Daniel's notes on Stop Reading The News

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easily digestible and extremely damaging. The media is feeding us titbits that taste palatable but do nothing to satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike books and well-researched long-form articles, the news cannot satiate us. We can gobble down as many articles as we like, but we will never be doing more than gorging on sweets. As with sugar, alcohol, fast food and smoking, the side effects only become apparent later.

As soon as a piece of news is in the world, it becomes public knowledge and you will not enjoy an advantage in knowing about it. You will, however, gain a huge advantage over your peers and competitors if firstly you have a deeper awareness of the background context and secondly, if that context is not widely disseminated. And you will only reach this awareness through intensive reading and thought.

Perhaps we can leave the selection process to the professionals? How good are journalists at tracking down and filtering important events? The first internet browser appeared on 11 November 1993 - probably the most significant invention of the twentieth century, after the atomic bomb and the discovery of antibiotics. Do you know what that browser was called? Mosaic. If you didn't know the answer, you have a good excuse: it didn't make the news. What were the lead stories on German television that day? Party funding was being reformed. The Israeli prime minister had a meeting with Bill Clinton. The Pope had fractured his shoulder. My point is that neither journalists nor consumers have much sense of what's relevant.

The relationship between relevance and media attention seems inverse: the greater the fanfare in the news, the smaller the relevance of the event. Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the items journalists don't report on are usually the very things you actually want to know!

To the media, what's relevant is anything that grabs attention. This is the racket at the heart of the industry's business model. The news they supply us is irrelevant, but it's sold as relevant. 'The relevant versus the new': it's the fundamental battle facing us today.

News organisations want you to believe they're giving you a competitive advantage. Plenty of people fall for this. In fact, consuming the news is far from a competitive advantage; it actively disadvantages you. If it did genuinely help you to get ahead, news journalists would be the highest earners in the world. But they're not - at all. It can be hard to assess exactly what makes people successful, but we do know with some certainty what hinders them, and the plethora of news titbits is definitely on the list.

For the most part, you'll find out about truly relevant events by reading good books. After all, non-fiction books are basically just ultra-long, elaborately planned and researched articles. Of course, books don't appear on the day something happens. But this doesn't matter - vanishingly few events are time-sensitive for you. What we want is context and consideration, which is what you get from books - even if it arrives a few months or a year late.

The legendary investor Warren Buffett uses the wonderful term circle of competence. Anything inside this circle is an area of expertise. Anything outside it is something you don't understand, or don't fully understand. Buffett's motto is as follows: 'Know your circle of competence and stick within it. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.' Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, is living proof of this thesis. He has said of himself, 'I'm no genius. I'm smart in spots - but I stay around those spots.'

Organise your professional life rigorously around your circle of competence. This radical focus will bear more than monetary fruits. Above all you'll save time, because you won't keep having to decide where to direct your attention. Knowing your circle of competence is your tool, enabling you to divide sources of information into what’s valuable and what’s not.

Over the course of your life you will modify your circle of competence. You may even add extra areas of interest. In these cases, creating a deep knowledge base by reading textbooks and completing online courses, reading long articles and talking to people in the know is imperative.

These days - with very few exceptions - you'll only find professional success in a niche. The greater your knowledge and the greater your ability within that niche, the greater your success. If you're the best in the world within your niche, you've made it. This is related to the 'winner takes all' effect. Simply put, you have a choice: nerd or loser.

With a sharply defined circle of competence, it will be easy to decide what information belongs in your brain and what belongs in the rubbish. Let's say you're a heart surgeon. Pertinent scientific journals will be an area of focus for you. Perhaps also leadership magazines and books, if you lead a team. Everything else you can safely ignore. You don't need to know whether one president shook another one's hand. You don't need to know whether two trains crashed somewhere in the world. Your brain is already full. The more you cram it with junk, the less room there is for the information you genuinely need to know.

A not-insignificant number of people who see a plane crash on TV stop flying for a while - even though these events are extremely rare and do not justify such a fundamental shift in behaviour. Surely it's enough to be aware of this fact, I hear you say, and bear it in mind as we consume the news? Wrong. We can't compensate for this tendency to overplay gripping stories with deliberate contemplation and sensible assessment. Our brains are too weak. They can't cope with the distinction. Even bankers and economists, who have tremendous incentive to assess risk realistically, aren't able to do so. By now you'll have realised that there's only one solution: disconnect completely from the news. Don't try to outsmart your skewed perception of risk. Just get rid of it.

There was a terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008. Terrorists killed 166 people. Imagine that 1 billion people focused their attention on the tragedy in Mumbai for an hour on average: they followed the news and watched various commentators babbling about it on TV. 1 billion people being distracted for an hour equals 1 billion hours of distraction, more than 100,000 years. The average global life expectancy is 66 years. In economic terms, then, consuming the news “wasted” 2000 human lives, more than 10 times than died in the attack. In a sense , the news organizations, became the terrorists’ unwitting accomplices!

We ought to try and understand the 'generators' underlying these events. We ought to be investigating the 'engine room' behind them. Sadly, shockingly few journalists are able to explain these causal relationships, because the processes that shape cultural, intellectual, economic, military, political and environmental events are mostly invisible. They are complex, non-linear and hard for our brains to digest. This is why news corporations focus on the easy stuff: anecdotes, scandals, celebrity gossip and natural disasters. They are cheap to produce and easy to digest.

Bad news is perceived as more relevant than good news. Negative information has twice the impact that positive information does. In psychology, this is called negativity bias, and it can be observed in even one-year-old infants. They respond more sensitively to negative stimuli than to positive ones. Adults are no different. A stock falling by ten per cent makes us twice as unhappy as a stock climbing by ten per cent makes us happy. Negativity bias is innate.

Living healthily takes willpower. The willpower to think clearly, work productively, eat nutritiously and keep your body moving. Unfortunately, willpower is depleted as stress increases. This leads to procrastination. You replace unpleasant but important activities with unimportant ones. You may, for example, substitute a trip to the gym with surfing online news sites. Now we're in a vicious cycle: consuming the news leads to chronic stress, stress saps will-power, and a lack of willpower makes us more likely to spend longer online, which in turn leads to more stress and further depletes our willpower.

Take the financial crisis of 2008. A whole poisonous cocktail of circumstances was responsible for the collapse of the financial system. In hindsight, this all seems so clear. It gives us the illusion that these crises are comprehensible - and predictable. This is called hindsight bias.

The shorter the news report, the more dangerous it is. News has to be extremely short even as it tells a story. This can only be done through a brutal process of simplification. No matter what happened - a straightforward bicycle accident or a worldwide financial crisis - it will only ever be attributed to one or two causes. Nothing will be said of the dozens of other causes, the interplay between them, or the retroactive effects playing out between the event and its causes (intensifying or dampening effects). In this way consumers are given the illusion that the world is simpler and more explicable than it actually is, and the quality of their decision-making suffers.