And today, I'm going to talk to you about a trap, something dangerous, and it's a trap that I've obviously fallen into several times myself. And I think I'm not the only one, I think that many, many of us have already fallen into this trap. There are many reasons for this, but the first thing is to tell yourself that in a world dominated by social media, we see a lot of things that may seem great to us and that we suddenly think we want. We didn't want it, but we see someone on social media who has it or who does it and it makes us want to do the same, we feel influenced by others, hence the term, which didn't exist before, but the term influencer is actually that. An influencer is someone who, through what they share on social media, will influence others and very often they will influence them to buy things that those who were watching would not have bought.
So, first of all, we have to understand that this social pressure is a decoy, that is to say it does not exist, it is a mirage. We do not see what is behind, we just see what is in front, we just see the facade. When we look at an influencer who presents something and tells me "it's great, it changed my life, I am so happy thanks to it, etc." in fact, we do not know if it is true. And very often, there are influencers who seem to have a wonderful life except that they are unhappy, miserable, some have even committed suicide. So, we know very well that many are playing a game, trying to show us a superb, sublime image, to make us want to have the same life as them, when in fact they are unhappy and they are just smiling and happy while they are shooting their video and as soon as they close the video, they have a miserable life. That happens.
So, first of all, you have to ask yourself "do I want to be influenced by people when I don't know if they're really happy?" And I'm not sure that they're really happy. Do we want that? So, once we have that in mind, it can allow us to be less influenced. But even beyond that, following them can sometimes push us to buy things we iraq whatsapp number data don't need, which is not great but it can have even more harmful effects since it can push us to stress out about having things that we don't actually want. It's the shiny object syndrome. We see something somewhere, we say to ourselves "if I had that, if I had that, it would be great, my life would be wonderful".
And we can have that at all levels. We can have it in our work, saying to ourselves: "His work is magnificent and exceptional. If I had the same thing, it would be great" or me, in my company, if I look at someone who uses a tool, I can say to myself: "If only I had this tool, oh la la" or "if only I followed this strategy". So, we are influenced by others without knowing what the real results are and without knowing what the constraints are, because... I'll give you a simple example.
At one point, I saw people saying: "You have to go to entrepreneur events because it will give you ideas to develop your platform", and since I am always looking for ideas to improve the Authentic French Academy platform, I said to myself: "Ah, I should go to events like that", but in fact I simply don't want to. These events take time. I'm not convinced... so, there may be times when it is interesting, but the time that I will invest will be time that will be taken from my work and will actually have a cost. So, the cost is hidden from us and we often overestimate the benefits that we get from it.
There's a quote that I've talked about on this podcast before, but I love it because it's super simple, it's so simple that it can seem stupid. And a lot of times, these quotes that are so simple that they can seem stupid, well they help us. And so, it's a quote from Darren Hardy, who is an American writer and speaker who is sometimes a little extreme in certain approaches and who is not always... I'm not always. Sometimes, he has extreme approaches that I don't share, but one of the things he said that I really appreciated was: "Don't want what you don't want."
And that's great. I don't want to go to these entrepreneur events and meet a lot of people, at least not today in my life, because I have other priorities. Maybe I want to later, but today, I don't want to, so why try to push myself to want something that I don't want. I have so many things that I want, let's try to do these things that I want. I know what I like, I know what I want, I know what I don't want. So, use that as a guide or at least, I'm talking to myself here, but I invite you to do the same thing. Use all of that as a guide. You know what you want, what you don't want, what you like, what you don't like, use that as a guide to make your decisions.