MBA929 Off Social Media For 4 Months. The Results So Far.

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Practical business lessons for the real world every day. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn what I've learned being off social media for the last four months. I'm going to be sharing my results so far with my off social media experiment. At the end of September 2017, I decided to take a break off social media until the end of 2018. But it's been four months and I want to kind of give you an update. A lot of you have been asking me questions about this. Why did you decide to do this and what are some of the results? What are some of the things you've learned or experienced by being off social media? And through my takeaways you can ask yourself is this something you want to do? Something that you want to experiment to see if you can get other things done if you're off social media? Cause I'll talk about that. It's all about a time exchange. Whether you spend 30 minutes or three hours a day on social media, that's time spent. What are you getting out of it? What can you do instead of that? But also has My business suffered, has my brand suffered by not being on social? We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, at the end of 2017, I decided to just take a break from social media. That includes posting on social media, being on social media, reading social media, spending any time whatsoever. Now, the reason I decided to do this is because I realized I was spending a lot of time reading comments, replying to people, being on threads, and just generally defaulting to going to social media when I had a few extra minutes here or there. Of course, they were not a few extra minutes. Those extra minutes became, you know, half hour, an hour. But not only was it just generally time consuming, it was also consuming my brain, my attention span. I was always thinking about something and I wasn't fully engaged in whatever I was doing. Even as something as simple as going out for dinner. When Nicole went to the bathroom, my automatic reflex was to pull out my phone and check social media. So I deleted all the social media apps on my phone and made sure I didn't visit any social media on my desktop. And it's been a little over four months now. And the first thing I've noticed in the past four months is how much time I was actually spending on social. You don't realize how much time you spend by just opening up Facebook and looking through what's on your feed, just. Just scrolling through, looking at images, videos, people's comments, people's rants. You spend so much time because it just sucks you in. It's never one or two minutes. It's always at least 10, 15, 30 minutes. And some of us, we even put in air quotes. This is working when really just buying time or wasting time because you're trying to avoid the task you really have to do. Now, I understand that some people have, you know, Facebook groups where they, you know, cultivate community and they're answering questions and things like that, and that's great. But the problem is that once you're on the platform, you can't just do that. It's very hard because you have that feed, you have the notifications, you have the messages. So you have to kind of weigh the positives and the negatives. And for me, I'm starting to feel the negatives outweigh the positives. Now when I say that, I'm recognizing the fact that there are positives, but you have to be critical and be mindful of those negatives. For me, those negatives are really really intrusive. So what are some of the negatives that I've enjoyed not having to deal with? Number one, negativity. Jim Rohn has a great quote that says, stand guard at the door of your mind. Meaning you can't just have anybody put anything they want into your head. And that's really what happens when you go through your newsfeed. And I found in my experience, most of my newsfeed was people complaining, ranting, being controversial, whether it's political or non political, whether it's ranting about what's going on in their business or something like that. And yes, there are some positive things and there's some really helpful things along the way, but the majority of it was stuff I don't want to put in my head. Stuff that's going to affect me throughout the day. Think about it. Whatever you're going to put into your brain will affect what you can produce. If I'm putting in a whole bunch of negativity in my brain through looking at the newsfeed, through looking at people posting certain rants or videos, it's really hard for me to block that out and then move on to whatever I have to do with my business and be super positive and be creative and be useful. So that's the number one thing I've gained in the past four months, is I've gained control over what goes in my head. Now I've replaced that stuff with reading more books. You know, I love my Kindle. Anytime I have some free time, I open up my Kindle and start reading or I listen to an audiobook. Just think about how many times you switch on social media, on your phone or on your desktop. Cause you're trying to kill a minute or two. So that's number one, I'm more mindful of what goes into my brain. Number two, the first few weeks when I was doing this experiment, I noticed when my brain would switch and say, oh, let's go check Facebook. Oh, let's check Twitter. And when I call myself and said, wait a minute, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm not checking anything anymore. I don't have that on my phone, whatever. I just go back on task. I would go back onto what I was supposed to be doing and thus I would be finished with my work faster and I'd be done earlier in the day. Which means I had more free time, more time to do things for myself, for life or hobby that you have. You know, I'm picking up the piano, I'm learning how to Play the piano this last few months, and it's been a lot of fun, but it's a challenge and it takes consistency. So now that I'm finishing things earlier in the day, I have some time to. To put in 30 minutes, an hour of piano practice, which is an absolute joy. Cause I get to step away from my work and do something creative outside of what I'm doing in my business. Allows my brain to do other things other than what I'm doing all throughout the day. What is another takeaway, and this one was kind of interesting. A lot of people say that social media is great for connecting with other people, but I sort of beg to differ because I really feel like it's just a platform for people to voice their opinions in a lot of ways. I don't feel that it's a communication tool. Why? Because I've been gone for four months and no one even cares. No one even notices all that communication I've had for years on social media. No one's like, hey, where you've been? So it's not really about communication. It's about people really communicating their ideas out in the world. People that really want to communicate with me can just email me, right? But only a few people actually reached out to do that. And those are the people I really want to speak to because they actually care. They actually want to make the effort. So. So the world doesn't change when you're off social media. People keep doing what they're doing, and it's not like anybody's gonna miss you. So a lot of us, we think, oh, I can't get off social media. Cause what if people say, oh, where you've been, you've, like, fell off the map? You know, I didn't get any of that. And, you know, I'm still communicating with my community. I'm still sending him emails. I'm still on this podcast. I do live webinars. So, like, I exist in the world. But this idea that, oh, you're off social media, people are gonna think that you vanished from the earth. No, never happened. Now, one of the things I wanted to do in this experiment, and obviously this experiment's not over. It's just is. See, if being on social media really affects your business in terms of marketing and your brand. Now, let me be super clear here. Our businesses have their own pages and they're maintained by our team members. But my personal brand, my name, Omar, I haven't really been on social and the big platforms that I was on, I'm still there But I just haven't been active is Facebook and Twitter. And I really haven't seen a significant difference in terms of marketing and the effects of social media or not being on social media. The traffic to our sites haven't really changed much. Our SEO hasn't really changed much. And our convergence to sales from social media hasn't changed either. Now it's only been four months and during those four months it was the holiday season. So I think it needs more time to really get a conclusive result. But so far, no real effect, no real effect on the business. Now there is something that I feel like I am kind of missing out on. I really don't know what's happening with some of my friends in terms of their business businesses, if they're launching new products, if they're working on something new. But I have to say it's probably more of my distant friends or I would say my business acquaintances. In fact, the people that are closest to me in business, my close friends in business, I've gotten closer to them because I'm making more of an effort to be closer to them because I want to, you know, maybe invest in those relationships more. So I'm speaking to them more on the phone or on Slack or over a Skype call. I know more what's going on in their business. I am communicating with people more on email and, and having more meaningful relationships now. They're not as wide. You know, I think I can count these relationships on two hands. But I'm going deeper with these people. I'm really establishing more of a relationship with them now in terms of the wider network of the people. I know I'm a little bit out of the loop. I don't really know what's going on. They might have posted on social media if they've launched a new podcast or a new product. And I just don't know. And I would love to help them, support them, things like that, and I would definitely do that if they reached out to me personally. But in the meantime, right now, during this experiment, I'm just gonna have to live with the fact that I won't know that I won't be able to kind of congratulate them or be a part of that process. But again, this is the wider network rather than the intimate group that I'm trying to establish deeper relationships with. So maybe it's a good trade off. We will see.

