Scott H Young

The most popular articles on this website are also the posts with the most negative comments. It took me awhile to realize this, but hate mail can actually be a sign you’re doing something right. Truly awful stuff gets ignored. It’s only the ideas that are new, involve risks or push boundaries that get hate mail. Those are also the ideas that change the world.

If everyone supports your goals and dreams, you probably have no real ambitions in life. If they laugh at you, mutter something sarcastic or send you hate mail, you might actually do something important.

When I started this website two years ago, I didn’t get a single vote of confidence. Most of my friends and family were ambivalent, and others were completely negative. Today, I received thousands of comments of support and many people who were skeptical have given me their full confidence.

Don’t Feel Bitter About the Lack of Support

It’s easy to become bitter if you don’t have any support for your ideas. You may rationalize that other people are jealous, uncaring or out to sabotage you. I don’t think any of these are actually the case.

I feel the real culprit behind a lack of support is that they don’t have access to your vision. Even the most empathetic people don’t have access to your brain. They can’t think your thoughts. They can only look at the digested pieces of your idea after you try to communicate it. And, unfortunately, the most important ideas are difficult to communicate.

Even if the other people can see your end result, they can’t see the motivation that will carry you there. Unless you have a spotless record for achieving the impossible, its too easy to see the obstacles but not your drive.

Don’t blame other people for not supporting you. It isn’t really there fault, and it can often be a sign that you are doing something original and important. Instead, put your focus on proving your idea. Go out and put it into practice. Don’t sit around and wait for an invitation.

Stop Asking for Advice

There are many areas of life where getting advice is important. But don’t ask for advice when you want support. If you have a goal or dream, your subconscious has already made the decision to pursue it. Asking for advice once that decision has been made can only dull your resolve to move forward.

Don’t ask for advice on your goals. If you want to start a business, don’t ask other people whether you should. They can’t tell you what your desires are. The only useful time to ask for advice is on implementation. Once you’ve made the decision to pursue the goal, then it makes sense to ask people for tips on how to do it.

Asking advice for a goal is really just asking permission. You want someone smarter than you to validate your desires by saying they are realistic. When you ask permission to go after an idea, you’re giving up power to the other person.

The critics might be right. You might be a half-wit whose ideas are impossible. You might be too incompetent to execute them. You might fail. But failing is better than sitting on the sidelines, always unsure about what you could have done.

I’ve received my fair share of hate mail in the two years of operating this website. Some are well-thought and genuine critiques. Others are gut-reactions to something that challenges their assumptions. I’ve even received personal attacks and borderline threats from people passing by the site.

Over time the hate mail becomes dwarfed by the support. Once you start bringing your ideas into reality, people who were previously skeptical become supportive. If everyone could share your vision it wouldn’t be yours.

How often do you check your e-mail, Facebook or web stats? Whether you’re a blogger or just discovering the internet, the answer is: probably too much. Information addiction is a disease in the blogging community, and unfortunately I know a lot of good people who are users. I can imagine the mental rationale goes a bit like this:

1. Measuring is good.
2. Therefore, more measuring is better.
3. Therefore, I should check my Digg ranking, AdSense earnings and web traffic every five minutes!

There are two reasons why chronic information checking is a bad idea. The first is the obvious one. If you’re constantly checking your web statistics, how are you going to get any real work done? Last time I checked, viewing your Google Page Ranking adds no value to anyone, so it shouldn’t consume your workday. (This applies for you offline information junkies too!)

The second, subtler reason that information addiction hurts is that it makes you shortsighted. This is the consequence I’d like to focus on, to explain why I went from checking my website stats every day to only once each week.

Day Traders Don’t Make Money

Investing in stocks is about patience and long-term growth, not jumping on the latest pick, according to finance writer Ramit Sethi. Constantly switching between investments to make a quick buck doesn’t work. You may end up losing money when you account for the brokerage fee.

I made a similar realization about running this website about six months ago. At the time I had been checking my website stats once per day. Not as much as some addicts, but it still took about 5-10 minutes of my time. Eight minutes doesn’t seem like much over the course of 24 hours, so I didn’t worry about the time investment.

What really triggered me to stop the daily updates was seeing what it was doing to my morale. I’d have a days where earnings went up and days when they plunged. On the plunge days, I’d start questioning whether I need to take a new direction with my writing the next week. On the up days I’d try to mirror the successful posts, looking for another hit.

It took some time, but eventually I realized: this is insane.

Focusing on daily ups and downs wasn’t just taking eight minutes from my life, it was causing me to be shortsighted. Instead of focusing on long-term strategies for providing value, I was focusing on insignificant fluctuations. There was a bigger cost to information addiction than loss of time.

Kicking the Habit

When I made this realization last summer, I started a 30 Day Trial to check web stats once per week. At this rate, I had enough time to react if a silent error was causing problems with the website, but I didn’t succumb to addiction.

After pursuing a restricted information diet, I’ve found it much easier to focus long-term. When I wasn’t getting constant feedback, my attention could shift to strategies that would build the website over months and years, not days and weeks.

Since going on my initial information diet, here are a few other areas I’ve been considering putting a limit on:

1. Weight. I usually weigh myself when I go to the gym. But weight ups and downs can change based on how much you ate the day before or how dehydrated you are. Could a once-per-month weigh in be a better approach?
2. News. This might be blasphemy for some people, but what would happen if you only read the news once per week or once each month? You would still get the same information, just with a time delay to prevent overreacting to the emotionally provoking media.
3. E-Mail. I only check e-mail once each day. It’s easy to get addicted to your inbox.
4. Investments. Instead of checking stocks once a day, what about once a month? If you want to think long-term, you need to make your information flow long-term.

What are some information streams you’d like to limit?