Ed Gandia explains why copying your peers' financial and marketing moves can backfire. What works for someone else might not fit your goals, timeline, or situation. Filter advice through your own experience first.
Blind advice. It has no context, no other useful information. It's only one out of maybe 37 additional variables to consider now. Conversely, because of that, Bill should not take investment advice from me because I'm a buy and hold type of investor playing a very different game from the one he's playing. In fact, Housel says this is precisely why financial bubbles get created and why they burst. Or fear of missing out is simply too hard to resist. So people make decisions that make no sense for them in their specific set of circumstances because they don't want to miss out on a big windfall, suddenly loses. What my friend Bill does works for him because those strategies are aligned with peers, what's working well for them. In fact, I encourage you to do that. But what it means is that you must run everything you hear through your own filter, ensuring that whatever you're thinking of implementing is well aligned with your goals, your preferences, and your own experience.
Well, that's it for today, I hope.
Target market, your peers goals or preferences or specific experience with that strategy or any other nuance factor that explains why they're doing what they're doing. Take social media or content marketing is two examples. It's very easy to look at what some of your peers are doing on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and feel like you have to do what they're doing. Or you see that someone you admire is doing a lot of blogging, or they write guest articles for a couple of outside blogs, or they like to appear as a guest in podcasts, and you start wondering, hmm, am I missing out on some big successes by not doing the same thing they're doing? It's a very valid and extremely common question. It's easy to fall into this trap of just kind of doing what others are doing. Most of the time we believe the answer is yes, we should be doing those things. And we need to copy what they're doing without taking into account why they're doing what they're doing. First of all, we don't know if what they're doing is actually working. We're seeing the activity on the outside, but we typically know little or nothing about the results you're getting on the inside. Second, what makes sense for Bob, Susan and Melinda may not make sense for us. Bob, Susan and Melinda have their own specific objectives, their preferences, experiences with different things that have worked and not worked, and those may not translate into our own situation. Morgan Housel makes this point very clearly. He's got a whole chapter about this in his outstanding book, the Psychology of Money. Specifically he urges readers not to take financial cues or advice from other people because they're very likely playing a very different game than the one we're playing. So without the context, you could be deploying implementing advice that makes no sense for your situation. I'll give you an example. My good friend Bill spends a big part of his weekday trading stocks. He does very, very well with this, so much so that this has become his main profession. He does a couple other things, but this is like his main gig. And believe me, it's very tempting sometimes for me to ask Bill for a stock tip here and there. But here's the thing. Bill is playing a very different game than the game I'm playing. He's day trading and he's making profits from holding stock positions for just a day or two, sometimes even just a few hours. I have a business to run. I don't want to dedicate 30 or 4 hours a week doing research and monitoring all my investments. Instead, I want to make investments I can hold for a long time until I'm ready to retire. I'm not looking to do this for income where he is, so I should not take investment advice from him. Heck, I shouldn't even try to mimic how he spends his days or what he reads and what he does. In fact, when you think about it, a stock tip is just that.
If you enjoyed the episode and just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book, Earn More and Less Time the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance Writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com where you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.