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A few more things I want to cover before I wrap up Today's lesson. This was a big challenge for me to drop all social media and maybe, you know, a year and a half for you is too long. That's my experiment. You may want to just do a month or even just a week. Nothing's going to happen. If you get off social media for a week and just see how it goes for you, you really have nothing to lose. It'll also be a good test of your own personal willpower. Now, I've discussed this experiment with other entrepreneurs and they've said, you know what? I really like social media. I really enjoy it. So this is not for me. Well, my reply to that is I didn't say I hated social media. You know, I enjoyed it too. It's not about what I enjoy or not. It's about how beneficial is it to myself as a person or as an entrepreneur or to my business. Are the positives more than the negatives? You know, I love video games, so you might love video games, right? But is playing four hours of video games a day more beneficial or negative for you and your business? You can enjoy it. That's great. But not everything we enjoy is great for us, right? And that's what my experiment is really about. Is that is it really helping my business or is it hurting me as an entrepreneur, as a person and the greater good of my business? So far it's been okay. The results haven't been incredibly shocking. You know, my revenue hasn't tripled or anything because of it. But I do feel more focused, I do feel less anxiety, and I do feel kind of free when I see everybody else on social media on their phone when they're out and about. You don't really get to enjoy the moment if you're always preoccupied with what's going on in your pocket. And now I sound like a little bit of a Luddite right now, but that's what I'm experiencing and my job is to share that with you so you can learn from my experiences. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, if you love our podcast, let us know in an iTunes rating and review. Really helps us get more exposure when you leave us a review so other people can see what you think of our show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's really good to run these experiments. Whether it's social media, whether it's more reading, whether it's what you watch on tv, whether it's health and wellness, exercise and diet. You gotta try different things out to see what's good for you. And I love going through these experiments because it allows me to use data and real experiences rather than hunches. You can't deny what you see with your own eyes, what you really experience. Once you have that information, then you can make a solid decision on what's good and what's not so good for you. I hope that helps. That's it for me today, but I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. So Q and A Wednesday where a listener asks, how do I create my customer avatar? Who is this person? Do I just make it up or what happens? How do I know what my target market is? No problem. We're going to cover in tomorrow's episode. I'll check you, then take care. Of.

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