Why I Took a Break From Social Media

I recently decided to delete all of my personal social media accounts. I felt like I was spending way too much time on them and that using them wasn’t really adding any value to my life. I think the thing about social media is you need to be totally honest with yourself and think “Am I just being a consumer, or is using this platform benefiting me?”.

Let me explain.

Someone who is using social media in a positive way would be an individual who is using platforms to connect with likeminded people. In this instance, social media is wonderful as it allows you to form relationships with individuals who think the same way as you, that you might not have ever had the chance to connect with without it.

Another example of using social media in a positive way is if you run a business and post content that directs leads to your business. Or if you post educational content to share with your followers.

Someone who is using social media in a negative way would be an individual who is only really consuming content. In this instance, most of the time spent on the platform would be spent scrolling mindlessly.

In my case, I was telling myself that I needed to keep social media for my business and to share educational content, but in reality I was barely posting. I was also using the same account that I’ve had since High School, so most of my followers were not even potential customers/clients, they were just peers and acquaintances that for the vast majority of them, I don’t talk to or haven’t talked to in years.

The only positive thing that social media was bringing into my life was memes that were shared with me by some of my friends! Now I love a good meme, but keeping my social media accounts for only this reason was too big a temptation and I found myself mindlessly scrolling way too often.

What really pushed me to finally get rid of them was I remembered something that one of my first mentors shared with me in 2012. I was 17 years old and playing basketball competitively. He gave me a CD called "The Blueprint to Success” by Eric Thomas The Hip Hop Preacher. He’s a motivational speaker that essentially came out with an EP so that his talks and philosophies could be shared globally to new audiences who maybe wouldn’t be able to go listen to him speak.

Probably the most memorable excerpt from this EP, was when Thomas was explaining that highly successful people weren’t really that much smarter or more brilliant than the average person, they just used their day more productively or had a better grip on their 24 hours. He then went on to explain that he studied these individuals and found that they were all waking up extremely early in the morning, essentially giving them a head start on the competition!

He came up with the hypothesis that your success in life directly depends on how you use your 24 hours as every one is given the same daily time regardless of race, gender, social or economic status.

Think about it… if the average person wakes up at 8am, and you wake up at 5am, that’s a 3 hour head start… 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year… that works out to 1092 extra hours a year or 45.5 extra days! Providing you are using this extra time effectively, that is a massive advantage over the competition, essentially an extra month and a half!

Thomas explained that once he started waking up earlier on a daily basis, his life began to change for the better… going from a high school drop out to earning tens of thousands of dollars every time he did a lecture.

Fast forward 10 years to 2022 and I caught myself thinking back on this philosophy and came to an epiphany. I realized that in today's society, getting that same edge on the competition and maximizing your 24 hours is so easy because all you have to do is get off social media. Way easier than waking up at 5am if you ask me!

In my client assessments I always ask them to share their average daily screen time and I know that a lot of my colleagues do the same. I see an average of 4-6 hours per day and have seen upwards of 10! Think of how much you could be doing with that time… Pick up a new skill, read books, learn a new language, start a side hustle, the opportunities are endless!

I challenge you to do an audit of your day. Ask yourself where you want to be in life? Are you serving your highest potential? Do you complain that you don’t have enough hours in the day? See how much time you are spending on Instagram, Netflix, Snapchat, Facebook, etc.

I know that for me it wasn’t enough to just consciously decide to not use these platforms as much, I needed to get off them entirely to break the habits and routines that I had with the activities.

We all have the same 24 hours in the day… How are you using yours?

Live Virtuously.

AB