MBA2174 Why I Deleted My Social Media Apps

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We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon, but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to. It feels good to Geico.

For those who have been following me for some time, you know that I took a break from social media for about 18 months in 2017. This means I was totally off social media. It was off my phone. I never visited it on the web, on my computer. I literally put a post on every social media app, pinned it and said, hey, I'm taking a leave of absence. See you later. And guess what happened to my business? Nothing. It didn't affect my growth at all. Now, I want to be clear that when I say this, that means me. Omar was not on social media, but I have a team. I have people that are posting on my behalf, posting on our profiles, our team profiles, our company profiles. So the content that I want to share with the world and the promotions I want to share with the world are still happening. I'm just not involved. And I'm doing the same now. And I'm starting with, first of all, deleting all the apps on my phone. So I'm never on it on my phone and not going to these apps on my computer unless absolutely necessary, where my team needs access or something like that. Now, you might be asking, why, Omar? Why are you doing this to yourself? Isn't this bad for your business, bad for your personal brand? How are you supposed to market all that kind of stuff? A lot of the things I just mentioned is a story we tell ourselves. Like, you have to be on social media in order to be running a successful business or market your brand or your business or your products or services. In fact, we pulled all our money out of Facebook ads because they're just not doing as well as they used to. And we spent our marketing dollars elsewhere. And I'll talk about that in an episode later on this week explaining why we did this and where you can spend your money where you can probably get better, more return on investment for your ad dollars. So you need to question these things we tell ourselves. Is it really true? Are people that are highly successful always on social? Not necessarily. There's a lot of people you don't know that are doing incredible things with their business and they're not. I know them personally. But the main reason why I decided to do this is because of how much I've learned over the last few months about how these social media apps are designed. I've read many articles, have listened to many interviews and documentaries about the people that actually created Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, all of them. And I'm here to say these companies are not inherently evil. They're not trying to do things intentionally bad, but they built a monster that is actually designed to do something which is take your time and your attention. And because of that design, it has some symptoms, it has some effects on you. One person in particular that really resonated with me is Chamat Pali Patiya. Chamat was one of the senior people in Facebook. So he understands the social media world. He's now an investor, he's out of the social media world and he highly advises entrepreneurs in particular not to be on social apps. Mainly because the way these social apps are designed to program you, your brain, this is not a conspiracy theory. This is just the nature of consuming content. That's all about the short term and not the long term. It's designed to make you impatient and to want the next hit of dopamine, next hit on your post, likes, hearts, comments and to consume more and more content. There's a reason why if you have these social media apps on your phone and you say to yourself, I'm not going to use them, but you tend to use them throughout the day regardless. You got to ask yourself a question, why is that happening? It's because it's designed to do that. Now Chamant recommends if you're an entrepreneur, to get off these apps because it doesn't train your brain to have a long term view, to build for the long term future. And he jokes around and says you're the same person, your same brain. The brain that you use is deciding to postwalk waffles right now so you can get some likes. That's the same brain you're trying to use to try to build a company that's going to change the world. You can't just turn it on and off. You have to actually train your brain to be a deep thinker, a long term thinker, A person that is not trained to have instant gratification, to delay gratification. And that's what makes a great entrepreneur. And I'm dedicated to that. I want to be able to build a business and build my career as an entrepreneur so that 30 years from now I, I have something incredible that's really impacting the world, impacting people in A big way. And I understand it's going to take some time. It's going to take some patience, it's going to take some hardship. And I will become more impatient if I'm on platforms that train me to be impatient. And I said this before on the show, entrepreneurship is hard as it is. I don't need to make it hard on myself by exposing myself to something that's going to not help me out, that's not going to actually make me smarter, make me a better entrepreneur. Train myself to understand that, hey, if you want to create something significant, that's a hard problem, that's going to take a long time to solve, and it's going to require commitment, effort, time, resilience. These are things that these apps are the opposite of. It's not making me resilient. It's not giving me time. It's taking away my time. So it's a conscious effort of trying to do everything I can to meet my goal. That's my goal. Okay? And this is why I'm doing it now. I would challenge you to do it. If you are looking to try to do big things in the world, if you're trying to accomplish a big goal in your life, you want the deck, the cards to be stacked in your favor as much as possible. And I'm the first to say there's a lot of fun stuff, hilarious stuff, entertaining stuff on social media, but at what cost? It's costing me, it's costing my business. And if I need to be the leader of my company, I need to have my brain in the best shape possible. And this type of media, these social media apps, are not making me smarter. They're not making me stronger. And that's just a fact. That's just a fact. That's what the experts say. They have built these apps, and I can either acknowledge it and do something about it, or I can acknowledge it and just willingly say, hey, I'm gonna do something that's gonna hurt my chances. And that's just the reality. That's just the truth I had to tell myself. And it's hard. It's hard to tell yourself, hey, you gotta do something that's a little bit uncomfortable and not so great and not so fun and not like everybody else, to achieve your goals or to help you achieve your goals. And I can tell you when I've stepped away from social media for long periods of time, I was so much more efficient. I had so much more time. I was thinking clearly. I had less anxiety, had less worry. I Wasn't thinking about the end of the month. I was thinking about the end of the decade. I was thinking about how the actions I take today will affect me and my business 10 years from now. Now I'm trying to think even further, 20, 30 years, because great things can be done if you have the patience, the resilience and you're willing to put in the time and the effort, the long term effort to make it happen. Now I know you might be think, well, Omar, what about your friends and family? How do you stay in touch with them? You know, that's what social media is all about. And I hear you and I will tell you that, listen, my closest friends and family that really love me will understand what I'm doing. They understand why I'm doing this. They'll support me, right? Secondly, I'm not deleting communication apps. I can still message them, right? In fact, I'm not deleting WhatsApp or Facebook messenger because that's how I communicate with a lot of my family members and I have a huge family. But it's not like an endless feed where I just see a bunch of media constantly. Luckily, these are separate apps and I don't need to have Facebook to have messenger and I can delete Facebook as an app and same thing, WhatsApp, there's an end, right? Like once the messages are read, it's over. Okay, I close it. But with Instagram, with TikTok, with Facebook, there's no end. You can constantly scroll and see more and more media, more and more information, more and more posts. So it's an endless vortex. Okay? So I can still communicate with my family. So I have no excuse. I can still stay in touch with people. They can message me, they can find me. I'm just not exposing myself to something that I know is hurting my chances.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

