When it comes down to analyzing something or making a decision, the reality is there has to be one thing that you’re optimizing for more than everything else. If you were buying a business, you can really only ever optimize for 3 things primarily: 1) Effort, 2) Money, and 3) Risk. If you were buying […]

“Don’t make decisions too hasty – major decisions should take time.” – Typical guru The reason why “big” decisions are so tough is because all the options have similar outcomes overall. It’s usually the smaller decisions that pile up that start to matter the most for people as opposed to one single decision. Tough decisions […]

“Passive income is what you need because it’s easy!” – Random guru. It’s probably harder to get passive income for many people than to just simply work. Finding sunken treasure may be harder than just to simply work. Getting a business to run passively while you drink margaritas is MASSIVELY more difficult than to just […]

“Work smart, not hard!” – Random guru. Succeeding in many things isn’t an absolute thing – it’s a relative thing. Meaning that if “success” is standing up in an auditorium for a better view, and everyone else stands up, you’re back to square one. Therefore, it’s not about working smart if everyone else is working […]

“Stop with your excuses!” – Random Guru I think gurus are close to having the right idea here. Many excuses are just that – excuses. Parents that blame their kids for the parent being messy, or fat, or unmotivated, will eventually have the kid no longer in the picture but the parents behavior continues on […]

The gurus will tell you that failure is a part of growing, and it’s actually right but that’s only half the story. Because when losers fail, they don’t think about why they failed. When winners fail, they think about what they learned to not fail in the same way again. Sometimes it takes creativity to […]

“Your diet is terrible and you need to follow my workout advice” – Fat Random Guru. I mention before in other articles about the tenants of advice and why advice is often so bad for many people and doesn’t work. I also mention that taking advice from people not ahead of you in terms of […]

“Be specific about your goals and visualize it!” – Random guru. This is another thing that’s right but it’s easy to mess up due to the guru missing a core part of this advice. A goal is easy to confuse it’s 2 parts: 1) The path, 2) The destination. A lot of people become specific […]

“The journey of a million miles begins with a single step” – Confucius (the original “Random Guru!”) Let’s do some math for fun. There’s 5,280 feet in a mile, and a step is about 2.5 feet, so 2112 steps in a mile. It takes 20 minutes to walk a mile. So, 20,000,000 minutes (333k hours) […]

Gurus want you to work smarter, not harder, which is usually just a sugar coated way of saying “Don’t work so hard, take the easy path, and I have the easy path to sell you.” This is compelling for most lazy people, and does seem to have a ring of truth. Here’s the reality, the […]

“Buy the new formula for getting everything you want!” – Random Guru The formulas are pretty much all available and are mostly free at this point. Getting rich is easy – save some money, put it in the stock market, and repeat for 60 years, and you’re probably rich. Getting rich isn’t the problem, the […]

“I’m a millionaire, and you need to do the things that I do!” – Random guru. I talked before about the problem with modeling successful people and mentioned to “model the path, not the person.” Once you’ve found the path, then you can find someone else that’s on that same path but just a bit […]

“Come to my seminar and solve all your problems!” – Typical guru. In a different post I talk about how to solve problems using the Onion Skin Problem Solving framework. One other thing to think about is that when you hear of a problem, it’s FAR more important to know what caused the problem. A […]

“It’s only failure unless you give up.” – Random guru. Sounds good but…give up what exactly? Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels tried selling nearly 100 different things and had a mixed bag of failures and small wins before his biggest win. What if someone told him to never give up on his potato gun product? Or […]

“I passed on investing in Uber.” – Gary Vee Gary loves to brag about how he “makes mistakes,” but is it really a mistake? If someone in front of him said, “I have a lotto ticket and I have a hunch it’s going to win, wanna buy it?” Would it be a mistake if he […]

“The man who chases 2 rabbits, catches neither” – Confucius I’ve quoted Confucius before when I spoke on why you need to give up on being the best. The catching 2 rabbits quote sounds like good advice, but like most things, it’s easy to let it ruin you. “The man who catches one rabbit, but […]

“The Unexamined Life is not worth living.” – Socrates (and other random gurus). The common thought is to sit down and think about what matters to you, how to make your life better, how to progress, and all that typical stuff. But introspection is a slippery slope to hell if you’re not careful. When asking […]

“Sit down and think about what you really want, write it down, and go after it!” – Typical guru. Why is it that people that achieve their goals aren’t always satisfied? Did they not really think about what they love before pursuing it? No. The reason is sitting down and thinking about the things you […]

