Reducing "Fluff" in Your Life

Description

With this simple exercise, you can begin to make the shift from "fluff" to strong skills and self-evolution.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

greetings peter parker's left a comment the other day and he said that he was considering spending one day a week just going out into the woods and trying to live out there with minimal or very very little equipment this got me to thinking about and all the exercise I knew about that can probably benefit a lot of us there's there's this concept of being on a path in life and in some other videos I've spoken about getting off the path that you're on but here I'm talking about having a conscious path and staying on it take all this with a grain of salt remembering that sometimes we're gonna be on a path and we're gonna think you know what I need to change my trajectory there's nothing wrong with that hopefully our life evolves as we go along and we can wisely shift our path taking the lessons from our past experiences and adding them into our new direction also remember that if we're holding too strongly to something sometimes we can do that blindly we can become so obsessed with something that we're missing other opportunities that arrive in our life so as I move forward with this video think about being flexible in the path that we're following but here's the thing for most of us being really on task is not the problem usually in our culture the problem is being distracted we think about our culture for a little bit that is built on distractions that's what entertainments all about so in any given day there are a thousand things calling to us saying look at me look at me we can spend so much time surfing the web watching movies watching television programs listening to radio broadcasts all kinds of things sometimes we can do these things consciously and they can earn rich us but a lot of times for a lot of us these are just distractions it's just fluff it's junk food for the mind now here's this exercise the first thing you do is you take a piece of paper and you write down some of the things you're really passionate about that you want to be paying attention to in your life the things that you want to be on your path it might be getting good at leather work because you've had a taste of this and you really want to hone your skills might be getting in shape might be learning to cook it might be going deeper into your faith or into meditation might be developing really strong prepping skills or wilderness skills now we can write down those things we can say ah wouldn't it be cool if I was super good at these wilderness skills and I could just start a fire any time in the woods but the reality for most of us is we have those those ideas of what we'd like but when it comes to going out and doing that thing or watching television television would be so much easier here's what you do you've got that piece of paper and that has this list of things that you want to include on your path now get any kind of a stopwatch all you need is a stopwatch so that you can start and stop and it's gonna continue to monitor the time and then for one day use that stopwatch and turn it on whenever you sit down to watch television whenever you surf the web whenever you do anything maybe it's reading kind of a fluff magazine whenever you do anything that's just distraction

turn on that timer that stopwatch and keep track of how much time at the end of the day you're gonna have a reading there it's gonna say you spent 10 minutes or an hour or 2 hours or four hours on the fluff now you get that that amount of time let's say it's three hours but you spent that day in distraction and just sit down with that piece of paper and ask yourself this simple question what would happen if I would have taken those three hours and I would have devoted that to practicing my wilderness skills well most of us the thing is we're gonna be very surprised at how much time we have available to us because a lot of times what we'll hear is when we think about okay it'd be really great if I could deepen my meditation practice or if I could really start developing those willingness skills my fire-making skills but then we think here comes I just don't have time for that there's all this other stuff in my life true but again for most of us when we look and we see how much time we're spending on distraction or fluff it's gonna be eye-opening that we have a large amount of time available to us in any given day a week that we could be devoting to some serious skill building some serious conscious intake of media some serious exploration some serious self evolution this is one of the little hidden dirty secrets in our culture we're given this message that we don't have time but boy oh boy our culture is so good at distraction distracting us giving us all these offerings that we hardly notice how much time we spend upon them

so grab a piece of paper write down those things that you're excited about developing in your life grab a stopwatch any kind of timer keep track for that day of how much fluff time you spend and then sit down at the end of the day and think about what that day would have been like how much you could have learned if you spent that fluff time deliberately building skills I think most of us will be surprised please share in the comments any thoughts you have about this exercise or places in your life where you found that you're spending extra time that really isn't serving you in a positive way and if you have switched from spending some of that time and fluff to spending some time building some skills share the skills that you've been building you can inspire us all thank you my friends [Music]

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