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Greetings all,

In this week’s episode of Ventures, my guest Moshe Engelberg and I discuss his book The Amare Wave: Uplifting Business by Putting Love to Work. From an entrepreneurial lens, we cover topics including loving customers, helping customers love your business, example case studies from a new founder perspective, and the existential purpose of every for-profit and nonprofit organization on the planet.

Check it out: The Amare Wave, love vs. war in business, and uplifting customers :: with Moshe Engelberg

Keeping up with “news”

It’s no secret that news outlets report and write in such a way to get attention and make money. Social media platforms are no different. They are all, at the end of the day, businesses like any other that are trying to attract, grow, and retain an audience.

If these businesses can get a ton of eyeballs and then sell that traffic to advertisers, then “everyone can win” in their minds. They can pay more staff to do their self-described important work to “help make the world a better place.”  

The problem is that this is hurting the world. It’s not a better place. Check out the recent article: Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity. And I’ve written about content like The Social Dilemma before. Mainstream media has essentially become social media; both practically in terms of business models and algorithms to determine content, and generally in terms of fighting for user attention and engagement.

So, if not news outlets and social media, how do we get our news?!

It’s worth taking a step back a moment and ask ourselves why we need news? What is news, exactly? Why is “news” important? Do we need to receive it hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or at all?

Obviously the answer to these questions are personal. Some people may have jobs that require them to keep up with specific news on a minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour basis. Some people may not need to consume such content ever. Others may simply “like it” for a sense of belonging, community, being a responsible citizen, etc…

However we look at it, defining your “news”, how/why you consume it, and how often you need to receive it, is not something that is broadly talked about. We are VERY habitual people and it’s easy for our brains to just keep going on a trajectory without thinking about WHY we are doing it. We can harness this to our advantage to do amazing things with compound interest, but on the flip side, it is making us sick on many levels and companies are happy to profit from it.

Entrepreneurs, let’s fix this. I’m tired of yet another well-meaning content site devolving into social media tactics to make money.

Also, this is worth repeating, please pay for content you like out there so the authors don’t need to show you ads.

Have a great rest of your week!

~Will