Some of you might know that April 23-29 is TV Turnoff Week. I think that watching too much TV can have a negative impact on your business and financial life. It turns out that there is research to back that up. Here are some interesting findings.
These quotes come from a nify little book called Simple Secrets for Becoming Healthy, Wealthy and Wise:
“A 1995 study showed that TV changes our view of the world and can encourage us to develop highly unrealistic and often damaging conclusions that serve to reduce our life satisfaction by up to 50 percent.”
I find it interesting that people who join direct sales or network marketing businesses are often told to go on a news fast while they build their business. Why? According to the book,
“Watch TV for any length of time and you will inevitibly come to the conclusion that virtually everyone is very rich or about to die a horrible death.”
Then it talks about an Alaskan tribe who had no TV until 1980, until one of the tribal elders obtained a set, and it completely destroyed their culture. They became greedy and wasteful. Both greed and wastefulness impact your financial fitness. Robert Kiyosaki, author of the RichDad PoorDad books, says that greed is one of the main reasons that the poor and middle class stay that way. Instead of spending their money on assets that could pay them long into the future, they waste it on things; in other words, materialism leads to financial ruin.
“A 1998 study showed that TV watching can triple your hunger for possessions while reducing your personal contentment level, by about 5% per hour of daily TV watching. “
Personally, I’m convinced that there is a connection between TV viewing and the likelihood of meeting your life goals, for several reasons. To save time, I’ll copy and paste an article I wrote several months ago on this subject. Let me know what you think.
4 Ways TV Is Bad For Your Business
Is TV hurting your business productivity? I’d like to demonstrate that watching television can actually harm your efforts towards financial freedom.
1) TV watching encourages passivity
Watching TV requires less energy and initiative than any other activity. (Did you know that while watching television, your metabolism actually lowers to a level between resting and sleeping?)
It’s obvious how this tendency towards passivity and dependence could be bad for your business. Being an entrepreneur requires creativity, initiative and a lot of work. The habit of watching TV works against those traits by making you lose the human struggle of doing nothing versus doing something. In a word,tv viewing encourages laziness.
2) TV makes you tired and depressed
Have you ever watched tv for two or three hours at a clip, only to get up from your couch in a fog, a haze, not really aware of why or how you had wasted the last few hours of your life? Did you feel tired or curiously wired? Depressed?
TV is stimulating to the nervous system but since you’re physically and mentally inactive, it’s all build up with no climax. It takes a lot of energy to succeed in a business endeavor. If you’re using TV “to relax”, why not take a nap or get some exercise? They’re both health-promoting activities that also relieve mental stress.
3) TV promotes a negative philosophy
Most of the content of television is negative and sarcastic. When you watch the news, you’re viewing tragic events that are very unlikely to ever happen to you. This creates unnecessary worry, which stifles activity.
In order to succeed in business, you need a positive attitude. You need to believe that you can achieve your goals, that you have personal power. One study of college freshman showed a link between a lot of tv viewing and a negative view of businesspeople. It’s not surprising that many success coaches in the network marketing and direct sales industries encourage new recruits to go on a “news fast” for the first 6 months of building their business. Certainly time can be better spent by working on the business, but it’s more than that. Watching the news can give you a negative worldview. Is there ever anything positive reported on the news? Good news just doesn’t sell.
During down periods, why not read inspirational books, or study marketing material in order to hone your sales skills? I’ve noticed that everyone on tv is either independently wealthy or poor and struggling. The haves never go to work, just like they never eat or brush their teeth before kissing their perfect bedmates!
And the have-nots are stuck in a cycle of debt, despair, overwork and the inevitable family problems that result. Are these extremes something you want to spend a lot of time considering?
4) Television Sucks Up Valuable Time
The average American spend 4 hours a day watching television. You’re probably exceptional and don’t watch that much, but even still, there are many more productive things you could be doing in the time that you do watch. One way to save time is to get your news online. You can read the latest headlines and click on more information and spend only 15 minutes getting the day’s news stories. Time spent watching tv is time you’re not growing your business.Why not take a moment to think about how TV may be impacting your financial future?
So what do you think?
