(1 of 2 due to size... continued in next post)
-
(2+ days ago…)
I find myself at the airport, waiting to head back home.
I’ve been in Arizona for the last few days visiting @biophase
Nothing too crazy, just hanging out with some MLMers and such(link).
I started thinking about the interaction with the kid in the store, some of the threads I read on the forum after Kenric posted that, some of the convos he and I had over the last few days. I remembered back to that starting out age and some of the things I wish I knew at the time. I found myself thinking, ‘man if people only knew…’
I look down at my phone to check the time. 37 minutes until boarding.
‘Ah f*ck it, maybe I’ll post on fastlane.’
I open my notes and start rambling through my fingers…
2+ days later, now that I’m back home and settled in I finally took some time to turn my 37 minutes of rambling airport notes into a more organized, but still rambling pile of notes for you, in hopes that there might be some beneficial nuggets somewhere within:
In thinking about the MLM kid in the link above, anything different than the reality he ‘knows’ seems incorrect to him and blasphemy since someone who he views as very smart through his naive eyes told him this perspective is the right way, and since he lacks experience he replaces experience with blind belief in someone with ulterior motives.
I see this a lot.
One thing that I tell people all the time is: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING
Everyone feels inadequate so they rely on someone else that they assume has all the answers. But again, NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
Once you start approaching life from that angle, you can start thinking more. If you just assume that you, or someone you look up to as an authority knows everything and blindly put your trust in either your current views, or in whatever authority figure tells you to believe, you are not going to play the game of life very well.
Think about this for a minute: Anyone who knows what they’re doing now, didn’t before. They had to learn it. And anyone who improves, had to not know something before. So if you are improving, it means to some degree you did not know what you are doing.
So even if you don’t have an MLM upline dude trying to brainwash you into thinking being in his downline is the secret to life, you still need to keep your thinking cap on, because even if someone did mean well for you, they may not know all the answers, and they may not know they don’t know all the answers.
As they say:
There’s levels to this sh*t.
Funny enough I actually looked up the guy who convinced me to join an MLM back when I was in college. And not surprisingly, he’s still not retired and still selling new MLM ‘opportunities’ to people, still posing next to cars in hopes people will think he’s ‘made it’.
‘Maybe he can help me make it’, I used to think when I was in college. I can remember being on the old Rich Dad forums and people who were supposedly successful wanting to jump on calls with me and ‘help me out’. Even when I was young I was always like, “wait a minute why do these supposedly successful guys have so much time for a college kid with a net worth of like $1k and a meal plan?” It’s not because they’re really that nice, it’s because they’re really that broke.
As new spaces have popped up, there’s ‘upline guys’ in every niche(amazon, youtube, crypto, etc…), with someone who’s not good at thinking or making money, convincing you that they have the secret for your success. It’s very hard to differentiate the ‘upline guys’ from the real ones, and the ratio is disproportionately gigantic for ‘upline guy’ vs. ‘actually wants good things for you and knows what they’re doing guy’.
You guys here don’t know how good you have it- @MJ DeMarco sweeping landmines of ‘MLMs of 2019’ out of your way. When many of us were coming up MLM was what ‘everyone’ was doing. At least that’s what it seemed in our small, naive world of what you had to do to start a business/start making money, since that’s what everyone was pitching, and masking it as wanting to help you.
Couple things that will make it a bit easier to tell if you should take advice from someone:
There are some relatively popular names in the guru space that are posting ‘I’m crushing life’ type stuff on social media, and behind closed doors are desperately trying to pay rent/save businesses.
There are some good people to work with out there, but again it’s a ratio thing, the hype to value ratio is insane. If hiring someone, ask yourself: ‘am I hiring them because of the way they think/articulate something so that I could learn a skill they have, or am I hiring them only because of the hype?'.
One easy tell, is that if someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about with one subject but is confident about it, do not bank on other things they say even if they’re an ‘expert’ at that. Because they may know a lot, but confidently being wrong about things is more dangerous than knowing you don’t know.
So a trick you can do is bring up subjects they may be familiar with, but you’re a deep expert on. If they’re confidently saying flawed things, you should not listen to them on other subjects even if they’re viewed by others as an ‘expert’ on that subject. If they are confidently sharing inaccurate info on a subject you know, how are you going to be able to tell what’s right and what’s wrong on a subject you don’t know...They don’t know when they’re wrong, how will you?
Look, the reality is…
You know you better than anyone in the world. I’m not talking about hiring people/business pitches. I mean even aside from the guru rant.
