☕ saturday mornings - April 2, 2022
limiting beliefs, vulnerable learning & avoiding the news
Good morning all!
Happy Saturday. I hope you’re having an excellent start to your weekend.
What I’ve been up to:
Finishing up another semester at school and heading into exams. Time seems to speed up each year.
Rounding into the final week of Write of Passage. The best word I could use to describe it is transformational.
I was accepted into the European Innovation Academy, a 3-week entrepreneurship accelerator program in Porto, Portugal this July. Pretty stoked.
I’m currently planning a 5-week trip to Italy, Croatia, Austria, Czechia, and Germany. If there are any destinations or sights I have to see, let me know!
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of the coolest things I’ve been pondering and exploring this week.
Thanks for being here.
Total read time (bolded sections) = 2 minutes
Total read time (all) = 6 minutes
✍️ Quote I’m pondering:
“When you argue for your limitations you get to keep them.”
— Gary Keller
💡 Idea from me:
Vulnerability is a precondition for learning.
💡 Idea I’m exploring: Why You Should Stop Consuming News
"The goal of media is to make every problem, your problem." — Naval Ravikant
In 2022 I stopped reading the news.
And as I don’t have social media, I’m 99% disconnected from current events.
According to my friends, I’m “living under a rock.” (Their words not mine).
I understand that many people believe it’s important to keep up to date with current affairs. If that belief serves you, by all means, continue. This is simply my experience.
I’ll explain how cutting out news helped me reclaim my attention, improved the quality of information I consume, made me more optimistic, and reduced stress.
The Danger of the News
“If you diet, invest, and think according to what the "news" advocates, you'll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.” — Naval Ravikant
We consume news because we want to be informed. Yet, the news doesn’t aim to make us informed. The news aims to make us inflamed.
Incentives are misaligned.
News stations are private. They are profit-seeking like any other company. And if you’re not paying for news, advertisers are.
No different from HBO, news companies get paid by selling people’s attention to advertisers. The viewer is not the customer, they’re the product.
In this game, views become the focus. More eyeballs mean more revenue. Incentives change. To increase views, as Shane Parrish writes “the more controversy, the more share-ability, the more enraged you become, the better”.
A journalist wrote an article about what makes something newsworthy. He explained how news stations manipulate information to make it more interesting.
News stations think through:
How do we make something odd or unusual or bizarre?
How do we add conflict?
How do we make something more local to people?
How do we make it more recent?
There’s a formula for what creates news.
The news perpetuates a culture of “tune in, don’t miss out, someone knows something you don’t, follow this or you’ll be misinformed, oh wait, look at this!”
Their intention is to keep attention. Not to disseminate truth.
(A study from Fairleigh Dickinson University found that watching Fox News makes you less informed than watching no news at all).
Your Information Diet Matters
“To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media.” — David Perell
Like food, you should be hyper-conscious of what you put in your mind.
Information and food consumption are perfect metaphors. You want to consume more nutrients and less junk.
David Perell tells a story of a time he hopped into an Uber with friends and watched them “scroll their social media feeds with ferocious intensity. One thing stuck out: the people in front of me only consumed content created within the last 24 hours... Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption — a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but barely goes anywhere.”
How can the best information to consume all be created in the past 24 hours?
“News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last,” Shane Parrish explains. “It exists for only a moment before it changes.”
The information isn’t relevant in the long run. There’s little substance. “To be completely cured of newspapers,” Nassim Taleb writes, “spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
Inputs affect outputs. To get healthier improve your diet. To get smarter improve your information diet.
Cutting Out the News
“Most of what you read online today is pointless.
It’s not important to living a good life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not dense with information. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you.” — Shane Parrish
For years, I was a news junkie. I spent over an hour each day reading the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg ... the list goes on.
Then I began to notice something. All my top idols: Tim Ferriss, Naval Ravikant, Alex Hormozi, David Perell, and Shane Parrish, avoided the news like the plague.
They were extremely selective about their information diet.
And here’s the kicker: They all run multi-million dollar businesses and are extremely prolific.
“I never watch the news,” Tim Ferriss writes, “and have bought one single newspaper in the last five years.”
"[The media’s] intention is not to educate me their intention is to make the world's problems my problem” Alex Hormozi notes, “and I have enough problems and so I don't need to add more that are irrelevant to me to my list.”
Shane Parrish wrote a great piece Why You Should Stop Reading News.
In 2021 I weaned myself down to reading The Morning Brew for five minutes each day. Then, I decided to stop reading any news while I was in Costa Rica and didn’t miss it at all.
The news doesn’t add value to my life, but it certainly can make it worse.
Burying my head in the sand? Perhaps. But I can’t control any of it. Why would I voluntarily add stress to my life over things I can’t control?
On his death bed, Hans Rosling wrote Factfulness a book on how we’re misled by the news. “It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections,” Hans writes, “is in a much better state than we might think.”
The media cherry-picks the top 0.1% of the worst things that happen in the entire world and force-feeds it to the masses every day. They ignore the bright spots and the improvements and the optimism. It’s no wonder the world seems like it’s getting worse.
I decided I don’t have to subscribe to it.
Where do we go from here?
“Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume: Is this good for me? Is this dense with detailed information? Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time? Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue?” — Shane Parrish
If you continue to consume news, try to be more critical of what you’re told. Separate the facts and data from the opinions.
Tim Ferriss asks his well-informed friends “what’s new in the world”. Using this strategy he “lets other dependable people synthesize hundreds of hours and pages of media” for him. I hear the most important news from my roommates.
And with the valuable time you get back, you can spend more time with loved ones or consume better information.
In my experience, avoiding news means avoiding spikes of stress over things I can’t control.
I replaced the time I used to consume news with time used for consuming timeless content. My information diet improved, and so did my thinking, decision-making, and relationships.
“Few things are as important to your quality of life," Winifred Gallagher writes, “as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time.”
That’s all for this week’s edition of “saturday mornings”.
If you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.
I shared a spiky point of view, so if you think I’m missing anything or looking at things the wrong way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Reply to this email, leave a comment, or find me on Twitter @tommy_dixon_
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Have a fantastic weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Tommy
Always love your intriguing thoughts, ideas and perspectives, Tommy. Appreciate you sharing so much in your “saturday mornings” newsletters. Your essay on reading the news is thought provoking and I agree with your outlook. News (and even daily weather forecasts, for crying out loud) is so sensationalized in order to capture our attention and draw us in all for the purpose of increasing readership, hence more advertising dollars to the publishers. For a long time, I didn’t read the news and was often accused of “living under a rock” or “living in a bubble”. When I started dedicating time to read the news again it wasn’t due to this social pressure but more to “be informed” and knowledgeable of current events. But, I would continually get so incredibly downright sad with what I was taking in. If even an ounce of my sadness would have helped people or situations I was reading about, this alone would make it worthwhile. But, as genuine as my sadness would be, it could not help a sole. So, I love your idea of gathering summarized main ideas from family and friends to “keep in the know”. The truth is the news changes and passes so damn quickly, one is hardly missing out, in my opinion. I’ll aim to educate myself with what really matters and, more importantly, help with the tangible when possible! Thanks again, Tommy, for providing a valuable forum for launch points of ideas and learning!!!
Subscribed. And loving your spiky point of view particularly around the news, Tommy. I shun the headlines in favour of creating & highlighting the kind of hope-filled headlines I would prefer to read.