Crack addict?

Yesterday, I talked about how reading online marketing blogs can easily become an addiction. One that is actually harmful.

I wanted to talk a bit more about that because…

I don’t want you to be addicted to crack. Like this guy…

In all seriousness, there’s an awesome video on Youtube you should watch some time from Simon Sinek. Watch: Simon Sinek: The Video That Will Change Your Life

This is SUCH a good video on so many levels. It is about 45 minutes long, so perhaps you need to queue it up to watch later rather than right now. But, it is worth it.

But, in it, he talks about various chemicals in the brain. One of them is dopamine. While there’s a lot of complexity behind how this stuff works, the simple version is that this little chemical is often associated with rewards and achieving pleasure. It signals feedback for predicted awards.

It is pretty addictive stuff. Like “brain crack”. 🙂 And even the smallest things end up triggering this in our modern, online world.

• Seeing that little notification count on your Facebook app. You just want to check that to see which one one of your friends said something to you. 🙂
• That little “(1)” on your email inbox. Who emailed you? You MUST find out!
• Phone notifications.
• Text messages.

The list goes on. But, in all of it, what you see is a little hit of dopamine. You want that next hit and so it can be quite hard not to satisfy that curiosity.

There are actually people in Silicon Valley who study this stuff so as to make apps as addictive as they possibly can.

Same thing when it comes to the consumption of online content… especially when that content is not immediately applicable to your current situation.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen readers of various internet marketing blogs comment with stuff like “this is pure gold!”… or “some good nuggets in this”.

That language just shows that there is this mentality like that of gold mining. Sit there and pan the river for weeks in the hopes of finding a little nugget. It is like pulling the lever on the slot machine in Vegas (those slot machines are addictive as hell because that next lever pull is just whipping up that dopamine like crazy!)

So, the unfortunate truth is that…

Most blog readers are basically crack addicts.

Only, they’re addicted to dopamine, not crack.

And because they’re constantly on the search for the next quick hit, it kills the required patience and willingness to do the work that is ACTUALLY needed to pull off the big win.

In my line of work, this is most definitely an issue for me. When people sign up for The Lab, I want them to get results. I want them to get the big win. But, in order to do that, I have to do all that I can (in the scope of a self-guided program) to keep them on track and not distracted by outside crack hits.

It’s a tough thing to do!

But, when I laid out the Roadmap, I did a few things to try to address this:

• In the Foundation phase, I start off with some powerful exercises and training on taking control of all the distractions. It is very counter-intuitive in a training program about online business, but the goal is to clear out some of those distractions.
• The Roadmap had the ability to check things off. Just that act of checking things off feels pretty good. 🙂
• The Roadmap has “pit stops” built throughout so that Lab students will acknowledge their own progress and wins. This is the opposite of a dopamine hit. This is more like an oxytocin hit. It balances things out.

But, if you are an avid consumer of online content, let me end off with this…

There’s nothing wrong with consuming online content IF you are the one in the driver seat. In other words, if you put set time frames on it and purposely guard up from being distracted and sent off in a new direction.

I’m an advocate of “just in time learning”… where you cut out most incoming sources of info except for those few you deem worthy, but then the rest you only seek out when it is immediately applicable to what you’re working on right now.

This puts you in the driver seat rather than allowing marketers to command your attention at their will.

Your attention is your most valuable asset. Guard it.

(Oh, and seriously, schedule some time to watch that Simon Sinek video. It really is a good one.)

See ya tomorrow. 🙂