Ignore the noise and work on what matters to bulldoze your competition. With the invention of the Internet, there are unlimited opportunities for brands to contact you about their product. For the media to give you fear mongering news rather than communicate factually correct information.
Companies, brands, and people compete for your attention. While there are times when it is worth your attention, most of the times, it distracts you from your own goals. It’s important to stay the course and never forget where you are trying to go to. It’s expensive in terms of time to sidestep and invest your time elsewhere.
A person on a mission doesn’t let others influence them to change the direction of where they are headed to. When you are walking and someone taps you on your shoulder, you continue to walk and force the other to walk with you. You don’t let others dictate your actions, you’re in full control.
This applies to so many things in life. Your finances, relationships, life goals, business, or family are prone to influence the most because you care about these things the most. You have to ignore the noise and continue doing what’s been working for the past years.
The worst thing you can do is go backwards and ruin all of the progress you made already. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, I lost $90,000 in March 2020. What! That was almost 11 months of work that I lost in a single month. That wasn’t a good feeling.
However, I didn’t let that distract me from reaching my goals. I kept going and stayed the course. It made all the difference in the world. It’s been hitting all time highs one after another.
There’s So Much Noise in the World
There are eight billion people alive in this world. As a result, they’re bound to make some noise today and tomorrow no matter where you live. As humans, we don’t like to sit still, we have to be doing something. Therefore, it’s only natural that the world can only get louder.
All the noise that will be made today and tomorrow isn’t even including the recorded noises that are already out on the internet.
The noise is 10 million times louder with the constant notifications from our phones that are competing for your attention. Think about the coronavirus pandemic. The media made it seem like the world was going to end and that we would have to farm and grow chickens and pigs for our food source. That’s wrong.
It’s been over one year since that elusive fear mongering piece of news came up. If you followed the guidelines and wore a mask, practiced social distancing, and avoided large crowds, there’s little chance you got the virus. Ignore the noise. The life principles that you employed and used are more than likely evergreen.
If you have an opinion about anything, there’s always someone out there who hates your guts and disagree with you. That’s the noise that you need to ignore. As long as you’re not supporting really bad things, your opinions are just fine. Learn to ignore others who are telling you to question yourself.
With the invention of the Internet, it’s not hard for someone to have a bad day and to take it out on you through snarky comments on the Internet. It’s made it easier than ever. It’s just distractions that are trying to fight and compete for your attention. Nothing more than that.
Things to Ignore the Noise On
The overarching theme is that emotions are the enemy. Strangers who are master manipulators will try their very best to use your emotions for their own agenda and purposes. When you can control your emotions, you are in the driver’s seat. No one can mess with your line of thinking and sway it one way or another.
The three things below are exactly the type of things for you to click, look, or think away from and get back to driving to your final destination. Stand your ground and don’t be manipulated by others who’re just looking to get rich from you.
1) The News Articles You Read Are Emotional
In Genghis Khan’s biography, his biggest weapon was not the biggest spear, sword, catapult, or army. It was his psychological tricks to intimidate his opponents into submission. He would have multiple men start multiple fires in the middle of the night so the enemy would think he had a huge army to overtake them.
They were scared before the battle even started. In reality, Genghis Khan’s army wasn’t that big. What can we learn from this? Messaging is much more powerful than brute force. The pen is mightier than the sword because people’s actions are driven through messages that they hear or read.
News articles take advantage of our emotions and use it against us. When you read an article and it shifts you away from your baseline level of feeling, then that’s when you need to ignore the noise. It isn’t anything that adds value to your life, it’s just meant to get more clicks to their articles and get ad revenue.
2) There’s No Substance
When the messages you read or hear has no substance behind it, that’s when you recognize that it’s just noise and you ignore it. Constructive criticism is very good, but only if there are factual information that supports that criticism. Actually understand the other person’s incentive before coming to a conclusion.
When you google “Should I accept a company counter offer?” there is a flood of articles out there telling you not to do it. That’s so misleading and false. Who is writing these articles? Recruiting firms who need to make a buck from your decision to change jobs.
When you realize there’s no substance, then you just have to ignore the noise. I accepted a counter offer before and it worked out just fine. My prior boss accepted a counter offer twice and it worked just fine for her as well. Understand the other person’s incentives before coming to a conclusion.
3) Ask Yourself, Will This Matter in 10 Years?
People dive and devote a lot of their time and attention into reading politics. Yes, you should focus on politics to the point where you understand the candidates proposed policies so you can vote. However, you shouldn’t go beyond that unless it’s making you more money or you want to go into it as a career.
There’s little chance that the President of the United States actually has a significant impact to your quality of life. He or she certainly has the potential to dramatically change your life. However, over the long term, it really doesn’t matter that much.
In 10 years, your life will not have changed that much because Donald Trump was president from 2016 – 2020. In 14 years, your life will not have changed that much because Joe Biden was president from 2020 – his last day. If it won’t impact your life for the next 10 years, don’t give it more than 10 seconds of thought into it. Ignore the noise.
How to Ignore the Noise
So now that you’re convinced that ignoring the noise is the best way to go, how do you go about doing it? One way you can ignore the noise is by SMASHING that social share button to the right for your friends to better their lives! Not only can it help your life, it can dramatically help your friends as well live a better life.
Share the information for everyone to learn from!
