In episode #626, Eric and Neil explain why they don’t watch the news. Tune in to hear why television news is a waste of your time.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: Why We Don’t Watch The News
- [00:33] The news media is just another business.
- [00:45] It’s a viewership-driven business and they thrive on ad revenue.
- [01:00] Instead, Eric follows different people on Twitter and gets his news from that.
- [01:20] TV news is just noise!
- [02:21] You can get your news by browsing news sites instead.
- [02:34] If something really important or big happens, you will most likely find out about it on Twitter or social media, anyway.
- [03:15] By not spending time posting on social media, you gain a lot of hours back.
- [03:44] To beat your competition, focus on your business and what matters as opposed to being obsessed with frivolous social media posts.
- [04:40] The Economist Espresso is one or two paragraphs and summarizes the most important stories.
- [05:00] “If you want to do well, stop wasting your time” -Neil
- [05:07] That’s all for today!
- [05:10] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post Why We Don’t Watch The News | Ep. #626 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neal Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neal Patel: And I'm Neal Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about why we don't watch the news. I'll kick it off. The way the news, the media, is set up is just another business. They're designed to get clicks. They're designed to get people to fall in and basically watch their content, or click on their titles, to get more advertising dollars. The more views that they have, it's a very viewership driven business, so it's designed to manipulate people. And, as marketers and also entrepreneurs, as well, we understand how that business works. That's why we don't fall into them traps.
What I do instead is I just follow very specific people, whether it's entrepreneurs, VCs, or investors on Twitter and I make these different lists. The most important things, they're going to show up, like if a really big earthquake happened and people are donating, you're going to see it happen. If a really big shooting happened, you're going to see that happen in Twitter too, but most of the other stuff, it's noise and it's just designed to get people to fall into the trap.
Sometimes when I watch ESPN, right now, when I watch Sports Center, when I watch First Take, it's just a bunch of people arguing about sports and really giving their opinion and it's really nothing much. It's the same thing as looking at Facebook when you see people arguing about religion, when you see people arguing about God it's religion and what else? What's the other thing?
Neal Patel: Politics.
Eric Siu: Politics. Everyone is an expert at this stuff and it just keeps going, and going, and going. It's just a complete waste of time. I'm pretty passionate about this. I just think that if you can ... All the time you spend on doing that, I think for most people, if you're watching CNN, for example, which is like crisis all the time. Well, I think that time can be better placed.
Neal Patel: Yeah. CNN always has some headline news saying, “Hey, this is wrong, or that's wrong.”
Eric Siu: And they're good at doing that.
Neal Patel: Yeah. And they're quick bait and you get trapped in and you keep watching. We're not saying the news isn't important, it's just, if you want to build a business, you want to grow your traffic, you're an entrepreneur, you don't have time to do all these things in the world. You've got to start cutting things out. You can get your news by just going to cnn.com and quickly browsing it or BBC. I read their economist every single day, but the easiest way to figure out if something's important is it will come across on your social media. Eric said it right, if you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're going to see it.
You shouldn't spend too much time reading the news, watching the news, or doing anything like that unless it's a core part of your business. Instead, go focus on doing, go do something. Heck, that even goes with social media. A lot of you guys are spending so much time taking pictures. The other day I was at a dinner, and I was with a few friends, and they're talking about how they're going to be deleting their Instagram accounts. I'm like, “This is great. How much time do you spend taking pictures every day?” They're like, “30 minutes.” Think about that. If you take that 30 minutes, and you multiply it by 365, the days in the year, that's over 10,000 minutes. You can get back 10,000 minutes by stop taking selfies, at least, that person could.
That's a shit load of time. If you think about that, for a perspective of how many working days it is, because there's 40 hours in a working week. Well, technically that's minutes and I've got to divide it by 60, so 182 divided by 40, that will give you 4.55 extra working weeks per year. You want to beat your competition? You want to get more traffic than them? Stop wasting time on shit you don't need to be doing and focus on growing your business.
Eric Siu: Just to build on what Neal's saying, instead of consuming ... You can just look at your phone. You can look at your analytics, what you're spending most of your time on. You can download an app called Moment and you can also look at Rescue Time, as well, just to see how you're spending your time there. But if you are consuming and you look at other people and you're trying to compete with other people, they're actually out there. Why are they doing better than you? Because they're producing more than you, so try to think about what balance you have right now.
By all means, if your thing is you want to learn some marketing from this podcast, but you want to relax, for the most part, that's fine. But if you really want to kick ass, and you're wondering why you're not kicking ass. This is probably one of the reasons. It doesn't matter what Kim Jong Un is going to do. It doesn't matter. It's not going to effect you, you just focus in on what you can control and that's the most important thing.