To wrap up today's lesson. Everything that has helped me as an entrepreneur, I look back at the things that really have helped me over the course of the years as an entrepreneur and were always things that are long format content that had nuance, that allowed for context. There weren't short clips of 5 seconds and 30 seconds and then 1 minute. If you want to really understand something and learn something, it might take some time. It might take 30, 40 minutes, an hour, five hours, 10 hours, a few days. And I've said this before on record that I feel like the best value I've gotten over the course of my whole career as an entrepreneur in terms of content are books. Books are incredible value. And it takes a while to read a book, right? It will take you 10 hours to read a book. Sometimes shorter books, three or four or five hours. How many of us have that attention span to sit down and bang out and read a book in one sitting so that it actually is solid in our head in one moment? I definitely saw a correlation between how much I was on social media versus how much attention span I had to just sit down and read a book for longer periods of time. I caught myself one time where I was like, why am I getting tired when I'm reading? And I've just only read 40 minutes? Normally I could read an hour or two or three, no problem. And I'm enjoying it. It's great. Paperback, Kindle, didn't matter. I was fully engaged. And that has something to do with our knee jerk, trained reaction that we've been trained on social media that like, hey, what's next? What's next? Let's move on. This is enough information of enough of this thing right now. Let's go and see something else. And this is the opposite of being present. This is the opposite of being present in the moment and just saying, hey, I'm reading a book right now. I'm enjoying this moment where I get to sit down and learn something new, delve into this new topic and learn about this author. This is what I'm doing now, and this is great. Who cares about what's happening next right now? I'm just doing this because when you're thinking about what you're doing next, you're not enjoying the moment. You're not living in the present. You can't be in two states at once. Online courses, whether they're live or on demand, seminars, conferences, these things have really enriched me in a big way. Even videos and podcasts that are 10, 15, 20 minutes long, that's enough to convey an idea and really make you think about it. These social media platforms are not designed to have you stay on one platform, place one thing for 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 minutes. No. Why do you think that? It's because they want to keep you scrolling so you can see more ads, so they can make more money again. It's not inherently evil. It's just how the business model is built. So I just wanted to share with you why I decided to do this. To delete my social media apps and, you know, step away from social media and allow myself the best chance to be the best entrepreneur I can and acknowledge the fact that I have a responsibility as a leader of my team. I I need to lead them in the best way possible. So I gotta be the best person I can. And I'm hoping that I'm able to make decisions like this consistently to increase my likelihood of success. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you don't miss an episode and get access to over 2,100 episodes in our archives. Go ahead and hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There's tons of great marketing that you or your team or a hired person, a firm, a freelancer can do for your business to spread the word more effectively, more efficiently than you will ever do sitting on social media. Trust me, I've tried it and the results don't lie. I'll talk more about that in Friday's episode about why I pulled out all our money out of Facebook ads for alternative ways to market that I'll share with you on Friday. I I'll see you then. And I'll see you tomorrow. Of course. Q and A Wednesday I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012. Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.