Listen to you.
Not sure what business to work on? … have you asked yourself? I mean, that sounds funny I know, but so many people are looking for someone else to tell them what they should want to do.
Listen to you.
I’m not saying don’t get feedback. Get plenty of it.
I still get feedback all the time on stuff. But I’ve learned the hard way that I know better than anyone else what I should do.
Just like you know better than anyone else what you should do.
It’ll be hard with all the noise, so practice at it. Over time with continuous effort the noise you hear from others will lower, to be able to hear your own voice better, and when that time comes you’ll know which to follow.
If you’re at the beginning of your journey and/or aren’t putting in the work it’ll be hard to hear your voice and all the others will be loud and distracting (‘start a store!’, ‘omg do amazon!’, ‘ebooks you should launch hundreds of them for 99 cents each!’, ‘but dude youtube omg you’re not on there!’). The more work you put in, not only will your skill level rise to learn what’s actually an opportunity and what’s a distraction from an opportunity, but you’ll learn what’s the best fit for YOU, and what YOU want to do most.
You are the best coach you will ever have. Don’t ignore yourself.
Get as much great advice as you can from people who’ve been where you want to go. Ignore those who haven’t been where you want to go as they may unintentionally point you in the wrong direction even if they meant well.
Then check in with yourself and see where you go from there. Don’t wait for others to do everything for you. It’s a common theme I see that is KILLING the chances of so many with so much potential. They’re waiting for someone else to basically do everything for them. I don’t know if the millennial thing is real or not, but most people are LAZY.
I highly recommend reading Straight Line Leadership(Straight-Line Leadership: Tools for Living with Velocity and Power in Turbulent Times: Dusan Djukich: 9780996203524: Amazon.com: Books). Great book for lazy people. Well, any people but lazy people NEED to read it.
I think part of what creates laziness may be confusion about what it takes to achieve what you want.
We were hanging out at @AllenCrawley 's the other night, and I was telling him and MJ a story about how I originally met Kenric- at a Rich Dad Poor Dad meetup event at Kiyosaki’s office:
Everyone at the event was staying at this hotel right near the office. I was probably around 21 at the time, and was like... ‘$199 a night!?!’. So I booked myself a ghetto hotel like 20-30 min away. I’d never traveled anywhere myself before I didn’t know it was in the ghetto it was just cheap so I booked it.
So fast forward and I’m in AZ... 21 year old me is walking around the hood in like 90s/100s weather in a heavy sport coat and pants asking thugs how to catch a bus (how did I know what people wore to these things I wanted to look professional!!). I’d never been on a bus before, but I finally found it and eventually made it to the Rich Dad headquarters. Showed up and I’m sweating, meeting a bunch of people in t-shirts who walked from the very air conditioned hotel right nearby.
I probably spent 25-50% of my net worth to attend once you factor in hotel, plane ride, etc…
I’d travel back and forth from my ghetto hotel each day just to try and pick up a few nuggets of wisdom that might help me on my journey.
Then once I got home I tried a bunch of stuff out. Didn’t know what I was doing and lost some money. But then I figured out what I didn’t know, then I played again. And I lost again because even though I learned X, now Y came up and I didn’t know THAT was a thing.
I didn’t know that I didn’t know.
Each time you figure something out, you just learn new things that you didn’t know you needed to know as part of the overall game.
But if you keep playing the game you WILL win… whatever winning is for you.
So… back to the whole ‘do you actually want to do what it takes’ thing…
I think some people don’t want it, they just don’t know they don’t want it. Like, they want the end result. End results are great! But playing the actual game may not be something you’re committed to actually doing.
If you listen to the right people, the game is easy… but it’s still HARD.
Like, it’s hard work.
It’s relatively straightforward once you get the concepts down, but the work is still there. You can’t outsource your pushups so to speak if you want to be ripped, you still have to do them.
You may think you want it, but it’s kind of like this...
Amatuer poker players are at a serious disadvantage vs a pro. They don’t know they don’t have an edge. They won’t even know someone’s a pro unless someone tells them, but for the pro literally within a few minutes it’s easy for them to spot who the sucker is. It is very obvious because they’ve played the game so many times, they see things others don’t even know you should be looking for.
For people who’ve really played the game of entrepreneurship for a while/put the work in, it’s kind of easy to spot who wants it/doesn’t want it. But for the people who don’t want it, they don’t even know they don’t want it! I know that sounds crazy, but it’s reality. Again it’s because they do want the end result… like they desire it. They’d like being rich, or famous or whatever else. But they don’t WANT it. Like, ‘spend half your net worth to stay in the ghetto for the possibility of improving your odds of success by a little and then go implement everything you learned and keep failing but keep betting anyways want it’. There’s probably a way better analogy but you get the point. The effort from most people is small, but they expect home runs from that minimal and often nonexistent effort.
