Aug 29, 2025 8 min read

🎯8.29.2025 - Distraction vs Direction: Set Your Path to End-of-Year Wins

Today's media distracts us with dramas beyond our control, instead of showing us actionable insights for achieving our goals

S3T PodCast Aug 29 2025

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🎧 Listen here or on Spotify.

Happy Friday and welcome to the S3T Labor Day edition!

⏳ Time is tight – We’re past the halfway mark of the year; now is when focus determines whether 2025 goals are achieved or missed.
📰 News has narrowed – Media coverage concentrates on a few personalities or controversies, ignoring the breadth of meaningful developments.
📚 Warnings long ago – Thinkers like Walter Lippman (1922) and Chomsky/Herman (1988) foresaw the manipulation of public opinion via mass media, now supercharged by ad-driven platforms.
😡 Emotion over insight – Outrage, scandals, and spectacle are optimized for clicks—crowding out useful signals needed for sound decisions.
🧠 Toxic effects – Skewed media diets erode focus, fuel stress, and push individuals, teams, and organizations toward reactive choices instead of purpose-driven progress.
🔍 Missed opportunities – While noise dominates headlines, valuable signals (scientific advances, new models, skills, local opportunities) are sidelined.
🛠 A better strategy – Prioritize primary sources and value-creators (researchers, builders, practitioners) over pundits; diversify inputs with credible data and technical insights.
🌱 Education, not agitation – Choose information that builds knowledge and capability; ignore noise to reduce anxiety, make better decisions, and unlock growth. Leverage curated S3T resources to help you build your own list of topic sources of insight (links in the newsletter below).

Recent academic research confirms what many of us intuitively sense: the information landscape is becoming increasingly concentrated, repetitive, and focused on outrage rather than actionable insights.

Is your media consumption driving you to learn and succeed—Or lose focus and burn out? How to regain your focus and finish strong in 2025.

an hourglass sitting on top of a wooden table — Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya / Unsplash

Now is the time when focus matters most

We’ve crossed the halfway mark of the year—school is back in session, budgets are in review, fall is just around the corner, and for many, the window to deliver on 2025 goals - personal or organizational - is rapidly closing. It’s the season when focus matters most.

So today I want to share something vital that is going to help you really hone your focus, achieve what you want to achieve and finish strong in 2025. You've been working hard all year and I want to give you something that will help you make the most of your time and energy you've invested.

Have you noticed the concentration of "news"?

Every week I plow through the headlines of the top finance and tech publications. What's interesting is - across so many publications - how small and limited the news has become: The focus is always on the same 1-2 personalities, 1-2 companies, 1-2 situations.

In spite of millions of companies, projects, breakthroughs, challenges, lessons learned, valuable insights, forwarnings etc, there is this myopic focus on an extremely limited set of topics, that for the large part also happen to be the least helpful - or presented in an unhelpful and incomplete manner. They are either things we can do nothing about - such as disasters in distant regions, or non-issues we should probably just ignore...like this week's hub-bub over Cracker Barrel.

Business newspaper article — Photo by AbsolutVision / Unsplash

What to understand about today's media

In 1988 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published a book called "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" In it, they warned that media platforms would become highly effective tools for managing the beliefs and opinions of the public.

This concern was first raised by Walter Lippman in his 1922 book "Public Opinion" where he coined the phrase "the manufacture of consent" with 2 assertions:

"the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough"
thanks to "psychological research coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner."

As someone said, the bones of the future are visible in the present. Even though these books were written decades ago, they accurately describe what is unfolding today - turbocharged by advertising driven revenue models. And what is having a very toxic impact on our ability to focus in a meaningful way on meaningful work.

Emotional triggers vs useful actionable insights

In today’s information economy, news has become highly concentrated, not around what is most useful or noteworthy, but around what is most likely to capture emotional attention. Platform owners, driven by advertising models, optimize for clicks and emotions—not insight.

The result?

Scandal, outrage, and spectacles are prioritized.
Meaningful developments are eclipsed.

This concentration doesn’t just skew public discourse—it undermines decision-making, performance, and mental health in organizations. Executive teams, bombarded with hype driven headlines make premature investments that serve vendor margins better than shareholder value. Individuals get caught up in taking sides in debates over technologies, politics, or situations, spending valuable time generating more heat than light, and more stress than insight.

