The 2 mind blowing things revealed about all great interviews.
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 want an aspiring surgeon that got all his knowledge by watching the “Top 3 Game Changers for Brain Surgery” and “The 7 things you’re forgetting when you start surgery. Number 3 will surprise you!”
You could accurately judge that surgeon as a fool. Now use that same skill to judge your own actions.
Omar, the host of The Passionate Few, interviews finance / success coaches. He has questions like, “What’s the best advice you have in under 1 minute to someone completely starting out?”
Joe Polish (marketing genius behind the P90x workout program and Dan Kennedy’s protege) and many successful marketers often aim to sell people what they want, and give them what they need.
Omar is giving what people want to hear, and usually the answers to these questions often twist into what people need. This is why Omar, intentionally or not, is one of the better interviewers I’ve watched.
How could an interview that’s all about questions like “top 3 reasons for success in less than 1 minute” turn into a 2 hour plus interview. If you just saw the questions, you’d think the interview would have been 15-30 minutes. But it’s not, because things are more complex than we’d like them to be.
The good news is, everything can actually be broken down into the clickbait style lists, so there’s still value even in hearing these snippets. However, it takes hundreds of these types of interviews to get the slivers of depth that you need to start to progress. If you listen to 100 interviews on a topic that are only 1 hour long, you start hearing the same stuff over and over – you never get beneath the surface.
Finally, what you want to get the result you want often tends to be slanted with the belief that there are “secrets,” which makes you ask the wrong questions. For example, for men wanting to get better at attracting women, they usually start by asking what the secret best pick up lines are. But if you give a creepy guy the best tactic, he won’t succeed.
Note that this is NOT quite the same problem as what Tony Robbins talks about in having the trifecta of having the right State, Story, and Strategy. A creepy guy may seem to have a great state, story, and strategy but when he executes the strategy with the pick up line, the fact that he hasn’t showered in days makes him lose the game already and thinks the pickup line didn’t work and he picked a bad guru.
The dating world would say this guy has an “inner game” issue instead of an “outer game” issue. It’s difficult to know where you’re wrong. It may have been a bad strategy for the pick up line, or it could have been an incomplete strategy. Incomplete strategies are hard to spot. Maybe his strategy only focused on what to say as opposed to the strategy to shower prior to saying anything.
Incomplete strategies are created by trying to figure out things by shortcuts. When your marriage counselor says “You need to work on yourself” the client doesn’t want to hear that because “he’s fine the way he is!” He just wants to hear the strategies to get his wife to stop acting like a lunatic. However, those strategies are likely to not be effective for him.
Here’s the top 2 things to blow your mind about interviews.
#1 – The interview might not be helpful. Stop craving clickbait. Highly complex things are seldom broken down fully into the simple clickbait style headlines we’re attracted to.
#2 – The answers you’re looking for might not even fix your problem. To get the results you want, it’s often not found with discovering silver bullet types of “secrets,” but instead it’s a problem of your state, story, or an incomplete strategy.
The one key to overcome everything.
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!
Many times we seek answers to moving forward by trying to come up with a good strategy, figuring ways to analyze carefully, laying out a plan and so on.
The reality is speed can make up for nearly any lackluster aspect of yourself.
Let’s say you had an awful plan to get rich by deciding to start playing the lottery – if it didn’t cost $1 to play, you could win with enough speed. You played, you lost, you played again, and so on until you win. If you take a enough lotto tickets, you’ll eventually win almost guaranteed if you could just get the speed to keep playing.
Let’s say you wanted to evaluate which piece of software to learn by carefully reading all the reviews about it and so on? But if you just picked one, and started learning, you might know both pieces of software better than if you watched another YouTube video review or dove in deep into another forum where people debated on which software was the best to learn.
Even the guy that wants to sharpen the ax before cutting the tree will lose if you could chop speedily with a duller blade.
Even the guy that learns the best sales pitches in the world will lose vs the guy that is mediocre but makes an extra 50 sales calls in the day.
There’s a certain point where you’re “good enough” and that nothing else is going to give you the same ROI outside of speed.
You’re good enough right now.
You can even provide the right answer on a math quiz given enough attempts and given enough speed. Just keep guessing randomly until you get the answer right. That’s bad test taking advice, but the point is that speed can overcome complete incompetence, lack of planning, lack of organization, etc.
