Unpacking 'unwavering certainty/ruthless mindset - Conor McGregor and Tony Robbins'

This podcast felt like a milder one but nonetheless, learning exists within anything.

I came across the term 'law of attraction' in 2015 at the end of high school and it made very little sense due to definitions and explanations seeming more magical than factual. I understand now that at that time, I believed anything that didn't make much sense to me was brushed off by my mind and put into a category of irrelevance.

Over the years, law of attraction seems more than coincidental. If we live by certain energy continuously, we will attract similar types of energy in the forms of opportunities, people, anything. Hypothetically, even if you live by 364 days with 'positive energy' (quite unplausible) and you live 1 day with 'negative energy', that day will attract more 'negative energy'. This can be through examples such as road rage, complaining in the workplace which contagiously gets other people complaining etc. Positive energy; being appreciative, visualising wins and feeding yourself positivity will bring you more wins, positive people and alike. This is done through perception and humanity's attraction towards similarity. Mostly, people bond through similarity. That's just how we are, we prefer to not have confrontation.

Conor spoke about the 'internal vs. the external'. The external, I often call 'noise', is constantly around us. Our phones are constant representations of 'noise'. In this Information Age, we have too much information for us to humanly take in. We are influenced on the daily whether we like it or not. Many people don't take a conscious effort to stop this and protect ourselves. Conor spoke about the externals seeping and more powerfully, infiltrating into our internal. I would attribute this phenomenon as the mind being conditioned to taint the soul. As a martial artist, I can understand that within rounds, your internal is like your rhythm, your mindset. It can be compromised quite easily through fear or distracting thoughts. Head to head between two evenly skilled people, it is the person who has that extra bit of focus whether it be driven through passionate purpose or whatever, that person who has a clear mind, would be more likely to win. It is quite a delicate and subtle battle to the outside eye but inside the minds of the two fighters, it is a war of energy. It's 'all in' or nothing. All ins are more difficult than you think. Under such pressure, to be able to muster 100% of yourself to literally all in takes sheer willpower and hard, consistent training. Incredibly abstract. Many of the times, they don't even realise. Simplicity is beautiful.

I liked how Tony and Conor spoke about the physical and mental health go hand in hand. I often heard about the mind > matter. Looking at older people, especially those who had an extremely successful past in sport and have a hardened mind, the 'matter', the 'physical' does matter too. A broken body, no matter how strong the mind is, will wreak havoc on the mind. Health is number 1. Those who have no chronic conditions which affect you on a second by second basis will not understand how blessed 'healthy' people are. Working with people with permanent conditions such as cancer, dementia, schizophrenia, Prader-Willi, the list goes on, I can see it affecting their mind no matter how strong they try to be with life coaching, physio and psychological training.

Going back to this Information Age discussion with Tony, we can acknowledge that information is abundant. Naturally, abundance leads to complacency. Within complacency, truth can be obscured as strict vetting does not thrive amidst complacency. Such an environment spurs weak links in humanity. We begin to get accustomed to short cuts . Tony spoke about 'social proof'. We want someone to listen to, someone we believe is right. We don't often check who we are listening to as long as they sound right. We find people to blame because we are afraid to blame ourselves in this complacent environment. Hard work, grinding through consistently, confrontation are all opposites to comfort and complacency.

Extending on the above, Tony said that information is worthless without a purpose. Without a purpose, information is just noise. We cannot put significance to it. Scrolling through social media, seeing ads come up on your phone, hearing or seeing news involuntarily, we are so reactive. We don't have a purpose or aim in the information we want, we don't know what we want to do or know, we are just wandering aimlessly till something 'interesting' comes up. This shapes our mind and perception to be unstructured, unnatural and numbing. The analogy Tony used was, if you buy a car, suddenly you may begin to see more of that car around you. It's not that suddenly that car began to appear out of nowhere. It's that your mind began to put significance to the car (the information) and began to notice it around more. This is similar to someone avoiding a certain person. They will notice more of that person around because their mind is focusing on that. This shows the significance of what we put into our mind and consciousness and to vet it carefully. We need to gatekeep our minds. We need a clear vision/purpose.

"The cheapest commodity is advice," Tony said. I agree. So many people can give advice and while good intention is nice, they can be, as Tony said, "sincerely wrong". Information pollution is rampant. There is so much high modality in the advice given whether it be a social media campaigns for example, that people are coerced to believe it. The irony I'm seeing is I sound quite sincere (I hope) in my writing. Who knows that I'm right? Take everything with a grain of salt. Guard your mind. Admit no one knows anything or everything. It's all a balance. Stay open. Have purpose.