What is your morning routine? The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I prepare a cup of coffee and sit down to write. While I’m waiting for the water to boil, I will make my bed, brush my teeth, take a leak or do any leftover dishes from the night before. Any kind of moving around will help to wake me up. Brushing your teeth first thing wakes your mouth up gets the salivary glands firing.

Once the water boils, I follow a series of specific steps to brew a great cup of coffee and then I sit down and write.

Central to my methodology is the refusal to look at my phone for the first hour of writing, the first hour of the day. I turn the alarm off and then I don’t see anything for at least one full hour and two pages of writing. 

I don’t think that our phones are controlling us any more than I think that gravity is controlling us. Some people cave into the pressures of gravitational force, but other people use that existing inertia to build strength. Some people build rockets. By resisting gravity, by lifting weights, by doing pushups, by climbing up hills, we use that negative force to our advantage.

There is a tipping point to strength versus difficulty of  resistance. Gravity keeps things grounded, but there is a certain amount of strength that is achieved through resistance that makes that force less meaningful. When your strength is greater than the forces exerted upon it, there is a freedom from the negative. Strength negates the weakness which is given to us as a precondition. Muscles atrophy without work, but we can train and become a lot stronger than if we remain sedentary. 

The same thing is true with our consumption of culture or food or anything else. The stronger the urge to do something the greater the capacity for strength. It merely requires a knowledgeable plan of action that will lead to increased will power. If you do this this and this, then this will result. In the case of social media, the program of resistance has not been developed. We don’t have social media trainers. The closest thing we have is Gary Vee.

If we lift weights, run, or follow some well-designed exercise plan, we will most likely see some good results. The harder we work, the more we resist quitting, the better those results are likely to be. The same is true culturally. We just need to have a conversation about media consumption and health and then evolve that conversation to be about fitness. Everything is circumstantial. Just like an athlete who is working out with high intensity twice a day is going to have different food requirements, an artist who is producing a lot of work will also have different needs with what they consume.

We need to develop some fundamentals. We need a set of best practices when it comes to social media that anyone can follow and become decently fit, fairly fluid, and more in control of the entire process. That will be a service to humankind to develop that kind of discipline. Figuring out the right amount of time to spend on different activities will help you to build up the will power necessary to use social media without becoming victim to it. These activities, which I will describe soon, will help us to make the most of digital culture.

Social media has a very strong pull on us at the present moment. We need to learn to resist. That doesn’t mean to not participate. If anything, it means to engage more fully. As long as it is going to be a part of our lives, we should learn to use it to build our will power. If resistance doesn’t mean abstinence when it comes to social media, then what does it mean?

We have to create a set of standards and best practices to gain some traction for our personal journey through a social media influenced world.