, yeah, that's, I wasn't intending to spend too long here. Yeah, go on with whatever you wanted to do.
Andrew Love: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then and then just to become more aware of like, like in the last episode, are you bringing your phone to bed or you bring your phone into the bathroom. And then just choosing whether you want to do that or not. My wife and I are going to start to impose like a curfew for our phones or just turn them off. And then after we're thinking even early, like eight or nine o'clock, and then if we really need something like if we're taking an online course or something, we'll just do that, get on and off. But typically, just completely put our phones away and then reading and connecting time after a certain period of time. Because I realized we were just wasting so much time. Just not doing, not connecting. We were close to each other, but we'd be on our own devices just kind of in our own worlds. And instead we just want to, you know, spend more time together. So like it's, like this novel idea of like, hey, wait a second- you're physically there, but mentally somewhere else. Why don't we just connect since we're married, like let's hang out as they will. Wow. Modern people, we do this. We can pull this off.
Sammy Uyama: You know what made me think of is that all phones these days, it, it tracks how much time you spend on each app.
Andrew Love: Oh my god. Yeah.
Sammy Uyama: Right. And you know, which can be, it's very confronting. If you actually go into that and look at oh my god, this is how much I spent today the past week. And the next level that would be if there's, it tracked how long you spent on a certain app, and who is next to you while you're doing that.
Andrew Love: It took pictures of your face to, like screen shots of your face and how stupid you looked when you're wasting time.
Sammy Uyama: But they could do like a GPS tracking thing and like if you know, that kind of thing. Got it. Like you are on Facebook for two hours laying in bed next to your wife, that kind of thing.
Andrew Love: Got it? Yeah, I was just thinking that they could finally use that spyware for something useful instead of just tracking us for marketing purposes. But yeah, I get you, I get you. And so again, it's all just like, it's not the worst thing in the world to you know, sitting next to your spouse and then each respectively reading about something or learning or doing something next to each other. But we wanted to just up it so, you know, we want to spend more time physically talking and or reading books or you know this kind of thing. So, my challenge to you for this one, for this strategy series number two is to learn how to dominate your phone so that it serves you and makes you richer, makes you smarter makes you more connected to yourself, to other people. And, and totally reverse all the damage that it's doing to our society. And, and find your way, whether it's using an app that Sammy's talking about or old school. That the reason I said pen and paper is because it's outside of your phone. Because if you have something that's inside your phone, then you have to go inside to use it. So something that's outside of your phone to rely on, that helps you dominate your phone. So it's like subterfuge and you can just like be ninjas that take down your phone and just totally defeat it like it was a villain. And then you just win every time you use it. And then, and then you check out and then you go home.
Sammy Uyama: Great. So that's it for this, this, this tip.
Andrew Love: Yeah, we're going to keep it short. We're going to keep these short just so that you can go now and apply this information. Any more information is just information. So take what we're saying and try, try it out. Try it out for a period of time and find your method. You know, there's no one way at all for everybody. It's like find your own way to dominate your, your devices, so that they serve you. And if you need help, reach out to us and we can give you some more tips and more links. Or if you want accountability, we can help you out. We have some accountability software with us. So just let us know how we can help you dominate your phone because the more people that are standing above the Internet instead of sucked under the Internet, the more people that will have a mind and a heart and a spirit that can do something really cool with this world. But we can't (inaudible) slave to the Internet. So Yeah, let us know how we can help.
Sammy Uyama: Fantastic. So stay tuned for our next. What do we call this episode? Stay tuned for our next episode in the strategy series. This is, again, for us we consider this the most important one out of all these. This gets underneath all of the symptoms and addresses the root problem, we're going to be talking about connection. And specifically, we're differentiating between low quality connection and high quality connection. How you can tell the difference and how to find more high quality connection in your life. So stay tuned for that. And if you like what you're hearing, and want to stay up to date on all of our ideas, then subscribe and it goes straight to your phone, you know how that works. Let us know that you're a fan. Thank you very much. We'll see you in our next (inaudible).
Andrew Love: Killing it. Just killing it.
Sammy Uyama: What's the word?
Andrew Love: Next, just next time on the next thing. We'll see you the next day. We'll see you...
Sammy Uyama: We'll see you on the next time, stuff.
Andrew Love: Bye, everybody.
Sammy Uyama: All right. Bye, bye!