TV streaming apps make money from stealing your attention. Their goal is to monetize your wasted time and distract you from your dream. They’ve been successfully doing this for years.

I heard a lady the other day in the office explain in exquisite detail about a show she was binge watching. She watched two whole seasons during one Saturday, last week. A few weeks later I heard the same lady complain about how she felt that she was unhappy with her job and deserved to be paid more.

Alarm bells went off in my head.

All of the hours you are spending watching TV shows is the time you need to do that thing that you’ve always wanted to do. Maybe you wanted to go back to university, or do yoga, or learn how to invest or spend time with your family.

Stop yearning for these things and go and do them! House of Cards can wait. You don’t need to know who dies, or cheats, or has a baby or get’s shot or hit in the face by a piece of salami. It’s not that important guys and girls!

Your habits are making you broke.

The lady in the office is broke and wants more money because she hasn’t put the hours or the effort into creating something of value.

This is a must if you want to stop being broke and make more money. Your TV show habit is what is making you broke, not your job or your side hustle. Complaining about money is not going to fix the situation. Only you can control how much money you make.

No external force is to blame. You are! Pull your finger out and turn something you have created into cold hard cash. There is a ton of ways to make money and there are a million guides on the Internet to tell you how. My advice: pick something you are already passionate about and in love with. It will make the task 1000 times easier.

It’s the single biggest thing you are giving up.

In your life right now, your addiction to TV shows is the single biggest thing you could do to change your life. It’s that precious time that can help you take back your freedom. The feeling you get when you have time back in your day and make progress towards a goal you care about makes you feel ridiculously good.

You won’t understand this feeling though until you try. You need to see how much better your life is without TV shows. They don’t tell you that when they advertise next weeks episode because they want your attention.

“When you give away your attention like a side of salad with a Big Mac, your life passes you by. It allows you to numb the pain of all the goals that you never started and may never achieve”

Suddenly days turn into weeks and you get stuck on that hamster wheel you begin to call life. Life is not a hamster wheel though – it’s this amazing journey of ups and downs. Real life situations are ten times better than any TV show storyline will ever be.

What causes it?

The reason you are attracted to the dumb stories on TV shows is because your own life probably sucks. You haven’t spent the time to understand what you are doing and assess where you are at. Once you know what you want, the clarity you get becomes a superhuman power.

That power allows you to resist the temptation of binge watching Netflix when you get home from work. I think the other issue is that when we look at our friends, they are all doing the same. This means that we feel left out when we don’t watch the latest episode of some new TV show.

We also tell ourselves the lie that everyone else is doing it so it must be okay. That’s true, but everyone else is mostly struggling at life, not living their dream and upset deep down with how their life is going. We’re all so good at hiding the person we really are.

“A lot of what we do is done for show because our lives have become the very TV shows that we are addicted to. We unconsciously think that we can be actors and pretend everything is great just like they do on the TV shows we watch”

Change it now!

So hopefully you understand the problem you have been caught up in. It’s now time to do something about it. I want you to log on right now to your TV or computer and delete your streaming membership. This is going to hurt, but in the short term, think about the money you are saving.

The only way to win this fight is by taking action. Once you’ve deleted your subscription, commit to doing 14 days of not watching any TV shows. Write a list of five things minimum that you are going to be doing instead over the next 14 days.

Make sure some of those activities are fun and motivate you to stick to the plan. If I were writing that list for myself, I would put down go-karting. Not sure why, but it’s fun and motivates me to bring some friends with me and have a good time.

There’s one more rule.

TV shows are not the only problem which is why there is one more rule: No freaking wasting time on social media either. The fake storylines of your favorite TV shows cannot be replaced by the fake lives people live on social media. Not all social media is bad but if you’re addicted to TV shows, then you need a break from it.

In case you have forgotten, the goal here is to do activities that you’ve been putting off which will make you fulfilled. The second goal is to be more social with your loved ones and with your friends. I’m positive that if you do this for 14 days, you’ll have an addiction to it.

This new addiction is going to be one worth keeping. So that’s it. It’s time to act ladies and gentlemen. No more lying to yourself and avoiding what you really love doing. We all know TV streaming, deep down, is not your life goal so let’s stop living like it is. Peace.

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