Only Listen To The big Cheese..
Guard yourself from taking advice from unsuccessful people
Several days ago, before the end of the school year, my son has a bridging ceremony. It’s called a bridging ceremony, and not a graduation, to bridge elementary from high school.
This coming school year, he will be out of elementary and diving straight to middle school (where did the years go?).
The ceremony is not a formal graduation, but they were dressed well and the ‘graduates’ were awarded with their individual awards.
He always wanted the scholar-athlete award, but for some reason, the school didn’t gave that formal award, and I believe he should have garnered that award because he played soccer and basketball on top of making the honor roll list.
For some reason, he got the BIG CHEESE AWARD, the big influencer in his class that can sway his classmates, in a good way.
Anyway, my wife didn’t know what a big cheese was, so we Googled it. In one word, it says, the most important person.
Now let me change gear here as I heard this advice over and over again. The advice is about the big cheese. And the advice is this:
ONLY LISTEN TO THE BIG CHEESE.
In my early years of figuring out to make money, I made a mistake of listening to co-workers who were not better than me.
I remember talking to a friend about putting up a business by selling street food in a flea market. My business partner was so animated that I really believe we can pull it off.
The good thing is that the intricacies of selling food, on providing all the paper work for government agencies that regulate this business made it harder for us to get the papers. In the end we didn’t pursue the business.
It was a good thing I guess, because in hindsight we could have failed easy and money lost.
One scenario that this happened to me was when I started to learn mutual funds from a friend of mine at work. He was so animated with stocks and mutual funds, even subscribing to Morning Star, a mutual fund rating newsletter.
Every morning, we discuss topics ranging from the SEC to who manages new mutual fund portfolio for big investing companies.
In hindsight, I was listening to a guy who is partially successful with mutual funds, and even lost money from the the two market crashes (2000 and 2008).
Today, I guard myself from listening to people who are not ‘experts’ in what they really do and just tell stories about their exploits.
In my current work, I was talking to a guy about Facebook Ad, and then he told me he was using Facebook Ad to boost a post. I mean that doesn’t make you an expert on Facebook Ad.
I learned my lessons already.
Jen Senciro, the author of You Are A Badass In Making Money once wrote in her book:
Elite Athletes have Elite Coaches, So Why Don’t You Have In Your Finance? Why are you listening to your friends and parents. Just saying.
For the past month, I been looking for coaches to scale up my business. I will start investing in my business and hire coaches that will put me up to the next level.
I have a lists of coaches who are successful in email marketing, Facebook Ads, etc. I’ll start from there. I started investing on learning too.
Next month, I am headed to Orlando Florida to network and listen to top people in my industry. It will a be two-day bootcamp in scaling my business. The event is called Elite Marketers.
I been following some of the speakers here, and what I like is that they are ‘local’ to me. (At least they are just an hour and half drive from where I am).
These are the people who regularly gives Mark Zuckerburg a million dollars monthly in Facebook advertising and profit back $2 Million. These are experts in the industry.
This will be a start of networking and listening to people who harness Facebook Ads and people who geek out when Facebook Ad and other advertising platforms are discussed.
This is one of the big secret here:
Network and only listen to people who are so much better than you.
It’s been proven, that your net worth is basically the average worth of the people you hang out with.
One of my mentor once told me to be careful with the people you hang out with. Take this advice seriously especially if you are still in the early stages. He said that in his stage now, being successful and millionaire, he hangs out with people across the railroad, the people who maintains his car, but he is aware of this.
He won’t even do that before.
Today, in my early stages as entrepreneur, I network with people who are better than me and who have net worth that are 100 times greater than mine.
This is the reason why I’m heading to Orlando.