You technically don’t need anything besides speed to win.
The companies that make it first to market, even with a mediocre (but functional!) product at first, often win the market. If you have something functional, and it doesn’t cost anything to hit the ground running, it’s better to just start experimenting by doing something. Trying making a slightly better Facebook and launching it and see how terribly that goes – even if it was slightly better, you’ve lost not because it wasn’t factually better, but because of speed.
The counter argument here is that it takes moments of your life away when you make the wrong choices, and even when there’s not a $1 at stake like in a lottery, you’re spending a minute of your time doing the wrong thing. While true, the point is that there are only 2 ways people can be screwing up:
1) Taking action hastily without proper research and knowledge
2) Not taking action fast enough due to researching and learning.
Restated, there’s only 2 ways to not get what you want: 1) You make the wrong decision, 2) You don’t make any decision.
Statistically, it’s more likely that people are wasting their life researching more so than wasting their life making hasty choices. The fear of wasting time is crippling. Name all the hasty choices you made last week in respect to your goals that you regret? Not so many, I’d wager.
Peter Thiel in “Zero to One” talks about needing to be 10x better than everyone else such that you don’t even have any competition. It’s hard to argue with Peter here, but many people will read that book and start endlessly “sharpening that ax” to become 10x better. When you’re 10x better, you’re not just a “sharper ax” you’re likely a different ax, which is a factor of speed to fill a market void. Let me take Thiel’s torch and say this,
You don’t always need to be 10x “better”, you can simply be 10x “different.”
James Altucher talks about how he got rich creating websites for people – was he the best designer and developer? Who knows, because back then no one else knew how to do it, therefore no one was as fast as James in regards to learning web development.
Altucher thinks he succeeded because he was the best, but he was the best only because he was the fastest.
Stop considering efficiency, perfection, plans, organization, and so on that’s designed to just bog you down and keeps you from simply starting anything.
Motivation Paradox: How feeling demotivated makes you get stuff done
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 work. Then after a week has passed, you notice zero books got fully read. The reason why is when you’re motivated, you want to do more than one thing, get overwhelmed and don’t start OR you get started on lots of stuff and never finish it because you’re always shifting gears mentally.
Shifting gears mentally is extremely “expensive” in terms of your brains resources (glycogen, ya know…brain fuel, etc). It’s called “switching cost” in psychology, it’s called “expensive” in computer science.
This is along the same lines of multitasking, but NOT quite the same idea. Multitasking has you doing many things at the same time. I’m talking about wanting to do many things at the same time. While you should absolutely be planning your day, the problem is when people want to accomplish 30 things. Then even when they do just 1 at a time in a sequence, the fact that they know 29 more things await them is where it gets to be an issue. If you know you need to wax the car, before you go planning out everything around that activity on all the other things you need to do – just go wax the car right now. Done.
You waste mental resources saying, “I should do this,” or “I need to write down in my to-do list something to be done tomorrow.” All of these things are shifting your mind away from getting anything done. It’s the equivalent of having a hallway in a house. Hallways are generally a bad part of house design – you kind of need it, but you can’t live in the hall way, and it’s not a feature of a house, and it’s basically just a necessary evil that you should try to eliminate.
Your intensity / proficiency goes up as well when you think of just 1 thing. Consider the idea:
Who gives a more intense bicep curl to their maximum strength? The person that is told to do just 1 curl as hard as they can, or the person that is told to do 30 curls as hard as they can.
So, demotivate yourself and stop telling yourself that you’re going to do X, Y, and Z. Instead, if you feel a little less motivation and just want to do 1 thing instead, you get the benefits of:
- Not feeling bad about yourself when you said you were going to do something and didn’t.
- Focusing on one task and completing it.
- Not having any wasted time thinking about all the other things you should be doing.
- Not feeling overwhelmed
- You get more done with less energy used because of ‘task switching’ is exhausting (and you’re not doing them)
So get unexcited. Demotivate yourself. Pick one thing to do. Watch yourself get more done in less time, do it better, AND with less energy needed.
8 massive benefits for businesses that have haters and critics.
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 tell yourself to make it not hurt your feelings such as:
“Don’t let it bother you.”