In seriousness, let’s go down over on how to avoid distractions and plow through your goals.
1) Block Out a Time Just for Yourself
To avoid outside influences that are distracting yourself from your own goals, block out a time where you don’t check your phone or the internet. It’s just a time for quiet reflection on what you want to do. It could be to go for a walk in a quiet park on a Saturday afternoon.
Or it could be to walk around your apartment just doing nothing but thinking. This is one of my personal favorite things to do. Every so often, I walk around and go over what I want to do and if I am taking the proper steps to get there.
It’s a way to evaluate where I want to go without any outside noise taking up any space in my mental capacity.
2) Ignore Everything Else, No Exceptions
Fully disconnect and disengage from the outside world. It’s not just about the internet and the news, it’s everything. Is someone calling or texting you? Is someone knocking on your door? When I write a blog post, I shut out everything.
I go to setting on my Mac and shut out any notifications from my texts or messaging apps so I don’t lose my train of thought. My notifications don’t just show up in text but there’s sound that comes with the notifications. It’s difficult to focus on the things that matter if there are constant interruptions throughout.
Meditating also helps in clearing your mind. I’ve been meditating for a solid month now and it’s been helping in ways I hadn’t considered.
3) Don’t Constantly Change Things
To ignore the noise, do things once and stick with it over the long term. Do you want to achieve financial independence? Then all you need to do is save and invest over the long term by buying a broad market index fund. This principle hasn’t changed and will not change in the future.
Although, the disclaimer is that I’m not a licensed financial professional nor is this investing advice.
You should figure out what strategy works and actually stick with it over the long term. Even if things happen that causes you to question whether you should change or not. Give it a good timeline for an evaluation period. A year, two years, or five years. If it hasn’t worked out by then, then you can look into changing your strategy.
Not until you’ve given it a good chance to see if you’ll be proven wrong or right.
4) Make a Decision When Your Emotions Aren’t High
When COVID happened, it’s painful to see your portfolio go down by 10% in a single day. Your palms are heavy and your emotions are at the highest point they could ever possibly be. That’s not a good time to make decisions. The best time to make a decision is when your emotions aren’t that high.
When you’re sitting in a relaxed state and when you don’t feel the need to rush to a conclusion so quickly. That’s when you should be making big life decisions. Not when there are outside forces that are influencing you to do one thing or the other.
Your worst decisions happen when you are the most stressed and your best decisions happen when you are the most calm. Ignore the noise and stay the course.
5) Select Your Information Carefully
There are many things in the world that can tug at your emotions. If you’re in the bottom half of the world, then income inequality will boil your blood. If you are passionate about politics, then the Biden presidency will anger or elevate your mood. Whatever it is, select your information carefully to ignore the noise.
Headlines serve as a way to bait you into clicking the article that news organizations are writing about. An enraging headline is the best headline. It’s not written based on what their actual personal views are, it’s written based on how their readers are going to react.
When I look at any type of message that I see, the first question I ask is do I want to read and learn more about it? If the answer is no, I promptly leave the article and go on with my day. I resist the temptation to read into it further because it doesn’t do anything positive for me. You can do the same.
6) Sight is the Enemy
If you look at your portfolio very often, you have a high chance of changing and influencing your decision making process. Portfolios, by definition, change every business day that the market is open for. A 1.5% volatility isn’t uncommon to see.
However, don’t use your psychological tendency to believe in what you see against yourself. Instead, only check things once over a long period of time to gauge your success. In blogging, the metric that bloggers obsess about are their page views. I have a bad habit of checking them often, myself.
However, that’s because I’m in the beginning stages where one extra page views make a meaningful impact to me. On the days where my blog gets a large amount of page views, I have an easier time looking away. One extra page view isn’t that exciting.
That’s how you can ignore the noise. When you look away from things that have a high chance of influencing the important decisions that you have to make.
All You Have to do is Ignore the Noise
Success isn’t just about doing things that allow you to win. It’s about avoiding things that allow you to lose. You can do everything right and still lose. If you avoid the things that make you lose, then there’s no way you can lose. One way to do that is to ignore the noise. That’s it, really simple.
There’s no complex problems you have to solve. If people can only reach success through these means, then I would be in a world of trouble and hurt. I just do the same things every single day, no matter what happens in the outside world. Day in, day out without fail.
It’s allowed me to amass a $300,000+ net worth as a 26 year old. Consistency is what made all the difference in the world for me. I just focus on things that I can control and ignore the rest. The principles that I’m applying to now will pass the test of time well into the future.
That’s great news for you, as well. You don’t have to be a genius in order to build wealth, reach financial independence, and quit the rat race. There’s so much outside distractions in the world today that’s made it easier for information to reach your fingertips and for you to consume.
Block out a time for yourself where you are truly at peace with your thoughts. That’s when you can make the most value-adding decisions that soars your life to heights you’ve never seen before. Meditate. Clear your head. A cluttered mind is a bad mind so you need to avoid it at all costs.
Your attention is very valuable to you, which means it’s also valuable for others who are fighting for it. Stay the course and just ignore the noise.
How to Ignore the Noise List:
- Block out a time just for yourself
- Ignore everything else, no exceptions
- Don’t constantly change things
- Make a decision when your emotions aren’t high
- Select your information carefully
- Sight is the enemy