It’s seldom that I think Napoleon Hill is not quite right, but he mentions failures make decisions slowly, and change the results of that decision quickly. Of course, this is a logical inaccuracy, since if you’re changing your mind quickly, that’s inherently a decision. So someone can’t logically make a decision quickly AND slowly. What […]

“Listen to me and take my advice.” – Random Guru. Someone that says this to a wide audience has no concepts of the main tenants of advice, which is for you to: A) Find the right person to listen to, B) Ask the right questions, C) Know yourself to know ‘where you are’ to adhere […]

“Success isn’t luck. It’s a skill!” – Random guru. When you start something new, everything will feel like luck. Everything new and where you’re not sure if it will work or not is luck. Playing poker and winning a hand may feel like luck to a new player, but really these things are skill disguised […]

“Write down 20 goals you have. Now mark your top 5. Scrap the remaining 15 goals because you’re going to just focus on the top 5!” – Random Guru If life was a genie, it’d give you 1 wish, not 3. Because people negate their first wish with their 2nd or 3rd wish. This advice […]

You need to change course and direction if you’re going to hit your goals! – Random Guru While striving towards goals does involve being a bit off course a lot of the time, if you’re changing strategies too frequently to try to level up, it could actually cause failure. The guy at the grocery store […]

“Thinking of going to college or taking a trip around the world? College can wait. Travel the world!” – Gary Vee Gary is probably right about most things. However, there’s 2 biases that are in play with his advice. Tell me what I want to hear bias (eg Confirmation Bias): The bias to want to […]

Jeff Bezos spends money better than you or I do. When we spend money, we’re basically influencing what someone else does with their time. There are certain tasks that are better for humanity than others, one would argue having someone spend their time to build a house, or cook a meal, is more valuable than […]

“Stop playing those games and get to work!” – Alex Becker. Becker will have you working non-stop, ignoring all your friends, and so on. For him, it works. But for many of us, we can find success by working hard and playing hard. People misinterpret that statement all the time. Here’s a good way for […]

“Work on your mindset everyday!” the gurus will scream. But really, your mindset is just a permission slip that grants you the ability to move forward. Granted, the real reason why people don’t move forward more is often mindset. But you can’t preach mindset advice to prisoners of war or to people that are slaves […]

In a different post, I mention that finding more problems is often strangely the solution. However, another way to go about that idea is to consider whether you’d like to solve a problem or eliminate a problem by making the problem irrelevant. There’s usually an easier way to handle a problem, and it’s by noticing […]

Gurus are always trying to tout that if you’re successful, you’ll be happy. The reality is these things don’t always coexist. We’ve seen many “successful” people kill themselves either intentionally or not (ie drug overdoses). The data is in: Being successful financially doesn’t equate to happiness. Gary Vee is always talking about “don’t you want […]

“Figure out a way to make money doing what you love!” – Random guru advice. This piece of advice can be good, but it can also turn someone’s life into a nightmare of distractions. Seth Godin actually accidentally told us a very good way to approach money and passion. Seth was a passionate writer and […]

“The definitions of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome!” – Bad Gurus (FYI – Einstein didn’t say this ridiculous statement, as he was false quoted as saying this.) The problem with a garbage statement like that is that it ignores 2 elements of every decision made: Probability of outcome. Potential […]

Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, as as well as gurus from The Secret, would tell us to simply visualize and think our way to wealth. Alex Becker tells us in the 10 Pillars of Wealth book that everything is our fault – both good and bad. There’s massive pieces of truth in this but are slightly […]

Find out what’s holding you back in life and move past it! – Typical wrong guru. What’s actually holding you back isn’t the same as what you think is holding you back – Truth Cake. A lot of people think that if they didn’t have to deal with their job, their kids, their nagging spouse, or whatever that they […]

See what successful people are doing and model them! – Random Guru This is helpful SOMETIMES. The correct thing to do is, See what successful people DID and model them! – TruthCake The problem is that if you model someone that’s already made it, certain rules may no longer apply to them because they’ve already […]

Some gurus like Joseph Campbell will tell you to do what you love and the doors will open for you. Mark Cuban will tell you to do what you spend the most time on already and get better at that. Gary Vee will tell you to just focus on being happy. Dan Kennedy will tell […]

“You need to be efficient with everything you do!” – Random guru. The reality is that if you think about things from start to finish, optimize to increase efficiency, many times you could have already completed the task by just doing it already without having to analyze the full process. Longer tasks and/or repeated tasks […]