Now, the final thing I'll say is, Neal talked about reading The Economist. To make things even easier for you, there's an app called, The Economist Espresso, that I read every morning and it's just five snippets of the most important things. There's no links, nothing. It's just one or two paragraphs per and it gives you finality, so you can just move on with your day, and get to your day, and produce, and make a difference in the world.
Neal Patel: Yes. So, these days, if you want to do well, stop wasting your time. It's not just related to the news. It's related to anything that's not helping you accomplish your goals. That's it from my end. Do you have anything?
Eric Siu: Nope. That's it, so just get our marketing goodies at singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here, on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neal Patel: And I'm Neal Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about why we don't watch the news. I'll kick it off. The way the news, the media, is set up is just another business. They're designed to get clicks. They're designed to get people to fall in and basically watch their content, or click on their titles, to get more advertising dollars. The more views that they have, it's a very viewership driven business, so it's designed to manipulate people. And, as marketers and also entrepreneurs, as well, we understand how that business works. That's why we don't fall into them traps.
What I do instead is I just follow very specific people, whether it's entrepreneurs, VCs, or investors on Twitter and I make these different lists. The most important things, they're going to show up, like if a really big earthquake happened and people are donating, you're going to see it happen. If a really big shooting happened, you're going to see that happen in Twitter too, but most of the other stuff, it's noise and it's just designed to get people to fall into the trap.
Sometimes when I watch ESPN, right now, when I watch Sports Center, when I watch First Take, it's just a bunch of people arguing about sports and really giving their opinion and it's really nothing much. It's the same thing as looking at Facebook when you see people arguing about religion, when you see people arguing about God it's religion and what else? What's the other thing?
Neal Patel: Politics.
Eric Siu: Politics. Everyone is an expert at this stuff and it just keeps going, and going, and going. It's just a complete waste of time. I'm pretty passionate about this. I just think that if you can ... All the time you spend on doing that, I think for most people, if you're watching CNN, for example, which is like crisis all the time. Well, I think that time can be better placed.
Neal Patel: Yeah. CNN always has some headline news saying, “Hey, this is wrong, or that's wrong.”
Eric Siu: And they're good at doing that.
Neal Patel: Yeah. And they're quick bait and you get trapped in and you keep watching. We're not saying the news isn't important, it's just, if you want to build a business, you want to grow your traffic, you're an entrepreneur, you don't have time to do all these things in the world. You've got to start cutting things out. You can get your news by just going to cnn.com and quickly browsing it or BBC. I read their economist every single day, but the easiest way to figure out if something's important is it will come across on your social media. Eric said it right, if you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're going to see it.
You shouldn't spend too much time reading the news, watching the news, or doing anything like that unless it's a core part of your business. Instead, go focus on doing, go do something. Heck, that even goes with social media. A lot of you guys are spending so much time taking pictures. The other day I was at a dinner, and I was with a few friends, and they're talking about how they're going to be deleting their Instagram accounts. I'm like, “This is great. How much time do you spend taking pictures every day?” They're like, “30 minutes.” Think about that. If you take that 30 minutes, and you multiply it by 365, the days in the year, that's over 10,000 minutes. You can get back 10,000 minutes by stop taking selfies, at least, that person could.
That's a shit load of time. If you think about that, for a perspective of how many working days it is, because there's 40 hours in a working week. Well, technically that's minutes and I've got to divide it by 60, so 182 divided by 40, that will give you 4.55 extra working weeks per year. You want to beat your competition? You want to get more traffic than them? Stop wasting time on shit you don't need to be doing and focus on growing your business.
Eric Siu: Just to build on what Neal's saying, instead of consuming ... You can just look at your phone. You can look at your analytics, what you're spending most of your time on. You can download an app called Moment and you can also look at Rescue Time, as well, just to see how you're spending your time there. But if you are consuming and you look at other people and you're trying to compete with other people, they're actually out there. Why are they doing better than you? Because they're producing more than you, so try to think about what balance you have right now.
By all means, if your thing is you want to learn some marketing from this podcast, but you want to relax, for the most part, that's fine. But if you really want to kick ass, and you're wondering why you're not kicking ass. This is probably one of the reasons. It doesn't matter what Kim Jong Un is going to do. It doesn't matter. It's not going to effect you, you just focus in on what you can control and that's the most important thing.
Now, the final thing I'll say is, Neal talked about reading The Economist. To make things even easier for you, there's an app called, The Economist Espresso, that I read every morning and it's just five snippets of the most important things. There's no links, nothing. It's just one or two paragraphs per and it gives you finality, so you can just move on with your day, and get to your day, and produce, and make a difference in the world.
Neal Patel: Yes. So, these days, if you want to do well, stop wasting your time. It's not just related to the news. It's related to anything that's not helping you accomplish your goals. That's it from my end. Do you have anything?
Eric Siu: Nope. That's it, so just get our marketing goodies at singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here, on Marketing School.
