Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something

Introduction

Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something

It’s not a manifesto against technology. It’s not asking you to throw your smartphone in a lake, cancel your subscriptions, and move to a cabin. It’s not written by someone who thinks the internet was a mistake or that your life would be better if you went back to writing letters by candlelight.

As of the time this book was written, I have over fifty books published, a ghostwriting business, a book coaching practice, a newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers, and a full-time operation built on digital tools. I use AI for research, drafting, and editing. I publish through digital platforms. I communicate with clients through apps and messaging software. I have never once suggested that any of this was a mistake. The argument of this book isn’t that technology is the problem. The argument is that passivity is the problem, and that the tools most people are using primarily as an audience are the same tools others are using to build something.

In 2014, I unplugged my cable box and put it in a closet. People have been citing that fact ever since as evidence that I’m anti-technology. They have it backwards. What I did that night wasn’t turn off technology. What I did was stop being an audience member and start being a producer. The screens stayed on. The relationship to them changed entirely.

There’s a line that runs through every digital medium. On one side of that line, you’re consuming. On the other, you’re contributing. The screen is the same. The platform is the same. Your posture isn’t.

You can use YouTube to watch other people show skills you’ll never practice. Or you can use YouTube to teach the skills you have to an audience that can’t find them anywhere else. You can use social media to scroll through other people’s edited lives and feel quietly inadequate. Or you can use it to build the audience for work you’re making. You can use AI to have it think for you, write for you, and make decisions you were capable of making yourself. Or you can use it to amplify your own thinking.

Most people are on the consuming side of every platform they use. Not because they’re lazy or stupid. Because the algorithm has one job, and that job is to keep you there. Every feed, every recommendation engine, every autoplay feature is engineered to convert you into an audience member and keep you that way. The consuming side is the profitable side. The contributing side is where you stop being the product.

I didn’t become productive by giving things up. I became productive by changing what I was doing with the same hours. Before 2014, I spent roughly a thousand hours a year watching other people’s creative work. After 2014, I spent those hours producing my own. The outputs aren’t the result of unusual discipline or talent. They’re the result of redirecting a thousand hours a year from the consuming side to the contributing side, consistently, for a decade.

You don’t need to write fifty books. But if you’re reading this and you have something you’ve been meaning to make, the reason you haven’t made it’s not that you lack the ability or the ideas. It’s that a thousand hours a year are going somewhere else. This book is about where they’re going, why, and what happens when you redirect them.

Table of contents

Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something

• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Confessions of a Reformed Couch Potato
• Chapter 2: The Line
• Chapter 3: The Four Pillars of Digital Destruction
• Chapter 4: Your TV isn’t Your Friend
• Chapter 5: Breaking News: The News is Breaking Your Brain
• Chapter 6: Welcome to Your Personal Echo Chamber
• Chapter 7: Smartphone Zombies and Other Modern Wildlife
• Chapter 8: Social Media: The Greatest Antisocial Invention Ever
• Chapter 9: Pajama Professionals and the Death of Real Meetings
• Chapter 10: The Inbox That Never Empties
• Chapter 11: Netflix and No Chill
• Chapter 12: When Your Highest Achievement is a Digital Badge
• Chapter 13: The House Always Wins
• Chapter 14: Instagram Travel Doesn’t Count as Going Places
• Chapter 15: The YouTube Rabbit Hole
• Chapter 16: The Machine That Thinks For You
• Chapter 17: The Podcast That Ate Your Walk
• Chapter 18: TikTok – The Attention Destruction Device
• Chapter 19: The Couch Potato Diet
• Chapter 20: Raising Digital Natives Who Remember They Have Bodies
• Chapter 21: Conversations with Humans
• Chapter 22: Swiping for Love in All the Wrong Places
• Chapter 23: The Digital Debt Trap
• Chapter 24: The World Is Designed Against You
• Chapter 25: The Male Trap
• Chapter 26: Adventures in Going Outside
• Chapter 27: How to Be Productively Lazy
• Chapter 28: What Are You Building?
• Chapter 29: Make Something
• Chapter 30: Move Your Body
• Chapter 31: Build Real Friendships
• Chapter 32: Learn a Skill That Takes Years
• Chapter 33: Be Somewhere Without Documenting It
• Chapter 34: Build Something Financially Real
• Chapter 35: Use Technology, Don’t Be Used By It
• Chapter 36: Find Your Community
• Chapter 37: What Intentional Looks Like
• Chapter 38: A Year Later
• Chapter 39: Your First Thirty Days
• Chapter 40: Escape from the Matrix (No, Really)
• Conclusion
• Further Reading
• About This Series
• Enemies of You Series
• Index