Being real with yourself is one of the hardest things to do, but also the most valuable.
Maybe you would be a great #2 (and this is in SUPER high demand). If you’ve been ‘trying’ to be entrepreneur for 5+ years ask yourself if you’ve REALLY been trying- like ‘bus from ghetto until you make it’ trying, or fake trying like most people. If fake trying, ask yourself why.
Do you want that life as much as you think? If not just change course, no biggie. Changing course is fine and people won’t think less of you, they’ll think more. “Hey I decided this entrepreneurship things not for me”... cool. That’ll enable you to find something that IS for you.
But don’t spend decades lying to yourself pretending you’re trying. If you’re not sure if you’re really trying, the answer is easy: you’re not.
If you’re not trying but you KNOW you want it, maybe it’s because you’re too comfortable. Maybe you want to work on something you’re passionate about. Maybe you’re distracted by a bad relationship. I don’t know what it is for you, but remember: you know yourself better than anyone. Listen.
And keep this in mind: YOU ARE DOING FINE.
Taking you a long time to figure stuff out? YOU ARE STILL DOING FINE.
Lost on every try so far? YOU ARE DOING FINE.
Have no idea what to do? It’s okay. Remember: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
Struggling with something in the early stages and feel like it could work, just not sure how to get it over the hump? OMG YOU ARE SO LUCKY THOSE ARE THE BEST DAYS. You will look back and on those times with so much happiness remembering them- enjoy it. YOU ARE DEFINITELY DOING FINE!
(... continued below)
-
(2+ days ago…)
I find myself at the airport, waiting to head back home.
I’ve been in Arizona for the last few days visiting @biophase
Nothing too crazy, just hanging out with some MLMers and such(link).
I started thinking about the interaction with the kid in the store, some of the threads I read on the forum after Kenric posted that, some of the convos he and I had over the last few days. I remembered back to that starting out age and some of the things I wish I knew at the time. I found myself thinking, ‘man if people only knew…’
I look down at my phone to check the time. 37 minutes until boarding.
‘Ah f*ck it, maybe I’ll post on fastlane.’
I open my notes and start rambling through my fingers…
2+ days later, now that I’m back home and settled in I finally took some time to turn my 37 minutes of rambling airport notes into a more organized, but still rambling pile of notes for you, in hopes that there might be some beneficial nuggets somewhere within:
In thinking about the MLM kid in the link above, anything different than the reality he ‘knows’ seems incorrect to him and blasphemy since someone who he views as very smart through his naive eyes told him this perspective is the right way, and since he lacks experience he replaces experience with blind belief in someone with ulterior motives.
I see this a lot.
One thing that I tell people all the time is: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING
Everyone feels inadequate so they rely on someone else that they assume has all the answers. But again, NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
Once you start approaching life from that angle, you can start thinking more. If you just assume that you, or someone you look up to as an authority knows everything and blindly put your trust in either your current views, or in whatever authority figure tells you to believe, you are not going to play the game of life very well.
Think about this for a minute: Anyone who knows what they’re doing now, didn’t before. They had to learn it. And anyone who improves, had to not know something before. So if you are improving, it means to some degree you did not know what you are doing.
So even if you don’t have an MLM upline dude trying to brainwash you into thinking being in his downline is the secret to life, you still need to keep your thinking cap on, because even if someone did mean well for you, they may not know all the answers, and they may not know they don’t know all the answers.
As they say:
There’s levels to this sh*t.
Funny enough I actually looked up the guy who convinced me to join an MLM back when I was in college. And not surprisingly, he’s still not retired and still selling new MLM ‘opportunities’ to people, still posing next to cars in hopes people will think he’s ‘made it’.
‘Maybe he can help me make it’, I used to think when I was in college. I can remember being on the old Rich Dad forums and people who were supposedly successful wanting to jump on calls with me and ‘help me out’. Even when I was young I was always like, “wait a minute why do these supposedly successful guys have so much time for a college kid with a net worth of like $1k and a meal plan?” It’s not because they’re really that nice, it’s because they’re really that broke.