“Focus on the work…consider your time…don’t be afraid to grind it out…obsess about the process. Work smart, not hard.” – Random gurus. This is some of the most confusing and misleading advice gurus have spewed. The problem with any of these ideas is that they’re only roadblocks in regards to your goal. Poor people value […]

“Set your goals and write them down!” – Tony Robbins and every other guru. But what if you don’t have any goals? What if you’re content as is? Even content Zen monks still set the goal of achieving Nirvana – even the monks want a little more than where they are currently. If you don’t […]

Many people giving advice to us have not achieved the same outcome that we want. Meaning, someone’s business advice to you is likely garbage if they’ve never started a business. Beware of taking advice from anyone that isn’t where you want to be. This works in all fields – you don’t take advice from the […]

“Feel the fear and do it anyway!” – Random Guru. It’s garbage advice…but only because it’s incomplete. Fear is what keeps you from making stupid decisions. It creates loads of loser gamblers and a few winners. Self improvement coaches are seeking testimonials though, and this advice creates great testimonials since with higher risk usually comes […]

There’s an obsession about relentless success. But you only need to be successful for a very short period to make it big. People look at the amount of businesses that close after 1 year, 5 years, and then 10 years. Very few make it to 10 years…so that must be mean you shouldn’t do it […]

You need to sit down and really dig and find your passion! – Random Guru There are ways to find and/or choose your passion, which I’ve discussed. But what if you have no passion? Being told you need to have a passion is what makes someone miserable. It’s like being a gay male and asked […]

At the end of many seminars, they open it up for Q&A. Gary Vee is a big proponent of this allocating nearly half his speaking time for Q&A. There’s a few valuable lessons woven in the audience’s questions. Audience members love to give their backstory. Hopefully with you being an outside observer, and listening to […]

Follow your passion is common advice. Some gurus preach it, and some gurus say it’s garbage. Is someone that starts a million dollar sewage treatment plant passionate about sewage? Of course not. But most people are passionate about a very limited amount of things, and most of them don’t make any money. The reason why […]

Kevin Smith recently talked in an interview with Joe Rogan that he’s “living on borrowed time.” This is because he had a heart attack and could have easily died but now is so grateful to be here for a little longer. It’s screwed up that people only feel gratitude when things are awful. The sooner […]

“Find your weakness and work on it!” – Random Guru If people followed that bad advice, a lot of success would have never happened. I’m not saying “turn those weaknesses into strengths,” I’m pointing out that that: Persisting weakness in one area actually creates strength in another – Truth Cake Arnold Schwarzenegger has a weakness […]

When Tony Robbin’s talking about his passion being “to serve the greater good” and other lofty ideals that make him leap out of bed in the morning, the rest of us think about being passionate about sitting around and doing nothing. Dan Kennedy once talked about how the idea of doing what you love doing […]

It’s been said by people like Jordan Belfort, Meet Kevin, and a slew of others that Grant Cardone just “got lucky” in real estate because basically everyone is making a killing in commercial real estate in 2019. But when the real estate market crashes, Cardone and everyone like him are going down because they’re not […]

“Stay positive, and focus on solutions and not the problems!” – Random Guru. It’s garbage advice. It’s often bad advice since we’re often solving the wrong problem. Sometimes the better way to look at it is to consider why something is a problem to begin with. If your business has a turnover problem, reducing turnover […]

“You need to grind 80 hours a week on your business!” – Random guru Almost no one is going to be able to take this advice. Gurus want to give impossible advice, so when nothing they say works, they can blame you for not following instructions. Something as harmless as watching a movie might actually […]

“Yesterday is behind you, just forget it and focus on the day!” – Random Guru. Where you are in regards to your goals barely matters for your happiness. And whether you want to forget yesterday, having an awful past that you’d like to forget about is the thing that’s going to get you to launch […]

“There’s no reason to have a Plan B because it distracts from Plan A.” – Will Smith Will Smith is successful, so we should listen to him, right? Not quite. What if someone had a dream that aliens told her to play the lotto. If she won the lotto, and began to claim that aliens […]

“Set and write down your your goals,” says the random guru with bad and incomplete advice. Earlier I wrote about having internal and external goals. And it’s valuable to see what type of goal you’re trying to achieve. But what’s also important is having a goal with it’s micro and macro goals that go along […]

“Don’t be envious.” – Random guru. I say, get green with envy! First, envy is just Admiration’s ugly sounding cousin, and we’re all fine with admiring someone. Regardless, think of whom you envy, what’s their life like? Who do they hang around? Who do you want to hang around? When you get the answers to […]

