The Danger of Consuming Low-Effort Online Content
Are you learning real information or just consuming someone's content marketing?
Be honest with yourself: when you watch a business influenza’s “Build in Public Day #89489724597” video do you ever learn anything actionable?
Have you ever expanded a guru’s thread on X and thought anything other than “why did I just click on this”?
The internet is a trap. Since you (luckily) ended up on this side of the web you already know how to avoid the extreme low-IQ traps like TikTok, video games, and Pornhub Premium.
Mindless entertainment and hedonism likely doesn’t even appeal to you in the slightest.
But I bet there’s something else that does:
Smart and semi-smart people both like to think that more information always = better.
Which is why you gorge yourself on ‘high IQ’ internet content thinking “if there’s even one nugget of useful information in this video it’ll be worth the time investment”.
Limiting your info consumption = Turbo Genius Move
The most successful people (even content creators themselves) deliberately LIMIT the amount of online content they consume.
Most content simply isn’t worth spending time on. The majority of business information you find on social media and YouTube doesn’t even deserve to be called information.
It’s infotainment used as part of someone’s content marketing plan. At best it’s a relatively benign form of entertainment. At worst it’s actively preventing you from achieving your goals.
The creators aren’t interested in actually helping anyone. They’re building their personal brand (personalities are the new companies) and trying to game the algorithm by pumping out as many videos as possible (1x per day seems to be the magic number everyone’s shooting for).
Things they’re not worried about:
Whether your business succeeds or fails.
Whether you actually learn anything from their content.
Your hopes and dreams.
Things they are worried about:
Improving their engagement metrics.
Growing their subscriber/follower count.
Increasing the CTR on the “link in the description” to their course/tool/mastermind group/whatever they happen to be selling.
You’re just a number on the screen at best.
Content creators spend all their time thinking about things like “what intro can we use to improve our retention”, “what CTA converts best”, etc. etc.
This leads to a rapid descent into lowest common denominator hell. Creating content that appeals to a niche group of high IQ, conscientious, and ambitious people can only grow a guru’s following to a certain point. There simply aren’t enough of these people in the world. The only way to grow any further is to dumb things down and appeal to the Great Unwashed Masses, thus losing any sense of uniqueness that made the guru worth following to begin with.
Being successful at business is like being successful at art. You have to have a unique view of the world that you ram down everyone’s throats whether they want it or not.
And it’s literally impossible to be this iconoclastic, insane type of person if you’re consuming content that caters to the aforementioned Great Unwashed Masses, who all have a 100 IQ and whose defining characteristic is their uncanny ability to think and feel the exact same way about every single topic as everyone else in their IQ/personality cohort.
There’s a common cliche that states that you’re the average of the five people you hang out with the most. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s definitely true that you become the average of what you consume.
How could it be any other way?
Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. So it’s logical to assume that what you think about is what you are.
If you consume slop, you become slop. And 99%+ of what you read online is exactly that: low effort, worthless, mindless slop. Even if it has an intellectual veneer to it, it’s still slop.
Podcasts are probably the worst thing you can consume if you want to have any hope of being successful.
No one I know who’s successful listens to podcasts. Maybe on a long road trip or something, but this weird lifestyle of gorging yourself on audio content all day long - often played in the background all day every day while working/ procrastinating - is not something that I’ve seen anyone I admire engage in.
Here’s a rare clip of podcasters being brutally honest about the types of people who listen to podcasts:
I happen to know a couple successful podcasters IRL and trust me, they don’t have a high opinion of their own audience (putting it mildly there).
The way you learn about business is the way you learn about anything: through real, hands-on experience. Trial and error. Tears and euphoria. Peaks and valleys.
You can’t avoid any of it.
Podcasters, gurus, and build-in-public social media clowns give you the illusion that you can skip the pain.
“Why not learn from someone who’s walked the walk/is currently walking the walk? It seems like a no-brainer.”
Because that’s not how the universe works.
Nerds like to think they can intellectualize their way out of anything. You can’t. You can either accept that fact or the world will keep delivering ruthless bitchslaps directly to your face until you, crying and trembling in the fetal position, finally come to terms with the reality that there are things your precious brainpower can’t get you out of. There are things you have to actually live through to fully understand.
Divided focus
The ability to focus intensely on a single task until it’s complete is the #3 most important trait for success (#1 and #2 are: having an insanely unique personality/worldview and having an at least slightly above average IQ, respectively).
Multitasking is a myth. When you’re listening to something “in the background” you’re not actually multitasking.
Your brain is switching rapidly between focusing on the main task you’re allegedly trying to accomplish and the thing you’re listening to in the background.
How anyone can work like this is beyond me. Maybe it’s possible when you’re doing something that’s nothing more than rote drudgery like copy/pasting things in Excel. Honestly even then it’s a bit sus because you’re probably making mistakes you don’t even know about while you’re zombieing out on that podcast you aren’t even really listening to.
You sure as shit can NOT do anything high level with this insane lack of focus though. That I know for a 100% fact. If you think you can you’re lying to yourself. Plain and simple.
High level tasks require high level focus.
Bottom line
Business influenzas and podcasters aren’t putting out content for your benefit. They’re putting it out there for their benefit.
When you invest your most precious and valuable resources - time and attention - into the crap they publish you aren’t doing yourself any favors.
You’re not shortcutting the process and you aren’t really learning anything.
If you’re resistant to that idea then quickly (without looking anything up) tell me one thing you remember from the last guru video you watched. You can’t. Because it wasn’t valuable content and you weren’t watching to learn, you were watching for a feeling.
Watching the video made you FEEL productive without the hard work or the risk of failure. Is that really worth sacrificing real life success for?
I say no, but it’s your life. Do whatever you want.
Tell it like it is! What a post—I agree with every word. There might be a small percentage of content creators wanting to help people, but it's very small. Gosh, some of the threads on X are so repetitive, like words from a secret society. That being said, we are what we consume—crap in means crap out. There is a world of great content out there; we just need to make the effort to find it.