How to Silence the World

It's hump day. Come on in. Good to have you here today, man. Do you listen to yourself a lot? I'm not talking about listening to other people. Do you listen to yourself?

Because sometimes you need to, and it's amazing how many people don't. Often, as a guy who coaches people, I'm like, are you listening to yourself? No, what'd I say? I literally hear that a lot.

It's kind of odd, right? I do it myself, okay? I'm just a regular guy that happens to have a podcast. But today, we're talking about that. Listen to yourself and something you need to do to be able to do that.

And you're not doing it right now. You're too busy. You're distracted. I'll give you that little tip as well. You're going to love that one. It is a daily boost from motivation to move.com.

It's the positive boost you need every single day. It's me, Scott Smith. Good to have you. Thanks for coming by. Thanks for being part of my school group as well.

We've, I put this thing off for a long time. It's so cool. And let me tell you, if you were really looking for that next thing in life that you want to do, that next movie to make a little frustrated, a little crazy, man, what am I going to do here? What's next for me?

A lot of people are doing that. That's what they're doing. That's what they're asking about. So this Thursday, tomorrow. my next move live coaching session.

We're going to get to know each other because we've only been there less than a week. So we've got some getting to know each other to do. So come on in, be a founder, get to know the folks in the beginning. It's not going to be this small forever.

43 members. It's not going to be tiny forever. It's going to be very large here by maybe January. Come on over. Let me teach you how to figure out what's next for you.

Let me give you a tool that is the most effective tool I've ever created. And I hear it every single day. If I can train you to do it right and you go do it for me, if you just give me a couple of days or a week, you'll know so much about yourself.

So go to school.com slash face your passion. That's S-K-O-O-L dot com slash face your passion. Get signed up. Come in and say hi. I'll be chatting with you.

You'll be able to DM me and everything. We'll have some good conversations. Maybe I'll see you over there. I hope so. By the way, yes, we're recording that call.

So if you can't make it tomorrow, just join. I'll send it to you by Saturday, okay? So when I was growing up, can you imagine that I was kind of energetic, kind of enthusiastic, kind of an excitable child? Can you even imagine I might have had that ability, that trait?

I still got it, man. Sometimes I feel like my dog. My dog's 11 now. He's getting older. Sometimes I feel like my dog. I'm jumping around, bouncing around all over the place and go, ooh, what was that?

It's like, wait, you know how old you are? Listen, I never let a day go by without challenging something, ever. Usually by my mouth. My mouth got me in a lot of trouble.

It also got me out of a lot of trouble, got me into a lot of good things, expanded good things. The mouth has been a good thing for me in this lifetime.

But thanks to some people who are responsible for raising me and turning me into a good person, I learned a couple of valuable lessons. You've heard this before, right?

Listen twice as much as you speak. You know what they say right after that. Go ahead and say it for me. You have two ears and one mouth for a reason. I never totally understand that.

I was always very, very proud that my mouth could outdo two ears easily. Hmm. I know you heard it before. But in today's world, we're a little fast-paced, aren't we?

And knowing when to put a zipper on your lips is kind of critical. But I have learned something. I have learned to take that advice to kind of a new level to get what I want. Now, before I give you these words, this four-letter word now, I want to double back on how busy and crazy things are.

The pacing is so crazy right now. Some of these Zoomies out there, my Generation Z, I'm on the internet a lot, man. I listen to you on the internet. I used to apologize all the time for talking very fast.

I will not do it anymore because you guys are, I can't listen to you. You talk so fast. And then you edit out all your breaths and everything. It's just crazy.

Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that all videos, go watch a movie these days with like a fight scene and watch how fast it is. It's like a video game played in high speed. It's crazy what's happening.

So if you don't understand that our attention spans are just going away and everybody's trying really hard to get our attention and that is a problem, if you don't understand that, you probably don't know you have a problem.

So what's the four-letter word I'm going to give you? People usually yell at me when I said this. I'm telling you, it will be a blessing to you. D-A-R-K.

Dark. When you go dark, when you have chosen to listen to others less, yes, you're still listening. You're still caring. You're still interacting with those around you.

You've decided to listen to yourself twice as much. Instead, your life changes. I'm a big AI guy. I am. I don't listen to it anymore. I'm smarter than AI every single day of the week in certain things.

AI sends me down the wrong path. Now, I still use it a ton. I mean, you know, I'm not smarter than AI. Come on, man. It's like a billion PhDs in there.

