Did you ever notice that products, sayings or behaviours are popularized after their showing on the screen?

The Cosby Show effect was a term coined around the results of the Huxtables, a black medical doctor dad and black lawyer mom.  During its nine-year run, black student college enrollment increased by 19%.

After Top Gun hit theatres in 1986, navy recruiters set up booths outside cinemas. Why? Because applications to fighter pilot schools reportedly spiked over 500%.

And from sipping giant lattes in Friends’ Central Perk to clinking Cosmopolitans in Sex and the City, pop culture proves it’s not directing trends, it’s driving them.  Despite coffee and alcohol being well-documented toxins, media repetition as well as association with cool, sophisticated or successful characters, has made these two substances essential for (perceived) quality living.

Whether we admit it or not, what we watch shapes what we want. Film and television don’t just entertain us, they normalize, glamorize, and popularize behaviors, identities, and aspirations. They plant seeds in the collective mind.

Aha! ~ If you don’t program your mind, someone else will.

And they are. Every scroll, show, soundtrack, song, and storyline is a subtle form of programming. When we passively consume what's on screen or in ear-shot, we’re not just entertained — we’re entrained.  Allowing your mind to be regularly hacked — through repetition, glamorization, and social contagion — is one of the most dangerous forms of unconscious living.

Enter pruning.

In nature, pruning isn’t punishment, it’s strategy. Gardeners and arborists know that removing dead branches, overgrowth, or even healthy stems in the wrong place allows the plant to redirect nutrients and energy to its most essential, productive parts.

It’s the same with us.

Pruning is how we consciously cut away the habits, influences, and inputs that drain our energy and dilute our focus. Whether it's a potentially toxic social feed, trending foods that are void of nutrition, Netflix binges, or mimicking someone else’s version of “success” — these are mental overgrowths.

Cutting back isn’t loss — it’s alignment. We have the power to shape our own growth by choosing what stays and what goes.

Conscious choices quietly shape extraordinary lives.

I didn’t realize until many years later that Bob Proctor regularly read Aha! Moment Mondays.  I think he’d be very proud of this one, don’t you?  Join us in HumanU where we share our own Aha! Moments and grow.

And here is the invitation for Human U members