Michael’s Content: Training Your Concentration

We often overlook the fact that many of our psychological attributes, much like muscles, can be trained and strengthened. These mental 'muscles' also adhere to the 'use it or lose it' principle, just like how muscles will shrink if they don’t get exercised, your focus will weaken if you don’t challenge it regularly.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about in the past few months, is that the number of Instagram reels I’m consuming has gone way way up. And now my ability to concentrate has gone way down aka: I now have a short attention span.

Essentially whatever type of content you consume determines your focusing ability. The TikTok/Instagram Reel short form video content is absolutely the worst for our attention span, and if you decide to keep on consuming them then you need to think about things to add as a counterbalance.

I was listening to an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast where he interviewed Jeff Bezos, and they were talking specifically about books, and how they help to lengthen your attention span. This made me want to look up what other ways there are to do this, and basically the answer is anything that’s long form, even some video games, as long as they require focus and strategic thinking. The main killer is multitasking, this destroys our ability to have deep, focused concentration.

For me, short form reels are the enemy of the week. So you can join with me in trying to go one week without watching any reels (I’ll report back next week how many I end up watching.. (hopefully none)). Message me and we can struggle against this together 😂.

Takeaways:

• Less TikTok

• More Books

• No Multitasking

• Remove Distractions

• Meditation?

Juan’s Content: The Werewolf Next Door

Source

The Werewolf game:
Werewolf is a game where the vast majority of players are villagers and they must win against a very small minority of werewolves.
The game is divided into day and night phases. At night the werewolves wake up and choose a villager to kill.
Then the day phase happens and everyone wakes up. A conversation starts between all the villagers and the secret werewolves as to who the werewolf might be. They must choose someone to kill at the end of the day.
The villagers win if they kill the werewolves and the werewolves win if they kill all the villagers.

Game origin:
The game was invented by a student of sociology in Russia. He wanted to prove that an uninformed majority will always lose a battle of information against an informed minority. The werewolves usually win.

Why is this important? 
Well, the speaker argues that when you have hidden information you can completely manipulate a large group of people.
And the scary thing is that you can find werewolves in almost every middle class industry. In publishing/media, public health care systems, large companies. You will always have 2-3 people that follow a socially challenging belief system.
If you go against the narrative, you risk being devoured by the werewolves, therefore the werewolves run the conversation.

The story of Rachel Rooney:
The speaker in the youtube video linked above gives his example of a wolf. A children’s author created a book called “My body is Me!”. It aimed at making children comfortable in their own bodies.
She was labelled an anti-trans extremist and disowned by the British Society of Authors union. This union was supposed to defend their members, but instead they turned their backs. It only takes one werewolf to call you a werewolf, and all the villagers are too afraid to speak up in fear of also being attacked.

“A small motivated minority, willing to play by a different set of rules, will often be able to cower the majority because of the collective action problem.”

It has been played out not only in identity politics, but also in religion, communism, witch hunts, and social movements. Stay safe people 😬

Projects:

• Accountability Groups: We will start advertising for our February groups this week :).

• Ambitious Bois Newsletter: We’re going to start promoting this newsletter to more people in our circle. Conversion rate via Instagram stories is low, so continuing on with sending this our via direct message.

• The Language Project: I still need to work on adding the Chinese vocabulary words in for this next week.

Accountability Groups:

Going to start our 4 groups in February! Join us for one and you can try it out 😉. February is a short month, so this will be the quickest of our groups, 4 weeks of accountability for something that you need to work on for yourself.

Definitely reach out if you want to join one of these or if you would like more information :).

Please reach out to us if you found any of this interesting (or boring), we need feedback and want to improve our writing/what we write about (even though the main goal here is just to write consistently for an audience, so that box is basically checked for us anyways 😆, just hope to make that more of an interested audience instead of a grudging one 👀).