Influence your influences

Do you think your social media feed can predict your success in life? Think about it: how many hours are spent scrolling. How much of that time builds you up? How much of it is just noise? I can confidently say that I’ve gone through periods of time in my life where the feed on my Instagram has looked enormously different. I’ve wasted plenty of time on Instagram but it’s made me aware of just how much time I waste. I was consuming garbage. Every time you open the app you are making an active choice to spend your time on this thing. Something that was designed to be useful but when applied in the wrong way can be detrimental. It can suck the life out of you. It steals your time if you let it. On the other hand, it can be an incredibly useful tool. It can be a way to keep up with friends. A useful tool for information. Product discovery engine. Motivational tool personally and professionally. But here’s the catch. You decide what goes into your feed. You decide what you look at. You decide who to follow. What to like. What to say you’re not interested in. It’s the ultimate freedom and yet so many of us act like we’re stuck in someone else’s algorithm. It’s a metaphor to life. We decide who and what influences us. We decide who to look up to. Who to model after. How to spend our time day to day. It’s not like listening to one thing from one person is going to change your life. But over time, if you consistently have people in your ear giving you positive affirmations, telling you to keep going, you just might to start believing it. So treat your life the way you should treat your feed: curate it. Surround yourself with people who push you to be sharper, stronger, more compassionate. Friends who hold you accountable, challenge your excuses, pick you up when you fall, and celebrate when you try. Because not trying or not doing is the only form of true failure. Everyone has the ability to influence their influences. And pretty soon, people will start choosing you.