“We interviewed 100 millionaires – here’s what they ALL had in common!” – Random guru. This results to this make someone believe that if they found the magic common fundamentals, they could have the secrets and be able to excel. There is no case of success where all they were in total was a conglomeration […]

Yawning is riddled with logical things around it, such as “it’s to help you get oxygen when your brain is sleepy,” or a “herd communication to relax,” and so on. That’s why it’s contagious. But how is it contagious? Some say it’s the sound of yawning that creates the trigger of contagiousness. Some say it’s […]

Ross Jeffries (the wildly successful god father of dating advice) says that Tony Robbins creates people that are addicted to Tony’s work. Ross means well I’m sure, but Tony absolutely needs to create addicts for self-improvement. Tony Robbins made his customers addicted to him. Drug addiction illustrates perfectly the main concept of nearly all positive […]

Mozart was cursed. People look for hidden talents in ourselves like we’re all a hidden Mozart with abilities to recall symphonies from memory alone and such. “If you could just find what you’re good at and born to do, everything else will fall into place!” – Random incorrect guru. Here’s what you were born to […]

We’re taught to listen to what someone has to say and that’s how we learn. But if you look at the meta information that’s being conveyed, that usually is helpful. Seeing “Do what I say, not what I do,” in a different light. Russ Ruffino from ClientsOnDemand.com says they made all their money without having […]

“Still the mind, the answer is within you!” – Random Guru. Often times, you don’t have the answer and you can sit in a corner for hours on end and it will never come. You’ve got to read, learn, confer, etc to find it – the answer is everywhere but within. But sometimes the answer […]

You need patience – Gary VeeYou need to not be patient – Ed MylettYou can’t be broke and happy – Grant CardoneYou can be broker and happy – Ed Mylett Who’s right in these battles? The answer is they’re all right. Gary Vee’s idea that you need patience is true. Many people try something, it […]

There are certain true beliefs that are very empowering. But sometimes the truth is actually very disempowering. “It all works out in the end.” – A great belief, but it’s totally false. It doesn’t always work out, but it’s a good way to think of things that keeps you moving forward. “There’s always a silver lining.” – Many times […]

Sometimes judging yourself as if you were someone else helps see things more clearly. Go to school, study hard, blah blah, now you’re a doctor. But the path for being successful isn’t quite so ‘guaranteed’ for people. Aspiring entrepreneurs look for “Top 3 tips for starting a business,” and stuff like that. But would you […]

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as having said, “If I had five minutes to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first three sharpening my axe.” I was going to say that Lincoln was totally wrong (no one is right all of the time), then I discovered Abe Lincoln aptly never said this quote to begin with! […]

Typical guru: You could just get everything done if you were a little more motivated! TruthCake: Wrong. It’s a massive paradox of motivation.  When you get motivated to get a lot of stuff done, it’s the same feeling of being in a book store and feeling excited to read everything in there and really get to […]

This is the ultimate guide to dealing with haters – all in under 1400 words. Notice that many successful people have haters? Maybe haters caused the success as opposed to were an effect or result of that success? You need to reframe your mind to crave the haters as opposed to coming up with things to […]

People think laziness is just when you don’t want to do something, and you need to overcome it with hard work. The reality is that laziness is bending your whole perspective on the world. Be cautious of the people you follow and consider if what they’re saying sounds like something you want to hear or […]

The hardest part is getting started sounds like a motivation problem, but it’s actually the hardest part – period. Figuring out the technical details to setting up a website, running your first ad campaign, and so on IS the hardest part. If you can just focus on the getting started part of things, that is […]

Ever gone into a business and think to yourself that you could do it better? Amazed things are going so well in a business despite heaps of steaming ineptitude at every turn? It’s because idiots have 1 major advantage – contingencies (and their complete disregard for them) The infinite what-if scenarios intelligent people can dream […]

Expectations: The mother of sadness. Certainty: The father of motivation. – Truth Cake. Staying off the emotional roller coaster of taking risks in life is much easier when you know the 2 players that are responsible for nearly everything. Expectations govern what you feel. Certainty governs what you do.  Tony Robbins often mentions that if […]

“Look at what the majority of people are doing, and do the exact opposite, and you’ll probably never go wrong for as long as you live” – Earl Nightingale  People read concepts like this but fail to execute many of the ideas because they fail at embedding the ideas into their mindset foundation. For example, […]

Many years ago, I had a friend that loved going out in hopes to pursue his soul mate. It’s a good idea to get moving towards trying to pursue what you want. But it would have been easier if he just instead spent time thinking about how to become an attractive man. They call it […]