As new spaces have popped up, there’s ‘upline guys’ in every niche(amazon, youtube, crypto, etc…), with someone who’s not good at thinking or making money, convincing you that they have the secret for your success. It’s very hard to differentiate the ‘upline guys’ from the real ones, and the ratio is disproportionately gigantic for ‘upline guy’ vs. ‘actually wants good things for you and knows what they’re doing guy’.
You guys here don’t know how good you have it- @MJ DeMarco sweeping landmines of ‘MLMs of 2019’ out of your way. When many of us were coming up MLM was what ‘everyone’ was doing. At least that’s what it seemed in our small, naive world of what you had to do to start a business/start making money, since that’s what everyone was pitching, and masking it as wanting to help you.
Couple things that will make it a bit easier to tell if you should take advice from someone:
- Take advice from those who if they benefit from you nothing changes for them. Example: if you paid Biophase $5-$10k for coaching, nothing monetarily changes for him. Meaning, it wouldn’t even show up as a blip on his overall financial situation. The money itself would be semi-irrelevant to his life. But to a blogger who needs you to click their affiliate link to cover rent, it’d be a game-changing amount of money.
- If they list ‘influencer’ or ‘thought leader’ as what they do. Actual thought leaders don’t need to try and convince others they lead thoughts, they just do. If someone needs to tell you they’re an influencer, it should only influence you to realize they’re an idiot.
- ‘I run a multinational organization’ is another one. broooo… that’s a strong title for selling a $5 ebook to some dude from Thailand off a wordpress site. Chillllll out. Successful people/actual multinational companies don’t talk like that.
- ‘Heart-centered entrepreneur’... this means ‘I’m broke but I want you to think I’m woke’ 99% of the time.
There are some relatively popular names in the guru space that are posting ‘I’m crushing life’ type stuff on social media, and behind closed doors are desperately trying to pay rent/save businesses.
There are some good people to work with out there, but again it’s a ratio thing, the hype to value ratio is insane. If hiring someone, ask yourself: ‘am I hiring them because of the way they think/articulate something so that I could learn a skill they have, or am I hiring them only because of the hype?'.
One easy tell, is that if someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about with one subject but is confident about it, do not bank on other things they say even if they’re an ‘expert’ at that. Because they may know a lot, but confidently being wrong about things is more dangerous than knowing you don’t know.
So a trick you can do is bring up subjects they may be familiar with, but you’re a deep expert on. If they’re confidently saying flawed things, you should not listen to them on other subjects even if they’re viewed by others as an ‘expert’ on that subject. If they are confidently sharing inaccurate info on a subject you know, how are you going to be able to tell what’s right and what’s wrong on a subject you don’t know...They don’t know when they’re wrong, how will you?
Look, the reality is…
You know you better than anyone in the world. I’m not talking about hiring people/business pitches. I mean even aside from the guru rant.
Listen to you.
Not sure what business to work on? … have you asked yourself? I mean, that sounds funny I know, but so many people are looking for someone else to tell them what they should want to do.
Listen to you.
I’m not saying don’t get feedback. Get plenty of it.
I still get feedback all the time on stuff. But I’ve learned the hard way that I know better than anyone else what I should do.
Just like you know better than anyone else what you should do.
It’ll be hard with all the noise, so practice at it. Over time with continuous effort the noise you hear from others will lower, to be able to hear your own voice better, and when that time comes you’ll know which to follow.
If you’re at the beginning of your journey and/or aren’t putting in the work it’ll be hard to hear your voice and all the others will be loud and distracting (‘start a store!’, ‘omg do amazon!’, ‘ebooks you should launch hundreds of them for 99 cents each!’, ‘but dude youtube omg you’re not on there!’). The more work you put in, not only will your skill level rise to learn what’s actually an opportunity and what’s a distraction from an opportunity, but you’ll learn what’s the best fit for YOU, and what YOU want to do most.
You are the best coach you will ever have. Don’t ignore yourself.
Get as much great advice as you can from people who’ve been where you want to go. Ignore those who haven’t been where you want to go as they may unintentionally point you in the wrong direction even if they meant well.
Then check in with yourself and see where you go from there. Don’t wait for others to do everything for you. It’s a common theme I see that is KILLING the chances of so many with so much potential. They’re waiting for someone else to basically do everything for them. I don’t know if the millennial thing is real or not, but most people are LAZY.
I highly recommend reading Straight Line Leadership(Straight-Line Leadership: Tools for Living with Velocity and Power in Turbulent Times: Dusan Djukich: 9780996203524: Amazon.com: Books). Great book for lazy people. Well, any people but lazy people NEED to read it.
