You’re currently reading the “Signal” edition of Abundance Mindset.

This edition goes out every third week of the month and serves as my personal “anti-brain rot” list. Here you’ll find a curated list of discoveries designed to spark curiosity, open your mind, and inspire your next personal or professional leap. If you want to expand your mind even further, check out the Thrive Now Podcast, for fresh conversations on growth, creativity, and clarity.

Olivia is here to de-influence you, and help you get your personality back.

In this video, she breaks down how social media, algorithms, and influencers quietly shape your preferences, decisions, and even your sense of self. Not all at once, but consistently over time.

More importantly, she walks through how to take that power back, so you’re not just consuming identities, but actively choosing who you’re becoming.

take back your personality →

Since 2023, I’ve been deeply curious about how we work, why we work the way we do, and who decided this is the way we’re all supposed to make a living.

One book that stood out during my search for meaning and impact is, The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff, who, in many ways, is also a de-influencer.

In the book, he challenges the idea that your job has to be your passion, your purpose, or your identity. Instead, it can simply be… good enough. Something that supports your life, not consumes it. Through interviews with professionals across industries, he makes the case that fulfillment doesn’t have to come from work, it can exist outside of it.

If you’re in a season where you’re craving ease, or questioning your relationship with your career, this might be the perspective shift you didn’t know you needed.

I’m also a de-influencer of sorts, and I’d encourage you to search your local library, Libby app, or even Spotify’s audiobook database before you go buy this book.

find the book at your local library→

The internet has a taste problem…

But, the idea of having “taste” isn’t new.

And as I was reminiscing on the old “Style” network channel with my friend, Jeneba Wint, she called something out that stuck with me. She said, if you exposed yourself to a lot of different things (like the Style network. lol), overtime, then you have taste. But now, with the internet we’ve essentially been living in a tasteless era. We both came to the conclusion that it’s not because taste disappeared, but because we’ve gotten so far removed from it that many people don’t recognize what it actually looks or feels like anymore.

And honestly… I think that’s right on the nose. We’ve also gotten used to listening to other people tell us how taste “should” look, feel, and sound like. (enter: influencers).

The first time I really understood the concept of taste was while I was in college. I was making really, really bad creative work, but I thought it was good. LOL. I specifically remember a video art class that I took where that clash between good taste and bad taste bubbled up to the surface.

In that class, I was given a camera, an Adobe account, and an assignment to create, but no clear sense (yet) of what good actually looked like.

My professor shared a video featuring Ira Glass (with additional context from Daniel Sax) that explained why so much creative work feels like “slop,” and why it’s so hard to produce something that actually feels tasteful.

It clicked then, and in the era of AI and lost creatives, I think it still holds up.

So, in the same way it was passed to me, I’m passing it to you.

learn what taste is, and isn’t→

Until next time,
DEJA WHITE | BREAKROOM BUDDHA