TV: Your secret competitive advantage

I created a very successful business during the dot com crash of 2001. It still brings home 7 figures. That figure is declining, so I am learning internet marketing to a) use IM techniques to boost that business and b) establish a safer stream of income than my day job, which relies on an uncooperative third party for its success.

Since I was young I realized something that still escapes many of us. Every hour you spend watching TV or surfing the web is an hour you are not applying to your new career. (Thanks, Mr. Obvious!)You may know this, but until you internalize it you will not understand the life-changing flip side to that fact: you can use your free time to launch a new career while your potential competitors are watching reruns of "CSI". Every hour they watch TV is an hour you can be surging past them in the market.

Do the math. Americans watch something like 30 hours of TV a week on the average. Now, of course you don't watch that much TV, because you're an entrepreneur--right?--so let's say you're watching a mere 10 hours a week.

How much HTML would you know if you devoted those 10 hours a week to your website? What if you spent those 10 hours reading Cialdini's "Influence" and taking notes? How much content would you have if you spent 10 hours working on your autoresponder series? What if you used those 10 hours to put up a WordPress site and try selling some of the giant moldering masses of PLR material you've socked away?

I don't have a TV*, so while you're watching "American Idol" I am learning Drupal and developing my next info product. While you were watching TV in the 90s I was writing one of the first web servers (never released; it wasn't nearly as good as the one Microsoft starting giving away for free in the midst of my product development) and writing reviews for magazines, one of which led to a nice career at... Microsoft.

While you were watching TV in the late 90s I was working my tail off at Microsoft, then coming home studying database programming at night. So 9 months after quitting Microsoft, when I bought the website that still supports me I could make intelligent decisions about whom to hire and how to design the software. I'm not a great database programmer. But I know enough that I don't get ripped off when I oversee a project.

Your watching TV gave me a competitive edge over you. You know every episode of "Seinfeld" backwards and forwards, but I know PHP and JQuery and am learning Django tonight. (I've learned enough Drupal already that I can supervise the chap heading up my Drupal project and gently nudge him back on course when he claims something can't be done as I suggested.)

Use this. Turn the tables on your competitors. Every hour they watch TV could be giving you a competitive advantage if you start moving your career path forward instead of complaining that nothing good is on.

Take an hour or two off from watching reruns tonight. Bust out that HTML book, download FileZilla, and start messing around with your HostGator account. Do a squeeze page, even a bad one, and know that even if you don't watch "CSI: Poughkeepsie" you will have moved your career path forward in a tangible way.



* A bit of a lie. I do have a TV, but with no cable connection nor any ability to watch broadcast TV. I buy DVDs, which I watch on the average about 4 hours per month. I also have a learning disabled son who watches tons of "Veggie Tales", "Bob the Builder", and "Dirty Jobs" (go figure) while I work on the laptop.