“They’re just jealous.”
“They hate their life and are losers.”
The reason these things don’t work to make you immune from the fear of haters is because they’re not always true. I don’t like certain business leaders at all for a variety of reasons unnrelated to their message. Their voice, their body movements, their questions, their laugh – I hate it all. But I don’t “fear their success” or need to “pull them down to my inferior levels by insulting them” or whatever reasons that can be real causes for haters to act out. Since I sound like a hater, but don’t fall into the descriptions of a hater, it breaks the efficacy of just insulting the hater to make yourself feel better.
Therefore, this is what happens when you read a mean ‘hater’ comment:
1 – Down deep you know that the hater isn’t always just “some jealous troll,”
2 – Which makes you stop believing all the mean things you tell yourself about haters
3 – Which makes you start to believe the haters instead
4 – Which makes you upset / sad.
Reality tends to be the most believable thing – and the reality is NOT that trolls are all “just jealous losers.”
Sometimes we just don’t resonate with people – that’s ok, and that’s why precisely we need to see your message / product out there.
Haters are the reason why you should still do something, even though it’s already being done.
But fear of haters is in our DNA – if you were in a small tribe a lot of outspoken people hated you, you were likely going to end up dead. Now, having haters can make you rich instead of making you dead.
All these things are pieces of advice to help you “cope” with hate critics and haters. Instead of trying to figure out how to make everyone happy and love you (last guy that tried that ended up dying on a cross), or trying to tell yourself that you don’t care (which rarely works), you can shift your mindset a bit. Both critics and haters are valuable in different ways:
Critics help you with logical problems: “Your book is full of typos!” “Your facts are wrong.” “You misquoted someone – check your sources, idiot!”
How nice of them to take time out of their day to ‘complain’ that the books facts were all wrong. Now you know better and it didn’t even cost a penny! Jeff Walker, a master of product launch marketing, recently interviewed Tony Robbins. At 50 minutes in the video, Tony claims that the word “lunatic” originated 100 years ago by people saying it was crazy that we could fly to the moon. The reality is “lunatic” has been used in the Bible, ancient Greece, etc. A critic does the research on the word to point out Tony’s inaccuracy. Now Tony is more knowledgeable moving forward and I’ve squandered 20 minutes of my day researching it to give my conclusion wrapped up in a 10 second bite for him via my YouTube comment.
No one wants to be a critic about a hobo’s terrible hair style – they’re a lost cause. But a critic pointing out a missed spot on a model is indicating that person being critiqued has hope to improve.
People love to point out what’s wrong; let them, as it’s the easiest / cheapest way to get better.
If you’re not getting critics, you’re not publishing / marketing enough of your works yet. However, maybe your works are flawless and all those critics actually love everything you do. Maybe that’s great, but maybe it’s just because you’re not pushing yourself to grow by doing things you may not be as awesome at.
Haters help you with the emotional side of your brand.
Seth Godin mentions he doesn’t read any of the reviews of his books on Amazon. It’s not because he doesn’t care about the opinions of anyone else, it’s because he doesn’t care about opinions of strangers and has general disdain for the general public’s opinion. Seth is writing books that publish to the masses, but I don’t believe he thinks his works are truly for the masses. They’re for the elite business leaders looking to get even a further edge, and I’m sure he’s interested in the opinions of those peers.
The 1 star reviews on Seth’s books aren’t because of factual issues (ie the book isn’t organized, plagiarized material, etc), they’re rating it poorly because they don’t “get it.” They’re haters. And Seth isn’t going to soften his message enough to be accepted by everyone. Haters let you know that you’re doing something that matters enough to have an emotional charge behind it, because usually when they’re someone that hates, there’s someone else that loves. Haters love to latch onto meta or tangential aspects. Adele’s product is music, but a hater will latch onto tangential ideas, “I never knew cows could sing so well!” Even Ed Sheeran said he’d see YouTube comments saying mean stuff about his awful hair would upset him for days.
Immunity from haters comes from knowing your product and not caring about opinions not related to that product.
His product isn’t a good head of wavy locks – it’s music. Now if someone said they hated the way he played, this might be valuable for him to consider whether he wanted that person as a fan or not.
