Why the News Sucks and is Destroying your Brain

Part One: Of Running A Successful Kickstarter Campaign

How I'm building a huge audience to launch a new product with Kickstarter.

We want to bring a new Rugby Bricks product to market, but we don't have enough cash on hand to cover our launch costs.

To get around this problem, we will run a Kickstarter campaign and pre-sell a bunch to our existing audience and customers.

I've previously run a few of these campaigns, and the biggest driver of success is how much attention you can generate.

So we need to capture as much social attention as possible before we launch the campaign at the end of September. We'll do this by connecting with relevant journalists, influencers, newsletter owners and anyone else in the world of rugby with an audience.

Here's how.

I've created a spreadsheet that I'm updating with the contact details of people inside the Rugby World.

My goal is to fill this sheet with as many connections as possible.

So first, I'll tap my network to see if they know anyone who might be able to help us - using this script:

""[Friend's name],

How are you? What have you been up to lately?

We're launching a new product for Bricks; a grip sock designed explicitly for rugby to fit inside boots. We will do this via Kickstarter to raise funds to get it over the line as the outlay is $40,000, and as a start-up, that is a bit much for us!

We want to get it out to as many people as possible, so I'd love to ask if:

If you'd be able to share this when we get closer to the time?

Do you know anyone that you could introduce us to who has an enormous audience of rugby players, coaches or supporters that would be willing to share the launch?

Looking forward to catching up soon, and I appreciate you taking the time to read this.

Cheers,"

I've also asked multiple friends and whanau to send the same

email out to their networks.

As of writing, we have 32 people on board with a combined audience of over 1 M+ rugby fans. We'll try to get to 10 M by launch day.

These campaigns need a ton of attention, and it's only because of our strong network that this will be possible.

Notes: Start building your network as soon as possible you never know when you might need to call on people for help.

Why I Keep An Issues List - How To Keep Your Mind BS Free

How I stopped getting distracted by random business issues

Every week new problems pop up in my business - that's just par for the course.

The hard part is dealing with them effectively.

It's too easy to let this random stuff clog up my mind and distract me from my real work.

So instead of letting these issues take up space in my mind, I dump them all in a document and return to them later.

I call this my issues list - and I've got one for every venture.

I review these lists weekly and only pick the top one or two things to address and then carry on.

Over time a lot of the stuff resolves itself - saving me a lot of unnecessary work that I would have done if I had tried to address everything immediately.

This method helps me operate proactively rather than reactively - I barely even notice stuff now that once upon a time would have derailed my entire week.

I used to think something bad would happen if I ignored these problems - it turns out that most of the time nothing happens.

Notes: Time will tell you which problems need your attention.

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Why The News Sucks

Here is why the news sucks.

You've probably heard some version of the phrase 'finding signal amongst the noise.'

As workers in the information age - finding the right signals might be our greatest challenge.

Signal, in this case, is useful information, whereas noise is useless information.

High signal information is like a non-fiction book published 100 years ago, with ideas still widely followed today.

Noisy information is... you guessed it, the news.

It's not a stretch to say, as information workers, the more valuable the information we consume is, on average, the better we will do.

So less news is probably better for us than more news.

News is also heavily biased towards negative events that prove meaningless over time. Some psychologists say the negative effect of loss is up to 2.5 times greater than a positive one from gain.

And believe it or not - when the news tells us a politician did bad - we feel loss. When the news reports - a business has been naughty - we feel loss.

The short-term effect of these negative hits on our nervous system can be high blood pressure. The long-term effects can be much worse, like; chronic stress, memory loss, loss of brain plasticity and even brain damage.

Basically, the news sucks and has little value. At best, it's a form of mild entertainment; at worst, it's destroying our minds.

Notes: Don't watch the news.