Your entire life will change when you realize you need more action, not information.

The most productive thing you did today was probably the biggest reason you're stuck.

Image credit: Midjourney

Information overload is the new pandemic.

We’ve become information junkies. The internet has overloaded us with information. Then social media 10X’d it. And now AI slop has 100X’d it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m drowning.

If I get one more email from someone who wants me to read their god damn 20-hour book, my head is going to explode. Books from unknown authors are dead. Why?

No one can afford to risk 20 hours of their time on a book written by an unknown person. So they will read books, but only if they already trust the author.

This is what information overload has done to humanity. It’s sad.

The false god is that gathering more information will solve our biggest problems. That’s clearly a lie. We have more information than ever and simultaneously more problems than ever. The simple life has been replaced with the complex life for most people. Every channel to someone’s brain is noisy.

Brain rot is everywhere too.

So the goal for you must NOT be to endlessly collect information.

The hidden problem of information gathering

You’re addicted to collecting information and probably don’t know why.

Writer Sahil Bloom simplified the problem for me:

Dopamine from information gathering is a dangerous drug. It’s the dopamine from reading, planning, or learning, but never doing.

I wasn’t lying when I said we’re information junkies.

Just like junkies are addicted to heroin, we’re all addicted to gathering information because it gives us the drug of dopamine. Dopamine runs our brain's entire reward system. That’s why you’re addicted. It’s biological.

You can only defeat the addiction with an understanding of what’s going on, and a ruthless level of discipline to stop consuming so much info.

When you collect information, you feel like you’re making progress.

The information you collect gets added to a plan, strategy or set of actions you intend to take in the future. The problem is plans always get f*cked up by life.

Everything sounds like a good plan until you get punched in the face, sued by a stranger, or fired from a job you spent 10 years working at.

The entropy of the universe guarantees your fantasies of plans and future actions will never come true. Yet most people can’t see the information-gathering mirage. They genuinely trust themselves and the world that chaos won’t find them.

But chaos finds everyone. Even me.

That’s when people say, “Sorry, I didn’t take action because I got sick or my mother died.” The response is innocent. But quietly underneath their reply is the belief that “Now you’re surprised what just happened to me and will let me off the hook for not doing what I told you I was going to do.”

That translates to “I’m special.”

But whatever unique form of chaos you experience isn’t special at all. There’s a list of about ten problems that will find their way into your life – and they happen to all of us.

Collecting information and expecting to implement it later on is a fantasy that’ll destroy your life the same way cheating on your partner with a hooker will.

The danger of gurus

Gurus are everywhere.

Open any content platform and you’ll drown in opinions. All of them seem like they’re only trying to help. The challenge is everyone’s strategy to solve a problem is different.

If you listen to too many gurus, you end up confused.

I shouldn’t admit this but it was a big problem for me. Between 2014 and 2019 I made little progress on my goals. And my business went nowhere.

I just kept listening to too many people. One guru told me to build a Wordpress blog. Another one told me to write on Medium dot com. And another one told me to focus on writing a book.

None of this helped me. I only felt more and more confused. So I did nothing. Perhaps you can relate.

The best type of information most people are unaware of (caution)

My entire life changed when I stopped consuming more information.

In my corporate job, I learned “agile methodology.” I won’t bore you with that sh*t, but the main takeaway was to run experiments using minimum viable information.

I started publishing essays on different platforms. I wrote short-form content on LinkedIn. I launched a few test products. Instead of consuming information, I became a creator of information. I used the information I created from my experiments to learn what did and didn’t work for me.

In the case of Medium, I rose to the top 1% of the platform. I figured out things about writing essays that no one else knew. I had essays get tens of millions of views. And I made $70K a month.

Turns out I had enough information to start. And I could learn more from iteration than conflicting gurus.

There is one difference though. Instead of paying for more information like before, I started paying for personalised help contextual to my situation. This combination has become deadly. It’s enabled me to get 1B+ views on my content.

This part is controversial as hell

Up until this point it’s all cookie-cutter and kumbaya. You’re probably thinking, “That Tim guy is a standout guy.”

Hold your horses, cowboy.

I must let you down. I’m not here to blow your whistle or tell you what you want to hear. I’m hear to see you change. That means I gotta share the hard part.

Learning from experience and experiments is good. It’s level one stuff. But there’s level two. It’s where the learning goes from a 5/100 to 999/1000. Ready?

Real learning comes from taking risks, embarrassment, facing uncertainty, and dealing with failure.

The problem with information gatherers is they’re stuck in a comfort bubble. They think they’re learning. They’re taking a few small actions, but their progress is nonexistent. So they consume more information.

That’s not the answer.

As an anti-guru, I’ve learned real learning only comes from circumstances involving negative emotions. I learned nothing in business until I lost everything. I learned nothing about investing until my digital wallet got hacked for $1.2M – in the years preceding, I made more than $6M from that loss.

I didn’t learn about love until I went through multiple painful breakups and my wife-to-be exited the car in the middle of the highway and never returned.

I didn’t learn about the music industry until I worked as a DJ in a strip club and got played by nightclub owners.

I didn’t learn about banking risk until my client was caught at the ATM with $100K in cash attempting to launder drug money. And none of us learned about the power of governments until we were locked in our homes in 2020 because of a bat virus.

Here’s what you don’t want to hear:

True learning happens when something bad happens. Avoiding bad outcomes or not taking risks is the real barrier to wisdom.

I love to see people fail or get rejected because that’s how I know they’re learning.

Most information you consume presents the ideal circumstances. But when you act on information, you experience the opposite. Nothing is ideal. Everything is f*cked. Your balls are on fire every day.

One negative emotion is all it takes

I spoke to a lady from Japan the other day.

She told me how she didn’t want to get help with her business because she bought a blogging course in 2018 for $500 and it didn’t work out great. So she's been stuck for 8 years — paralyzed by a single bad experience.

This is how most people live.

They expect everything to work out. And when one tiny failure happens or they experience a teaspoon of negative emotions, they stop everything and usually never get back on the horse and ride again.

Real learning is a series of negative emotions that you must be willing to experience.

This is what it all boils down to for you

The solution Sahil Bloom suggests is this:

Stop looking for more information and start acting on the information you already have. Get your dopamine from action.

When your dopamine comes from the right place, your brain’s reward system is working for you, not against you.

You probably have enough information to take action already. Use a minimum viable level of information to take some actions. Learn from those and add personalized help along the way so you’re not trapped in a bubble of your own awesomeness.

Taking action decreases confusion because you see what works for yourself. And without evidence something works, you won’t invest the time to repeatedly do it. Because you can see me do it, but you’ll still think, “Yeah, but will it work for me?”

You gotta act to find out. And your own experience is always going to be the most trustworthy in a world of shonky gurus and bad AI answers.

Oh, and go out there and sh*t in your pants so you can experience the thrill of embarrassment and your whole day not going as planned.

Be honest — what's the one thing you already know you should be doing, but have been "researching" for way too long? Drop it in the comments. No judgment. Just accountability.

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PS

Get this.

My YouTube channel has driven $1M in revenue.

The channel is tiny

But the profit is huge.

Will reveal more of the “how” soon.

For now, take a peek at my latest YouTube video.

(See if you can guess how I’m doing it)