Curate Your Corner
If nobody's in your corner, build one — unfollow the toxic, follow the wise, read the dead.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 78%
Asked what to do if you don't have a mother like his, O'Brady's answer is that you probably do have a corner — you just haven't built it. Almost everyone today has connection, even if not to people sharing physical space. The internet is a two-way instrument: the same feed that hosts the person who triggers you every morning also hosts the people who could expand what you think is possible. The move is subtractive first — pull out your phone and unfollow everyone making you feel bad, right now — then additive. And the corner extends to mentors dead a hundred years whose words survived because they were worth surviving.
Origin
O'Brady's own turning point was one person: his mother, who tracked him down in remote Thailand and refused to let a doctor's diagnosis become his ceiling. Later his wife Jenna talked him off a cliff, quite literally, from the summit of Everest and the core of Antarctica. Asked by Hala what someone without a single person in their corner should do, he built the answer from his own reading — mentors dead a century whose books profoundly impacted his life.
Core principles
- 01You only need one person in your corner — and they don't have to be someone you've met.
- 02You're the net product of the five people you spend the most time with, and screens count.
- 03The same internet that is toxic is also the richest supply of mentors ever assembled.
- 04Mentors can be dead a hundred years and still change your life through their books.
- 05Curating community is a core component of possible mindset, not a soft extra.
How to run it
- 1
Audit who's actually in your head
The five people you spend the most time with includes the accounts you scroll every morning. Name the one on your feed who reliably triggers you or makes you feel bad.
Pro tip You already know exactly who it is — the name arrives before you finish the question.
- 2
Unfollow, right now
Pull out the phone in this moment and remove them. Not later, not after a review — now.
Pro tip It feels amazing immediately, which is itself evidence of how much they were costing you.
- 3
Refill the space deliberately
The vacated attention doesn't stay empty. Fill it with people actively sharing wisdom, advice and experience — podcasts, long-form, practitioners.
Pro tip The one person in your corner can be someone you've never met and never will.
Watch out Leaving the space empty means the algorithm refills it for you.
- 4
Recruit the dead
Add mentors whose work outlasted them. O'Brady counts people dead a hundred years among the most profound influences on his life, purely through their books.
Pro tip Words that lasted centuries survived a brutal filter. That's a quality signal.
In the wild
Hala observed that people imagine they need ten supporters around them in a crisis, when in reality one person in your corner makes you blessed. O'Brady's crisis had exactly one: his mother, who took four or five days to find him in remote Thailand and then showed up every single day with a smile while crying in the hallways where he couldn't see.
→ That single person's refusal to accept the diagnosis is what O'Brady credits with changing his entire life.
O'Brady points to mentors in his life who have been dead for a century. He's never spoken to them, never will, but their words were written down and lasted the decades and centuries, and they've profoundly impacted his life.
→ Proof that the corner is built from access, not proximity — available to anyone with a library card.
Common mistakes
Waiting for a supporter to arrive
Treating your corner as something that happens to you rather than something you assemble means the isolation persists indefinitely, even though the raw material is one unfollow and one book away.
Subtracting without adding
Unfollowing the toxic accounts feels great but leaves a vacuum. If you don't deliberately fill it with people expanding what's possible, the feed simply serves you something equally corrosive.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone isolated, rebuilding after a setback, or without a mentor in physical proximity.
Not ideal for
People who need clinical support rather than curated inputs.
From the transcript
“Get rid of all those people on your social media feed that are continuing to make you feel bad right now. Pull out your phone,…”
“That one person in your corner can be somebody that maybe you haven't even met.”
“I have mentors in my life who have been dead a hundred years, but I've read their books that have profoundly impacted my life.”
From the episode
Colin O'Brady: Conquer Your Mind
Colin O'Brady