The emotional reaction to Ed and Adele’s looks isn’t what they’re trying to sell. But the good and bad news is that we’re almost always selling emotions.
Would Adele have done as well if she looked like Brittney Spears? All those songs about jilted lost love might not be so relevant and congruent with the song writer being exceedingly hot.
Haters come mostly when brands are people, meaning basically any celebrity (musician, public business leader like Elon Musk, actor, politician, etc).
Those neck tattoos you saw on some guy that you hate? Someone else absolutely loves them. Hate is also much more vocal than Love. If you’ve got 5 haters, it’s likely that you have 25 fans. This is great to know that you’ve very likely got some major fans that are simply staying quiet and also that you’re creating something emotionally powerful enough to warrant a hater.
Finally, I saw an ad for a marketing agency that said, “We’re a real agency, not someone ‘in their garage'” This is a direct stab at Tai Lopez that released an insanely viral ad (~70 million ad views as of 2018) that which showed him in a garage full of nice cars and books. Haters of Tai will resonate with this and be drawn to new advertiser though. This shows a massive opportunity in general, which is…
If someone has a ton of haters, they want that product / message to come to them in some different way (a new person saying the same thing but with a slightly different spin).
Therefore see the following truths:
- If you’ve got one outspoken hater, there’s probably 5x more fans out there being quiet.
- If you’ve got one hater, you know you’re creating a product that inspires emotion, which is needed for strong fans.
- Watching haters hate usually tells you the industry is good (it’s got an emotional audience) and is ripe for a new competitor.
- Haters force you to get extreme clarity on what your product is and more importantly, what your product is NOT.
- Critics imply that you have hope for improvement and not a lost cause.
- Critics are the cheapest way to get proof readers, fact checkers, etc.
- Critics tell you that you’re likely marketing well.
- Critics help you find ways to continuously improve yourself.
TruthCake Chapter 5, Verse 44: “But I say unto you, Love thy haters as thyself.”
You don’t want to hear this – How laziness is bending your reality.
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 something you need to hear.
We want to hear: We can outsource our social media ad campaigns.
We don’t want to hear: Gary Vaynerchuk says we need to manage it ourselves.
We want to hear: we just have a motivation problem.
We don’t want to hear: Truthcake says it is only part of the overall problem with creating something new.
We want to hear: we can create multiple sources of income.
We don’t want to hear: Warren Buffet says we need to focus our income on one thing before moving on to the next.
We want to hear: we have the resources to be passionate in multiple things and don’t need to focus on just one.
We don’t want to hear: Tai Lopez says you’re likely only good at one thing only.
We want to hear: we can be the person that has a respected opinion on everything.
We don’t want to hear: Jack Ma (CEO Alibaba) says he won’t give an opinion on Bitcoin because it’s outside his scope.
We want to hear: the jack of all trades will show up in the Google search results.
We don’t want to hear: Google displays sites that are extremely specialized because they know that’s what searchers want.
We want to hear: you can buy real estate with no money down.
We don’t want to hear: John T Reed says you need to have some serious cash on hand for the majority to succeed in real estate.
On one side, you already know much of the stuff deep down (you knew it takes money to make money, and you aren’t likely the next Leonardo diVinci that can excel at everything). But it’s also easy to be erroneously jaded and believe that down deep you “know” it’s also hopeless (this isn’t accurate either). Usually, when someone is saying something that’s accurate, it requires effort and most people don’t want to do anything that requires effort.
The reason why hopelessness is also an attractive ideology is that hopeless requires NO EFFORT.
Why try to do anything? It’s hopeless! Give up…Relax. That sounds like no effort to me. If you have a belief on something, consider if it’s the “lazy” side of the coin or not. Hopelessness is on the lazy side of the spectrum vs the less lazy idea to read every TruthCake article and discover the secrets to self improvement.
It’s the same thing as why you want a 3 step process to becoming a rock legend and not the 3,253 step process. The 3,253 process is actually easier as shown in this post, BUT 3,253 sounds like more effort…which sort of sounds harder. Effort and difficulty aren’t always the same thing.
Models are the secret to knowing where reality is. If someone else is doing it, you likely can too.
If you hear that it’s possible to make stunning websites without learning how to code, and you’re wondering, “Is that true?” Simply consider 3 questions:
1) Does this sound like the less effort or more effort side of reality?
