Before You Take Advice From Anyone

byNumerous

1K followers

8 years ago

What I'm about to say applies to taking advice from anyone, not just people on the WA. In fact it probably applies to people outside of the WA even more. And it definitely applies to me, which is why I'm writing this. I want to be able to post a link back to this, as needed, as a caveat to anything I say.

First a little background. My dad was in Amway for years when I was young so I started listening to Amway training when I was about seven. When I was 12, my grandfather told me that authors, what I wanted to be at the time, never make money until they're around 40 if then. So I started reading everything I could about self publishing. That led me to books about business and marketing in general. At 15 my uncle joined an MLM called TPN. It was a satellite dish TV channel that aired nothing but personal development/entrepreneur training. I watched and recorded hours of talks. This led me to buying and consuming stacks of self help/personal development books, cassettes, CDs, seminar tickets, etc.

My point is that I've been immersed in the “best” personal development/self help/entrepreneur advice money can buy for the better part of my entire life. It helped me a lot for sure, but I never saw the success they promised. It took me years to figure out why.

In a nutshell, I don't think like other people. I'm not going to go into why, but basically my brain doesn't process information the way it does for the vast majority of people. All that time I was trying to implement those “proven” methods of success, I was literally trying to force my brain to operate in a way counter to the way it was naturally designed to work. That whole time I thought it was a failing on my part. It wasn't until years later that I learned that not everyone's brain works the same, that there was nothing wrong with me, and that if I just learned to work the way my brain was meant to life would be so much easier.

But while maybe I'm more out of the norm than usual, this is true for everyone. We're all a little different. When you start moving out of the realm of advice guru's, and back into the realm of science, you start to learn a lot more about how people actually work. But the first thing you learn is how little we really know about how we work.

In the realm of studying humans, scientists don't say X produces Z. They say X has a Y percentage chance of producing Z. So for that Y percentage of people X will work perfectly to get to Z. For everyone else it won't do anything. In fact it might get the exact opposite results. In other words, just because someone found something that works for them doesn't mean it will work for you.

Part of this also stems from the fact that we often don't know what X really is even if we think we do. As an example, science has repeatedly shown that stress and working excessive hours causes health problems and leads to an early death. However, research has also shown for a small percentage of people that doesn't apply. They thrive on working in busy high stress environments and suffer no ill effects from it. If one of these people becomes really successful and writes an advice book about their formula for success, their advice will most likely put the majority of people in an early grave if they try to implement it because this person doesn't realize how different they are in this respect.

I'll be the first to admit that it's good to use other people's experience as a launching point, and when you try something you have to stick with it long enough to see if you actually get the results promised. However, just because they swear it will work, doesn't mean it actually will. You have to be willing to drop it and go in a new direction if you're not getting the results you wanted.

While this may be less true for the mechanics of internet marketing, it's still true. First off there is a lot of bad information out there, and a lot of good intentioned people spreading it around. (Just an aside, sometimes the best help you can give someone is to not say anything if it's not your area of expertise rather than unintentionally giving them bad advice.)

Everyone on WA is now in the marketing business. Marketing is the business of spreading ideas. Marketing doesn't care if it's a bad idea or a good idea. It doesn't care if an idea is accurate, outdated, or completely misleading. As individuals in the marketing business we should develop a greater skepticism than most at just how unreliable “common” knowledge can be. If you don't believe me, go spend some quality time on Snopes looking up all the stories you take for granted as being true, but are completely made up.

Of course, even people that do know what they're talking about don't always know what they're talking about. For example, a lot of experienced people have really good knowledge when it comes to SEO. But the truth of the matter is that only the search engines know how their algorithms really work, and even then probably no one person knows the whole thing. In the end really all the SEO experts have are really good educated guesses. They may be way better than your guesses, but that doesn't make them 100% true all the time.

My point is take other people's advice, including and especially mine, as not the answer, but rather the starting point. Maybe we know what we're talking about. Maybe we're completely wrong. Always be testing and looking for better solutions. Keep what works, and scrap the rest.

Oh and if something I tell you doesn't actually work. Help a brother out and let me know. I'm always trying to improve my own personal knowledge as well. ;)