Good morning from Madrid! If you haven’t heard the previous episodes, I’m in Madrid, Spain now, one of my happy places in the world. It’s always been a happy place for me. I also mentioned maybe on Friday’s episode the power and importance of declaring when you’re happy. Noticing it. Saying it out loud. So I’m going to start the day by saying I’m happy, and I say that with great sincerity. Spain has always been a happy place for me. It’s a very special place.  I love the lifestyle here. I love the food. I love the way I feel.  So there you have it.

I got off to a good start today. It was around 7:30 when I opened the window. It was still dark outside and the full moon was right in the center of the window in all of its glory.  It’s also a good day to do a little bit of housekeeping before I talk about what’s on my mind today. So first up, well people have been telling me that I speak too quickly, or that I mention things assuming that people know what I’m talking about and that I need to slow it down or be more clear. I guess I have this fear of repeating myself, but I am going to make more of an effort to slow down also because I think new people are joining us.

So let me start by saying this.  I was and continue to be very passionate about Episode 105. I called it Rocketfuel, three tips to create a fun life you love. I encourage you to go back to listen to episode 105 of September 1^st, but I’ll also summarize it here very briefly. The three-step process is this. The first is to create one big event that defines your year so that you can look back and say yeah, in 2024 I did this in 2023 I did this.  So one big event that sort of defines your year. The second step is to do something you wouldn’t normally do every other month, so it’s kind of like creating six mini adventures over the course of the year. The third step is to initiate a new habit – one new habit – every quarter.

In essence it’s a three step process to be more intentional about your choices in life. It’s really about the power of deliberate intent and I called it rocket fuel because that’s how I felt when I heard it the first time. But it’s not about having some great big exciting life. It’s very much about making new choices and being deliberate about how you live your life. It’s not about blowing things up, taking a trip around the world, quitting your job or getting divorced. It’s about making new choices, and it’s about being deliberate and intentional in how you live your life.

So, for example, for a new mother or a new parent, it could simply be taking an hour for yourself once a week. Or if you’re in a moment of your life where you just have to give it your all and work, work, work, it could be simply about choosing to be more deliberate about your sleep or your eating or your exercise. You see where I’m going? But as I said before, I encourage you to go back and listen to episode 105.

Those of you who are going to join in the fun, which we’re going to create in 2024, I didn’t forget that I put out that invitation. I’m working on a new website and I’m kind of holding off because I want this group to exist independent of Dear Constance in that let’s just say you want to invite one of your friends to participate or a young member of your family, they don’t have to be a listener of Dear Constance to participate in the RocketFuel Group.

Anyway, this leads me up to talk about what I want to address today and it harks back to the question I asked last Wednesday, which was how am I going to decide what to pay attention to? One of my friends and a listener of Dear Constance, my friend Eleonora, sent an excellent podcast to me. As a sidenote, when I launch the new website, I’m really hoping that people will leave me messages, offer suggestions and share things they love because it’s something I value. It really helps me because we’re talking about distraction here and there’s so much information out there and I love it when someone shares what’s inspired them

So, Eleonora sent me this interview It was from the Rich Roll podcast. It was episode 393 from September of 2018, so it’s quite old. It was his interview with Yuval Noah Harari. I think most of you have at least heard of him. He is the author of that book, Sapiens, and he was being interviewed because his latest book was coming out at the time. It was called ‘21 Lessons for the 21st Century’.  So if you want to look him up, he’s a renowned historian, a prodigious intellect, and one of the truly great. thinkers of our time. Again, his name is you’re Yuval Noah Harari.

Here’s what he said that really caught my attention because it directly relates to last week’s question how am I going to decide what to pay attention to? I’m going to read it. It’s very brief. He said this. It is common to say that information is power and knowledge is power. This was true for most of history when information was very scarce. Censorship worked by withholding information, by blocking the flow of information. But we now live in a very different age when we are flooded by enormous amounts of information. We have far too much of it. We don’t know how to make sense of it. And censorship now actually works by distracting people with too much information, with irrelevant information, with disinformation. And in this age, clarity is more important than ever before because we need to know what to focus on. attention becomes maybe the most scarce resource of all.

Wow. That is really powerful to me. This idea that censorship is happening by distracting us from what’s important. By conditioning how we pay attention and how we consume. I feel like it drives home my point of last week that the distraction is like a disease and we regain not only our calm and sense of agency, but we regain our power by being very deliberate about what we pay attention to because attention is a very powerful resource.

I don’t know, there was just something about that I guess simply drove home the point that I don’t need to try to know everything. I don’t need to try to keep up all the time. it’s much more powerful to choose how I direct my attention. I don’t know who needs to hear that today. I know I did. I’ll leave you with that.

Until next time, from my heart to yours.