2) Consider if you believe it’s true because of either a) It’s actually likely to be true factually, or b) It sounds easier than the more likely high-effort alternative
3) Do we have any models / heroes doing it already?
Why lack of motivation ISN’T your problem when getting started.
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 an achievement all on its own even with a garbage product at the end of the tunnel. For example, learning how to write a novel, getting published, and understanding how book tours work, is likely going to be harder than actually having the story of Harry Potter fill the pages.
Focusing on creation with blatant disregard for the quality isn’t some “don’t be a perfectionist” trick. It literally allows you to focus on the fact that getting started IS the hardest part for many people, regardless of your motivation levels.
We know that making the bad product is the best way to start to create something good, as it’s easier to be critical and improve something than to create something to begin with. This was discussed when I said that working hard is the worst thing for getting started since you’d think the pot of gold is behind the rainbow of hard work.
In reality, if you look for the easier path of just creating anything at all and not worrying about the initial quality, that will seem easier to accomplish, and allow you to make incremental improvements which will lead to an amazing product faster than just creating something perfect all at once.
You can’t solve your “Why can’t I get started?” problem when you’re incorrectly blaming it on motivation instead of blaming on your desire to create something while you also possess no technical skillset to even create junk. Again, motivation isn’t the problem when you fail to get that new website business launched. The problem is you don’t know how to code AND you want it to be a good website when you launch it. Just give up now, because motivation can’t get you through that swamp by itself.
You want to focus your motivation on, “Learning to program.” and “Creating anything, regardless of quality.” and NOT “Create the best travel website known to man!”
When you fail to solve a problem begin to consider if you’re blaming that failure to solve the problem on the wrong thing.
The #1 reason why idiots have a massive advantage in starting a business.
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 up are astounding. Idiots can’t think of all these things, can’t comprehend what can go wrong, don’t realize they’ve skipped 20 steps of the “correct” process and simply execute.
If the business is solving a real problem AND has some real value AND the most probable contingencies don’t result in being knocked out of the business game permanently, it’s better to move forward. Alex Becker talks about this in the 10 Pillars of Wealth when he says “Focusing on What Is and not the What If” and his concept is spot on, but leaves the reader to incorrectly believe that planning and thinking ahead isn’t valuable. What Alex is trying to get at is this:
There are only 2 things to consider in a ‘worst-case’ scenario: 1) The probability of occurrence, and 2) The probability that you can’t adapt / change / start over easily.
In Austin, there are scooters that you rent for $1 a minute. You pick them up wherever they’re randomly left, ride them and drop them off randomly. People could steal tons of scooters, disable their GPS tracker, and the business owner would be out quite a bit. Since the probability of this is very low, and even if there was theft, they’re still in the business game overall, this is a thing that an idiot would ignore (since they never thought about it to begin with) and move forward. However, if the business was to offer a product with a refund guarantee and then never give the refunds and there’s so many class action lawsuits that occur, well now you’re a bankrupt criminal (Don LaPre late night get rich infomercials come to mind). Now you’re out of the business game.
Same for Anytime Fitness with having a key fob to get access. It can easily be shared and members let their friends in secretly. An idiot wouldn’t think about this and just realize that 24/7 access to a gym is valuable and people can and will pay for it, and executes. Smart people want to see the holes in everything – and there’s always holes somewhere. If someone lets their friend in secretly in the gym, the owner isn’t out of the business game altogether, and it’s worth just moving forward as they can adapt to solve that problem or start over easily.
The scorn (and subsequent envy) of idiots blinds us from seeing the subtle mentalities that are sometimes valuable to adopt.
Are your “what-ifs” brilliant ways of never executing anything or are they considering both the probability of occurring as well as the potential to knock you out of the game altogether.
What is this site?
Self improvement for smart people.
I follow business leaders, gurus, and philosophers and note things others missed that I’ve found valuable.
This site is my precious treasure chest of ideas on business, philosophy and life. And hopefully during your pillaging here, you get your mind blown.
My life’s goals are to help summarize the human knowledge base, dispel self improvement myths, and achieve a resultant and unrelenting state of 24/7 euphoria. I’m kidding, but we’ll still try!
Follow along on my journey!
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