For the last week, Wiet and I have been recording daily nuggets of wisdom on business and investing.
We post them on our Instagram page (that you can find here), and soon, we’ll be broadcasting them on Facebook, Youtube, and LinkedIn as well.
Our goal with these nuggets is to compress highly valuable and actionable information into 3-minute snippets that you can watch on the go when you’re brushing your teeth – or any other time you have 3 minutes of free time.
We started doing this because, throughout the week, we get a lot of questions from readers like yourself:
What should you invest in, how should you go about it, how do you scale your business, how do you attract new clients, etc.
These are the kinds of topics we address, and we highly encourage you to check them out (it’s totally free – and it’s here).
In addition to that, we have started Free Coaching Fridays – a 30min session on Friday at 2pm where we answer any questions you have on business and investing. You can join us on our Facebook page, and simply ask us anything. We’ll answer – and once again, it’s totally free.
One of the questions we addressed this week was one of the most common that we get – “if I want to get started investing, what should I be reading regularly?”
The question makes sense.
Now, more than ever, there are countless sources of information out there to give you the latest news on markets, currencies, politics – you name it.
And it’s so easy to get sucked into an avalanche of news that never stops.
I wrote to you at the end of last year that in the age of information, clarity is the investor’s new superpower.
In other words, one of your biggest assets as an investor is your ability to filter out valuable information from all the noise out there.
That means differentiating between the information that serves you and the rest which is either irrelevant to you – or complete garbage.
In the process, it’s important to remember that almost all news companies exist for one purpose only: to keep your eyes glued to their pages and channels.
When news companies make money from advertising, you know that it’s their objective to keep you reading and scrolling and watching for as long as humanly possible.
To that end, they use clickbait headlines and titles, dramatic language, exaggerations – and more importantly, constant updates.
There is always something new, they say, that you MUST stay up to date with, they say. And to make you feel like they are the answer to your previously non-existing problems, they use fear.
When you’re fearful, you’ll keep coming back for more. And that’s why watching the news is depressing.
However, for the purposes of investing, 99% of the information you’ll find on these websites is completely useless (and the remaining 1% you can find somewhere else).
And that’s why I recommend that you stay away from almost all traditional news.
As an investor, it isn’t always so much about what happened, but more about why it happened, and what that means for the future.
Luckily, there are alternatives to the 24/7 news outlets out there, and those are the ones I suggest reading instead.
Some of these are compiled by people who actually understand the topics they’re dealing with.
To me, The Economist is one of the best sources of actual, relevant information out there. It’s a magazine released every Friday, and it’s very much worth your time.
They also have a 2-min version you can read every morning on your phone called Espresso if you need to know the 5 biggest stories of the last or next 24 hours.
And if you’re mindful about it, a well-curated list of people to follow on Twitter can also give you more insights than any journalist ever will – and in our video, we talk about some of these.
Again, we encourage you to follow our Livestreams every day where we share more insider tips like this one. I look forward to seeing you there.
To freedom,
[See you tomorrow at 10 AM Brussels Time on Instagram and Facebook for our daily LIVE nugget of wisdom, and on Friday at 2 PM for our Free Coaching Friday where we answer any questions you have about building a business and investing!]
Alex Monéton & Wiet Vande Velde
Founders, Beyond Entrepreneurs