I get it. But it's stupid some days. So I just don't listen to it. I just go dark. I don't have to ask it anything. I just do my own thoughts first, and then maybe I'll spell check it or something like that.

Or what do you think? Give me your ideas. Oh, that's really good, Scott. We live in a world today that makes it seem as though it's impossible to get what you want without other people's help, right?

Don't get me wrong. If you want to grow your business, you want to leverage, you want to scale, you're going to have to have this help. We really zigzag this over many years. You get everything you want in life, helping others get what they want too.

So I'm not against that. But endless hours of interacting, AI, Googling, Zooming, texting, all that stuff. It's like we've lost permission to think for ourselves.

We can't move forward without social approval from those around us. And the exact opposite is true. Use all the tools to figure stuff out, yeah. But at the end of the day, do you ever sit down and just say, I'm going to go dark.

I'm not going to talk with anybody else. I don't need their input. I don't need to make a phone call. I don't need to send an email. I don't need to ask.

I'm actually going to lean back and make a decision to do it myself. Remember the old days? Some of you might not remember those old days. You had none of this stuff.

You had nothing. You had to say, hey, I think I'm going to go do this. And you couldn't go online to ask anybody how to do it. There was no Google to tell you how to do it.

How do we even do it? We used to go to the library and figure stuff out or, heaven forbid, we actually talked to people. But usually we sat down and just started doing it.

Songs used to be written by somebody who actually sat down and said, I'm going to write a song. They didn't go on Suno. They didn't collaborate with 15 other people to make a song. They actually just sat down and wrote it because it came out of them.

That's called going dark, my friends. If you give yourself space to listen to yourself more, something extraordinary happens. Your creative mind and your talents just kind of flourish.

Positive energy, it's crazy. It just kind of rebounds in you. You feel more present. You find more meaning in life. Going dark makes life brighter. And then good stuff happens.

And every time I do this program, every time I mention going dark, people really take it the wrong way. And have you noticed that if you do go dark, say you decide not to talk, you're just going to not interact. You can go quiet for a week or two.

Have you noticed how people start checking on you? What's going on? How you doing? By the way, I don't go dark around my wife. That never works. Ever.

Ever. They can tell what's wrong. What are you doing? I'm just thinking, yeah, really got to be careful sometimes, but I'm just saying when you take the time to kind of slip away into your own space, you really do develop into the person you once were and the person you are right now and the person you're meant to be without any other thing else influencing you.

This world is so about attention and so about influence. It's almost impossible to think with your own brain these days. All the tech that's in our face right now. I embrace tech like crazy.

We just bought a new car. It's tech crazy. Yeah, you know which one I bought. You know which one I bought. I've been talking about it before. I'm not going to get it for about six weeks.

So you know what I bought? I'm trying to de-tech my life and what I do, I bought more tech from a car. I'm not going to tell you what it is. You know what it is.

It's not mine. It's my wife's. When you remove yourself from the buzz of the world, you get yourself a new kind of energy, don't you? And you do it without anybody's permission or without anybody knowing.

Wouldn't you like to have that? It is time, my friends, and all this communication, all this stuff we have going on. I got my group, my Face Your Fashion group, and I'm chatting and I'm interacting with it. I love doing it.

It feels like, look, people again. It's awesome. Really loving it. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to sit back and just do my own thing. In fact, I would think that if you listen to my podcast, in fact, if you listen to me this week, where my brain is, you can tell I've gone dark a little bit.

I went and got myself all supercharged with my new friends over in Face Your Fashion. And then I slipped away by myself and said, man, I'm just feeling like a buzz right now. Scott's using his own brain today. He's not looking at anybody else.

I'm just giving you my thoughts. It makes a difference, guys. It really does. Anyway, when you emerge from this darkness that sometimes you're in, you're going to notice that things are different.

People listen to you when you do that. My friend at the gym, he hadn't seen me for about a week. He came looking for me. I was around just different times than he was.

He wanted to catch up. Man, I haven't heard from you. What's going on? We had a great conversation today. Who knew that listening twice as much as you speak works even better when you listen to yourself twice as much as you listen to somebody else?

There is somebody right now who's probably very young and And for the first time in their life, they've heard from a boomer, probably as old as her dad, maybe older, tell them to do something that nobody else has told them to do, except, yes, go dark? What the hell is that?

Some people like to go hiking and stuff. It works, right? S-K-O-O-L dot com slash face your passion. That's where I am. You join today. I'll see it. And I'll say you know it right away.

I'll see you tomorrow on our call.