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Hey Partners,

This week a hired a new assistant to help Todd & I full-time.

Hopefully I can finally get some of my back-end systems tighter and make this email list 10x better. Hiring is always a pain in the butt. Everyone sells you the dream but most people are full of the brown stuff. I prefer to just trial someone and see if they have the skills.

The most useless thing on resumes I skip over is college degrees. Means nothing in modern business.

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Here's my most shared tweet this week (click to read all of it):

Tim Denning @Tim_Denning I bet my life-savings Pieter Levels will become a billionaire by 2029. Not because he currently makes $195K/month with zero employees from his laptop. Because he found the secret formula for online business (it’s so basic I couldn't believe it): 9:17 PM • Aug 19, 2024 435 Retweets 4965 Likes Read 141 replies

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Stop Wearing Headphones Everywhere, It Will Change Your Life

A whole new generation is about to deal with massive hearing loss.

And the worst part is they don’t even know it. Like sheep, most people now wear headphones everywhere.

When the Apple AirPods went mainstream and you no longer needed to have any cords plugged into your device, wearing headphones everywhere became far too easy.

It’s tempting to never take headphones off because a phone call could come through at any minute. Or you’re about to jump on a Zoom meeting so you may as well keep your headphones on.

If only people knew what headphones were about to do to them.

How a constant high-pitched noise ruined my life forever

I was a drummer for 10 years and spent 12 years as a DJ in nightclubs.

I also studied sound engineering for 4 years at college. On the first day of class I entered the room full of 250 other wannabe music producers hoping to become the next Dr Dre.

I expected we’d go straight to the mixing board and start recording stuff. But the lecturer came out & presented a 3-hour lesson on hearing damage.

It sent chills down my spine. It still does when I think of this moment.

He went on to describe a condition called tinnitus. It’s where you experience some hearing loss and your brain tries to compensate by dialling up the volume of certain frequencies.

What you’re left with is a high-pitched ringing in the ears. Once you get this condition it never goes away. It’s incurable.

In 2020, the world got hit with a bat virus and we got locked in our homes. I was working in banking. I spent most of the day in Zoom meetings. When I wasn’t at work I was writing online.

To get into a flow state, I learned to play music from movie soundtracks or to listen to binaural beats while I was writing. This helped sharpen my focus and block out noisy distractions.

I quickly began to hate my wired headphones and bought a pair of fancy Sony wireless ones. They were so comfortable I could wear them all day.

So I did.

I didn’t play loud music in my headphones because I knew from my studies that this was dangerous.

But I did have my headphones on use for at least 10 hours a day. Some days it was more like 14 hours. I’d even keep them on when I watched TV at night to make movies feel more alive.

I thought I was so f*cking smart.

A year into being locked at home due to the bat virus, I went to bed one night with ringing in my ears. It didn’t worry me. We’ve all been to a live music event before and come home with ringing in our ears.

It’s no big deal. The high-pitched noise goes away within 24 hours.

But this time it didn’t go away. A week later it was still there. 4 weeks later I still had the noise every night.

It was a real shock.

I couldn’t sleep. I panicked about it. I couldn’t handle any silence because it made things worse. But I hated listening to music, too, because I knew that would make the problem worse.

The medical industry knows something we don’t

I looked up online the greatest hearing experts in Australia.

They cost a fortune. I booked an appointment with every one of them. When I saw the first doctor he asked me a lot of questions.

I told him about my background in music and wearing headphones. He said something that took my breath away:

He explained that regular exposure to noise produced predictable results. Hearing loss was a certainty. Then he hit me with this line:

I went and saw the other doctors. They all said the same thing to me as if I was stupid and didn’t know this obvious outcome would occur.

When I told them about wearing headphones for long periods of time, they had zero surprise that this fast-tracked my hearing damage.

Headphones have a speaker in each side. This speaker is right up against your ear drum. It’s closer than any other noise source. Is it any wonder that a speaker that close to an ear drum all day is going to hurt it?

Kind of obvious when you think about it.

Why you must stop wearing headphones everywhere

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1. Unplug from the matrix

“The Matrix” was a fictitious movie.

Yet now we actually live in the online world 24/7. We never seem to disconnect. Someone is always talking at us through our headphones. That’s one big reason we can’t think for ourselves anymore.

Walk into the gym. What you’ll see is a bunch of lifeless zombies. People are there to exercise, but most are distracted by their phones and what’s playing through their headphones.

They do one set of an exercise and then are distracted for the next 20 minutes. This isn’t exercise. It’s a waste of time. They’re not working out anything, yet this is normal.

Present-moment awareness is needed for something like a fitness habit.

2. Headphones are rude

People can’t come and talk to you when you have headphones on.

When someone at the office walks into an in-person meeting with headphones on, it’s a sign they’re anti-social. Their headphones quietly scream “F off and don’t you dare talk to me because I’m too cool.”

Headphones make you unapproachable.

A long-lost friend or former colleague could be shouting your name from the other side of the road and you wouldn’t hear. These life-changing random experiences are dead. The outside world becomes closed off.

What a huge missed opportunity. May as well stay home all day and play Playstation. There’s no difference.

3. Turn off information overload

A big use case for headphones is to listen to audiobooks or podcasts.

But you don’t need more information. You need more implementation. Too many conflicting opinions confuse you and make you give up on your goals. All these people talking at you just clogs up your brain.

4. Trust your own wisdom in your head

Everyone wants to tell you how to act or how to think.

If all you do is have voices playing through headphones all day, you unconsciously become a product of other people’s ideas.

You’re piss-easy to manipulate too.

Once I took the headphones off I could hear my own thoughts again. Sometimes they were dark. But for the most part, my mind had a lot of wisdom to share with me. I began to trust myself again.

I could finally hear myself think.

5. Listening to music all day is a pleasure. And too much pleasure is bad for you.

Some people can’t imagine a world without music playing constantly.

That says a lot about them. If you need music to distract you all the time, then there’s a good chance you’re trying to escape something or a feeling.

Instead of dealing with the tough experience or tragedy, you drown it out with music so you don’t have to think about it.

I love listening to music too. But when I find myself needing music the same way I need oxygen, I know something is wrong.

Too much pleasure turns into addiction.

Refraining from too much musical pleasure makes the times when I do get to listen to music more special and enjoyable.

We have more dangerous addictions than we realize or like to admit.

6. It’s hard to be creative

Creative people need time to think.

We need blank space. And we especially need to embrace being bored, where our biggest breakthroughs happen. It’s impossible to do this with headphones on all the time.

Now, when I go on a walk, I like to leave my phone at home and just listen to nature. It’s healing. And it makes my writing 10x better for it.

Final Thought

Wearing headphones all day has been normalized.

No one has stopped to think what this does to our hearing. If you could hear the high-pitched noise I hear 24/7 you’d never wear headphones again.

And if you could experience the clarity of thought I have because I don’t have Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss playing in my ears all the time, you’d see why I’m telling you to stop wearing headphones.

I’ve now installed speakers in my home office. I only allow myself to listen to things in the open air with speakers at a moderate volume for short spans of time.

Rethink your relationship with headphones. A no-headphone life is extraordinary. Try it for 30 days.

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PS -- Ditching the headphones has also allowed me to get more writing done.

(At superhuman levels, some say).

What about you? Are you actually getting any writing published?

​Take my "gut check" online writing quiz here.​

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