The problem you’re trying to solve currently is most likely not your actual problem.

Someone thinks, “Can’t find a decent girl!” and thinks the problem is the girls. The problem is they suck and can’t attract decent girls.

Someone thinks, “I need help with reaching clients!” and thinks the problem is marketing. The problem is that they don’t know who their client is to even market to.

Someone thinks, “I need a new weight training regimen to get bigger muscles!” and thinks the problem is the routine. The problem is that their diet sucks and they’re covered in lard.

The problem is you don’t know what your problem is.

The total worldwide population of Jews is about 15 million. The total casualties in World War II was 50-80 million. Would more lives had been saved if we didn’t try to stop Hitler from killing all the Jews?

Do we do more damage solving problems than just leaving a problem alone.

People want to find these shortcuts, and I’m not hating on shortcuts and expounding how “hard work beats shortcuts” or some hollow inspirational one-liner. Tell that to someone that’s worked their ass off for 40 years and gotten no where that they want to be.

Hard work doesn’t always work.

So work smart then? No, not quite. I’m saying that actual, true shortcut is actually not the perceived shortcut. I’m talking about the situation when people say, “Here’s how I got made $1 million dollars WITHOUT…”, followed by “college degree”, “having tech skills”, “knowing how to code”, “having any money and good credit.”

I’m saying it’s easier to get a college degree, learning how to code, and work a 2nd job to get some extra money. You know why ‘make money’ programs don’t say, “Here’s how I made it big, but you need $20k in the bank, good credit, a solid understanding of tech and coding, and a good degree.” Because it starts to seem obvious that making money is much easier at that point. If it’s truly so easy to get rich once you have those things, then make your goal to have those attributes (a degree, 20k in the bank, decent credit) and not the near impossible “1 million dollars!” generic meaningless goal. Consider that it may take 5 years to learn the shortcut techniques to succeed without any skills / money / credit, but it only takes 4 years to do it the “hard way.” How hard are we working to avoid working hard?

The true shortcut is the hard way.

Knowledge and free speech is potentially crippling the progress of humanity. If in 1970, you learned by books and maybe a teacher. In 2018, we learn by podcasts, forums, videos, blogs, and books. The problem is a lot of information is 1) repeated already, and sometimes inadvertently since people don’t always know if someone else has said the same thing, 2) inefficient – people love to tell long stories and such to help the entertainment portion of it, which entertainment is good if it creates emotion which helps us learn/retain info, but it’s often too much, and 3) not appropriately structured and 4) usually a disguised sales pitch for something else, usually proving expertise in a topic just enough to build trust, but not enough so that anyone’s learned anything of deep substance.

If you were to want to learn chemistry in 1970, you read a well organized and peer evaluated book that doesn’t repeat itself and is no sales pitch for something else and you learn chemistry. In the age of Google, you may be reading Chapter One 50 times over because of all the random YouTube videos, aimless but entertaining podcasts, incorrect info on a blog that’s being debated in the Discus forum below the article, and so on. Before you know it, you’ve wasted tremendous time and not gotten as far as the guy with the lone book. Knowledge…you can have too much of a good thing.

If someone is able to mentor you, stop quizzing them to see if their advice is “worthy” for you or not. Very few people are likely personally offering to help you, and you’re likely not so inundated with helpful people that you need to start eliminating the people that have worthless advice because they’re not “qualified” enough.

You’re not that busy (that you can’t listen for a moment to someone wanting to help), people aren’t that helpful (that they’re going out of their way to help you personally), and you need to start taking what you can get. Listen to the advice you get, and if it seems bad then either: a) research whether they’re qualified to give you advice that seems wrong to you, or b) stop listening to them moving forward because it’s simply bad advice.

Most of the time good advice is clear and intuitively accurate after you hear it.

The exception to this is the legal system, because what’s illegal may not always make a lot of intuitive sense. Beware of tasks like this where you’ll waste more time in researching whether you should listen to them rather than just listening to begin with.

Make everyone your mentor.