I think part of what creates laziness may be confusion about what it takes to achieve what you want.
We were hanging out at @AllenCrawley 's the other night, and I was telling him and MJ a story about how I originally met Kenric- at a Rich Dad Poor Dad meetup event at Kiyosaki’s office:
Everyone at the event was staying at this hotel right near the office. I was probably around 21 at the time, and was like... ‘$199 a night!?!’. So I booked myself a ghetto hotel like 20-30 min away. I’d never traveled anywhere myself before I didn’t know it was in the ghetto it was just cheap so I booked it.
So fast forward and I’m in AZ... 21 year old me is walking around the hood in like 90s/100s weather in a heavy sport coat and pants asking thugs how to catch a bus (how did I know what people wore to these things I wanted to look professional!!). I’d never been on a bus before, but I finally found it and eventually made it to the Rich Dad headquarters. Showed up and I’m sweating, meeting a bunch of people in t-shirts who walked from the very air conditioned hotel right nearby.
I probably spent 25-50% of my net worth to attend once you factor in hotel, plane ride, etc…
I’d travel back and forth from my ghetto hotel each day just to try and pick up a few nuggets of wisdom that might help me on my journey.
Then once I got home I tried a bunch of stuff out. Didn’t know what I was doing and lost some money. But then I figured out what I didn’t know, then I played again. And I lost again because even though I learned X, now Y came up and I didn’t know THAT was a thing.
I didn’t know that I didn’t know.
Each time you figure something out, you just learn new things that you didn’t know you needed to know as part of the overall game.
But if you keep playing the game you WILL win… whatever winning is for you.
So… back to the whole ‘do you actually want to do what it takes’ thing…
I think some people don’t want it, they just don’t know they don’t want it. Like, they want the end result. End results are great! But playing the actual game may not be something you’re committed to actually doing.
If you listen to the right people, the game is easy… but it’s still HARD.
Like, it’s hard work.
It’s relatively straightforward once you get the concepts down, but the work is still there. You can’t outsource your pushups so to speak if you want to be ripped, you still have to do them.
You may think you want it, but it’s kind of like this...
Amatuer poker players are at a serious disadvantage vs a pro. They don’t know they don’t have an edge. They won’t even know someone’s a pro unless someone tells them, but for the pro literally within a few minutes it’s easy for them to spot who the sucker is. It is very obvious because they’ve played the game so many times, they see things others don’t even know you should be looking for.
For people who’ve really played the game of entrepreneurship for a while/put the work in, it’s kind of easy to spot who wants it/doesn’t want it. But for the people who don’t want it, they don’t even know they don’t want it! I know that sounds crazy, but it’s reality. Again it’s because they do want the end result… like they desire it. They’d like being rich, or famous or whatever else. But they don’t WANT it. Like, ‘spend half your net worth to stay in the ghetto for the possibility of improving your odds of success by a little and then go implement everything you learned and keep failing but keep betting anyways want it’. There’s probably a way better analogy but you get the point. The effort from most people is small, but they expect home runs from that minimal and often nonexistent effort.
Being real with yourself is one of the hardest things to do, but also the most valuable.
Maybe you would be a great #2 (and this is in SUPER high demand). If you’ve been ‘trying’ to be entrepreneur for 5+ years ask yourself if you’ve REALLY been trying- like ‘bus from ghetto until you make it’ trying, or fake trying like most people. If fake trying, ask yourself why.
Do you want that life as much as you think? If not just change course, no biggie. Changing course is fine and people won’t think less of you, they’ll think more. “Hey I decided this entrepreneurship things not for me”... cool. That’ll enable you to find something that IS for you.
But don’t spend decades lying to yourself pretending you’re trying. If you’re not sure if you’re really trying, the answer is easy: you’re not.
If you’re not trying but you KNOW you want it, maybe it’s because you’re too comfortable. Maybe you want to work on something you’re passionate about. Maybe you’re distracted by a bad relationship. I don’t know what it is for you, but remember: you know yourself better than anyone. Listen.
And keep this in mind: YOU ARE DOING FINE.
Taking you a long time to figure stuff out? YOU ARE STILL DOING FINE.
Lost on every try so far? YOU ARE DOING FINE.
Have no idea what to do? It’s okay. Remember: NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
Struggling with something in the early stages and feel like it could work, just not sure how to get it over the hump? OMG YOU ARE SO LUCKY THOSE ARE THE BEST DAYS. You will look back and on those times with so much happiness remembering them- enjoy it. YOU ARE DEFINITELY DOING FINE!
(... continued below)
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