Truth exists (Part V)
Everything we support is extracted from the truth, but it is then coated to stand as original. If you love your family and friends, where does that love come from? Why in the world would you love anything in this world if love is just a feeling.
List everything in your life that is important. Here is a sample of what most would provide:
- Family
- Friends
- Job/hobby
- Leisure
- Self
- Pets
- God
In the list, most, if not all, are around relationships between you and others. If you can extract and package it, you will fall into the marketing arena. What do we know about relationships? It takes time to develop, must be fed, and needs attention. There is no way around it. In fact, people try to find shortcuts around it and what happens, in the end, is a disaster.
How have we deviated from the truth? (hint: it's super easy)
True relationships are genuine because they are important to us. Instead of cultivating the essential ones, we give them away without thinking we are.
Where does our attention go? The answer is to whoever will give us a reason. The shift happens at the smallest scale that we do not even notice. A famous selective attention experiment proves that we can easily miss the most prominent object in front of us if we focus on something else (most times, the focus is controlled by someone else). The Invisible Gorilla experiment.
In 1999, the Selection Attention Test from Simon & Chabris showed in a one-minute video that tunnel vision is real. You will miss the Gorilla walking by and pounding his chest in the middle of your focus session.
Here is the exercise :
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible. (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html)
What does this mean? Well, look at what you give your attention to today. Where do you spend most of your time in a regular week? Look at the list below and see if they apply to you.
- Mobile phones
- Streaming services
- Spending money
- Restaurants
- Driving
- Social media
- Your dreams/desires
- Giving your time somewhere
If any of the above apply to your life, does that mean you have a relationship with them because you spend time doing so? If I were to ask, are those essential to your time? The answer would be "no."
Earlier in this article, you went along with the idea that relationships are essential to your life. And yet, your attention is somewhere else; in fact, the majority of your attention is elsewhere. Would you agree that you are missing the Gorilla in your life?
Knowing truths is one thing, and living by them is another thing.
You and everything around you knows that attention is needed for a relationship to work. When a product like your iPhone or your 9–5 job wants more out of you, it makes the necessary changes to keep you coming back. You are not addicted to it; they are dedicated to you. You slowly spend more of your attention on them, believing that it's essential for your life. But the problem is that you know what is vital in your life.
No matter what you might be thinking, if a signs say to do something (e.g., YIELD or STOP sign). The chances are much higher than you will do that thing. Yes, people don't follow the rules all the time, and maybe the rule just sucks. Those people might see the Gorilla and try to do something about it. The system in charge discredits those rule-breakers because the law says you must count the number of passes. The system does not even address the gorillas; they are focused on the rule that was broken.
Why do we follow the rules?
Another psychological experiment tried to understand what makes people follow the rule.
In the study, a group of students was to take an exam in a classroom. In one instance, the professor left the student alone with the answers on his desk. You can guess that cheating occurred.
In another instance, at the beginning of class, the teacher had every student sign that they would be honest and not cheat on the exam. The professor left the student alone with the answered layout again. This time, cheating did not occur.
The experiment shows that with a contractual agreement, our behaviors will align when tempted. And when we break the rule, we can point to the contract instead of the act, like a buffer.
How about making an agreement with the truths and spending time with it.
You know how to make a relationship work. You already practice this in the way you give out your attention. Look how those external attention grabbers take your time, do the same thing with the important stuff. Make it easy for yourself, find a quick way to interact with it, make it part of your routine, and find a way to be rewarding when you do it.
We know the phrase, "If you don't stand for something, then you will fall for anything." The term also applies to truths. Truths are in relationships, the essential ones. If you don't stand on those important connections, then anything new will pull you in, and you will not hesitate or question it.
We will explore further in part 6.
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