Toxic preoccupation

Individuals and organizations committed to achieving their potential, must avoid deriving insights and priorities from headlines and memes: they can only bring misdirection and frustration.

Careers can drift toward reactivity instead of purpose.
Teams can lose focus, caught up in distractions rather than progress.
Organizations can chase “urgent noise” rather than the “quiet signals” that shape long-term success.

In short: the wrong information diet leads to the wrong outcomes.

Today's media tempts us to imagine we are experts on distant dramas we can’t influence - while staying ignorant about actionable opportunities within our reach.

In the 21st century, ignoring the loudest noise and tuning into the quietest signals makes the difference between leading vs. drifting.

While mainstream media focuses on a narrow band of political personalities and controversies, genuinely useful information gets relegated to the periphery:
• Scientific breakthroughs that could inform your field
• Innovative business models emerging in your industry
• Skill development trends that could advance your career
• Local opportunities for networking, learning, or community involvement
• Practical solutions to problems you actually face
The current system trains us to be experts on distant dramas we can’t influence while remaining ignorant about actionable opportunities within our reach.

🛠️ If you aren’t working hard on an issue, you probably shouldn’t have a hard opinion about how to solve it.

A Better Information Strategy

Diversify Beyond Breaking News: Replace reactive news consumption with proactive learning from scientific and technical sources (see links to curated lists of top resources further below).
Follow Builders, Not Commentators: Instead of following political pundits and media personalities, follow people who are actively working and creating value:
- Researchers publishing in your areas of interest
- Entrepreneurs building solutions and solving real problems
- Practitioners sharing lessons learned
- Local leaders making tangible community improvements
Taking this approach will also tend to put you in proximity to good Primary Sources: Get information directly from:
- Actual results from case studies and tests
- Academic papers and research institutions (where findings are based on field work and active attempts to solve a problem)
- Company filings, earnings calls and annual reports
- Credible government data releases (economic indicators, research findings)
- Professional conference presentations and industry reports

There's a VERY important principle here: If you aren’t working hard on an issue, you probably shouldn’t have a hard opinion about how to solve it. Beware of platforms or "news" sources that simply reinforce the views of people those who are not actively engaged in actually trying to make things better.

Why? if you’re working hard to solve a certain type of issue then your opinion and your viewpoint is probably more actionable more specific more useful than someone who’s not working on the issue at all and doesn’t understand the challenges the reality on the ground, so to speak. Work informs.

Look for other people who are also action oriented, and see what you can learn from them.

Recognize what is not worth consuming or monitoring, and ignore it. Making this shift will give you reduced anxiety and an increased sense of agency.

You'll be able to have more meaningful conversations rooted in substantial rather than superficial knowledge.
You'll make better decisions - based on actionable intelligence.
This will in turn enable growth and success at both the individual and org level.

five person by table watching turned on white iMac — Photo by Jason Goodman / Unsplash

Takeaway: Education not Agitation

Our information diet shapes our worldview, emotional state, and ultimately our success. Remember: The current media landscape is optimized for advertising revenue, not human flourishing. By consciously choosing sources that educate rather than agitate, we can adopt a less stressful more productive way of consuming information, and turning it into competitive advantage.

While others exhaust themselves tracking the daily circus, you’ll be building knowledge and capabilities that actually matter for your life and work.

S3T Platform Resources

On the S3T Platform you'll find curated lists of top sources of insight and news - click the links below to explore and begin building your own set of go to sources:

🏫 S3T Resource Library

Curated collections of insights, time-saving explainers and accelerators that frame key trends and issues with important context and perspectives. Some include worksheets or additional resources.

🛠 Best Online Tools & Resources

Top trusted online tools that save you time and $$$, as well as best online sources for emerging tech & research, economic insights, shifts, trends, history, culture and nature.

🌍 Global Economic Dashboard

500+ US & Intl real-time economic indicators organized by nation and release dates. Tap or click any indicator for detailed charts.

🪙 Crypto Market Caps

Top 100 Crypto Market Prices and Indicators. Colors indicate 24hr price movement, size of boxes indicate Market Cap.