‘Energy is the currency of the universe’ is a brilliant thought articulated by Emily Maroutian in her book Thirty: A Collection of Personal Quotes, Advice, and Lessons.
It advises us to be careful where we focus our consciousness or attention because by doing so, ‘we feed it our energy.’ This concept is thought-provoking. Let’s read this thought in its entirety before we dive deeper into what it means.
Energy is the currency of the universe.
When you “pay” attention to something, you buy that experience.
So when you allow your consciousness to focus on someone or something that annoys you, you feed it your energy, and it reciprocates with the experience of being annoyed.
Be selective in your focus because your attention feeds the energy of it and keeps it alive, not just within you, but in the collective consciousness as well.
Emily Maroutian, Thirty: A Collection of Personal Quotes, Advice, and Lessons
What does it mean?
Everything we do requires energy
Physical work makes us feel tired. Similarly, intense mental work also drains our energy and makes us feel fatigued. Not only humans but all plants and animals need energy to live and thrive.
All actions originate in thought
Everything that happens in the world starts as a conscious or unconscious thought in our mind. Just review everything you have done today, and you will realize this is true. Let’s say you want to go to the beach for a holiday, it first starts as a thought and leads to actions to convince your family, plan the logistics, and eventually get there.
If everything we do, including thinking, requires energy, and all actions originate in thought, then it follows that your, mine, and everyone else’s mental-energy drives everything that happens in this world.
Our attention feeds energy to everything
Focusing our consciousness or attention on something feeds it our energy and keeps it alive.
You would have noticed this when a child throws a tantrum for no good reason. The more you pay attention to the child’s outburst, the more it continues. The moment you take your focus away and go back to doing something else, the child will magically find something else to do.
When we argue politics or religion with folks holding strong contrary opinions and beliefs, the debate stays alive as it feeds off our energy and attention.
Hence the more we ‘pay’ attention to something annoying, it returns the favour and we ‘buy’ the feeling of being annoyed. The more we pay attention to something positive and constructive, the more the world reciprocates the positive feeling back to us.
Energy is your life’s currency
We can use the finite energy to achieve something positive, like learning a new skill or working on a project that will get us that raise or promotion. Or we can spend it on social media arguing against someone’s firmly held political beliefs or focusing attention to someone’s annoying actions.
If you can control your thoughts and put them to productive use, they would, over time, lead to actions that produce positive outcomes.
It is true when we say, ‘its all in the mind.’ No wonder there are so many self-help books about controlling your mental chatter or thinking straight. And so many gurus have made a career out of teaching people how to meditate and control their thoughts.
Consciously choosing how and where you spend your finite attention and energy determines how well you achieve your life goals. In other words, it determines how successful you are in life.
“Be selective in how you spend your energy; it is your life’s currency.“
Thoughts on Energy
Here are some interesting thoughts on the topic of ‘energy’ from diverse fields like philosophy, physics, management, and sociology.
There is no feeling without thought; and behind thought is pleasure; so those things go together: pleasure, the word, the thought, the feeling; they are not separated. Observation without thought, without feeling, without word is energy. Energy is dissipated by word, association, thought, pleasure, and time; therefore, there is no energy to look.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
Passion is the adrenaline coursing through your veins giving you the energy to outperform competition.
Sfurti Sahare, The Monkey Theory
In Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body’s energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy. Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.
Peter F. Drucker
.. the universe functioned with a singular directive. One goal. To spread energy. In the simplest terms, when the universe found areas of focused energy, it spread that energy out.
Dan Brown, Origin
If the total energy of the universe must always remain zero, and it costs energy to create a body, how can a whole universe be created from nothing? That is why there must be a law like gravity. Because gravity is attractive, gravitational energy is negative: One has to do work to separate a gravitationally bound system, such as the earth and moon. This negative energy can balance the positive energy needed to create matter
Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design
In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
You get more energy once you spend more energy, and you get deeper focus once you focus more.
@orangebook_ on Twitter
You have to bring a different energy to get a different result.
Emily Maroutian, Thirty
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This was helpful
Just stopping by… and I wanted to share because yesterday I discovered a website talking about something nearly the same.The information wasfascinating I admit.
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