The Great Brain Robbery

If you want 2025 to be a joyful, productive, profitable, relationally rewarding, and spiritually uplifting year, you better know and protect what’s most valuable.

What’s your most valuable possession?

If you agree with the adage that the value of anything is determined by what someone is willing to pay to attain it, I propose that your focus is your most valuable possession. Billions of dollars are being spent to capture and hold your focus.

In 2025, you’ll be the target of the greatest potential heist in history.

If you study the most significant historical heists, you’ll find that the thieves went to extraordinary lengths to study or case their targets, while typically pretending to serve those they were casing. You know you’re being cased. Whatever you watch online or on television, click while scrolling, or discuss near your phone, appears more consistently - meaning the more you focus on anything the more similar content will appear. Artificial intelligence (AI) is designed to study and measure your focus.

Why?

Because the longer one holds your focus, the more opportunities one is given to subtly shape your focus with products and services someone is seeking to sell you. So, as AI better understands your focus, the more offerings it can produce to hold your focus, the more targeted and subtle the ads become, and the more likely you’ll spend money… all under the guise of better serving you. Captured focus has become much easier than stolen art, precious metals, or illegal drugs to convert into cash. And make no mistake – they are not asking your permission to capture your focus.

The thieves could care less about your weaknesses, addictions, passions, or insecurities. They are not trying to make you better or worse, but predictable and easily influenced. They simply wish to capture and exploit your focus. They learn what interests you and offer you a continuous stream of whatever it is in hopes of holding your attention as long as possible.

Yet, you’ve already discovered that AI is best at capturing and holding your focus on matters of insignificance while you overlook more important matters. To consistently steal one’s focus is to shred one’s potential creativity, productivity, and relational opportunities. We are lured away from the here and now as we anticipate and chase the next on-screen dopamine hit.

But your focus is your possession.

You get to choose your focus. Artificial Intelligence is not trained to develop your focus, but to study, capture, and exploit your focus. You will not effortlessly escape their well designed trap. But you can choose to intentionally protect yourself.

So how do we protect ourselves from The Great Brain Robbery?

How do we choose and guard our focus?

· Limit your time scrolling & streaming. Artificial intelligence measures your focus in two ways – the number of times you focus (pause or click) on content and the time you spend viewing related content. Predetermine how long you will be online. Set a timer. The content is designed to influence you to disregard your own limitations. Don’t compromise.

· Don’t pause or click on the kind of content that makes you most vulnerable. You know yourself. Just don’t go there! See above. Remember, a well-designed trap has been set with bait chosen specifically for you.

· Know and control your impulses. The key to controlling impulses is making proactive decisions or limitations rather than relying on your ability to react. Approach guarding your focus much like one would seriously approach limiting calories, drinking, smoking, or spending. If you lack intention, they’ll steal your attention and hold it as long as possible. You know it’s getting harder to put your phone down, close your laptop, or turn the TV off. That’s not coincidence. AI is learning what you like and teasing you with it.

“But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”

James 1:14-15

· Recognize that the most powerful choice you have in this life is determining your own focus. When someone steals your focus, they steal your life. Seconds turn into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days…

What does God say about guarding your focus?

“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” Colossians 3:2

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” Proverbs 4:23

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Philippians 4:8

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Matthew 22:37