“It’s the thought that counts!” This terrible excuse (usually for failing at something) may have more truth in it than it seems. Recall, this is a similar concept on premises and book summaries that states that the “why” matters more than the “what.” For example: The ‘what’ is – “He’s successful.” The ‘why’ is – “Because he’s […]

You don’t. That’s the secret.  Very few thought leaders will admit this idea of finding a passion is a terrible idea. It’s because it’s highly lucrative to sell people an easily believable model: 1) Find your passion 2) Then you’ll love what you do 3) Then you’ll get rich Give people some anecdotal stories about […]

There’s an art to doing a book summary, which I can assure you very few people do well at. Many book summaries have 2 fatal flaws: 1) They tell you the conclusion, 2) They boil it down. Sounds great right? It’s terrible. Because conclusions don’t matter nearly as much as the premises to have reached the conclusion. […]

Everyone wants a simple process…or a fast process. Generally they want both, at the same time.  The “The 5 step process you need to do to make $10k a month in your business!” The problem with the desire for a simple process is the harder it becomes. Interestingly enough, when you have more steps though, […]

Beware of bad advice that gets hidden and wrapped around good advice.  Your mind will embrace both ideas, which contradict each other, and result in not being able to progress. People can’t figure out why they can’t execute their plan, why they lack motivation, and so on. But the problem isn’t in a lack of […]

Dan Kennedy talks about you should be interpreting all news as good news, since it’s very difficult to know if something that seems “bad” leads to something “good” later on. You never get any momentum of moving forward if you’re always assessing each thing as “good or bad” and also considering that many things are […]

We already know that winners have no problem failing, but considering the difference between failing vs quitting can be illuminating. Quitting means you never got to the end point to know if you failed or not. If the goal is to knock out Mike Tyson, then “quitting” is going to the boxing gym for a […]

When I’m 1 day late to wish someone a happy birthday, I don’t wish them a belated birthday, I wish them a happy 364 day early birthday. If you’re late to business trends, there’s usually something else that you’re inherently tremendously early for if the original trend is still going. You may have missed the […]

In an interview with Tom Bilyeu, Michael Ovitz, a highly successful talent agency owner in Hollywood, talks about how much easier we have it now and subtly hints to the glory (and difficulty) of cranking things out from scratch as he did in the entertainment industry. It’s worth spending a moment to consider the implications […]

Wait, didn’t I say to never work on weaknesses in another article? Yes and no. You’d think that if you asked for a laundry list of things, and got 90%, you should be content since you got the majority. In another article I talk about whether to double down on your strengths like many guru […]

Stagnant valuable industries that aren’t declining, are usually where we find the home runs for new businesses. People want to enter the obvious industries – VR, High Tech, and Artificial Intelligence. Nothing wrong with that, as there’s tons of opportunity there. But that often comes with the implicit conclusion that there’s no opportunity elsewhere. Go […]

Seth Godin had an April Fools post where he said he’s out of ideas and totally tapped. Cooking, as an analogy, can have 2 types of ideas. One where you mix up the ingredients creatively, and something new comes out. This is creativity, but what happened when someone discovered pasta. The amount of variables in […]

People love to hate on lawyers. Are lawyers greedy evil people or an awesome way to understand a fundamental component of success?  Should we hate on them, or realize they’re innocent and not to blame? If you try to entice someone to break the law, it’s actually illegal and called entrapment. It’s not ok to […]

“Successful people are working when others don’t!” – Not (fully) true.  Richard Branson wakes up at 5am. Tim Cook (Apple CEO) wakes up at 4am. Warren Buffett wakes up at 6:45am (and this is considered sleeping ‘late’) Oprah wakes up at 6am. Gurus claim vapid things like “they’re awake while others are sleeping, and that’s […]

Some want to have their knowledge take on a life of its own, and come up with new ideas. This creative point happens when you understand your fundamentals. Listen to 100 videos by Gary Vaynerchuk, whom hits the fundamentals over and over in different ways, and when you listen to next one, there’s a good […]

Let’s say your goal is to own your own private jet. Nevermind the idea of whether this a good goal or whether it will “truly fulfill you” – simply look at the goals reality and purpose. The goal of owning your own jet has the reality that you can travel places fast and more easily […]

“Winners NEVER quit! Failure is NOT an option!” Just kidding – it’s a great option. Beware of the idea that failure isn’t an option. First off, it detaches you from reality, which is never a good thing, because you can’t make good decisions when you don’t have a grasp of reality. Here’s reality: you can […]