Do This! START Small In Research For BIG Results

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's message is "Do Your Research." Over to you, Peter Lynch. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

The public, when they buy a refrigerator, they get a Consumer Reports. They buy a microwave oven, they do that. They ask people what's the best kind of radar range, or what kind of car to buy. They do research on apartments. When they go on a trip to Wyoming, they get a mobile travel guide. Or California. When they go to Europe, they get the Michelin travel guide. People will hear a tip on a bus on some stock and they'll put half their life savings in it before sunset. And they wonder why they lose money in the stock market. And when they lose money, they blame it on the institutions and program trading. That is garbage. They didn't do any research. They bought a piece of junk. They didn't look at the balance sheet. And that's what you get for it. And that's what we're being driven to. And it's self-fulfilling. The public does terrible investing and they say they don't have a chance. It's because that's the way they're— that's the way they're acting.

So I have a couple of thoughts on this. The first and maybe the most obvious is you want to do your research before you get into any project, right? You want to understand the market. You want to talk to customers. You want to understand the price and understand the competitors. Too many people just kind of jump into something and spend a ton of money on it and then it doesn't work out because they didn't do their research. To me, that's maybe the most obvious answer. The second thing around doing your research is also, I think you can do research by trying. Just don't try on a big scale, right? It's okay to try because you can only get so much information from researching online, right, and looking at the reports. At some point, you have to actually do, right? Just don't spend an insane amount of money doing. And see if it makes you come alive. See if you like it, right? Say you want to start a YouTube channel, right? I could do all the research in the world about how to start a YouTube channel, and yes, it's growing, and yes, there's lots of opportunities, and yes, you can impact a lot of lives, and yes, you can make a lot of money. Great. Now you actually gotta go out and do. You gotta execute. And maybe you start and you hate it. Like, maybe you get in front of the camera and it's like, "Oh, this isn't what I thought it was," or, "I don't wanna do all that editing work," and the dream kind of falls apart. And that's great, you move on to something else. But part of the research is actually doing and testing and not going out and spending tons of money on the gear and the camera and the editing equipment and all of that stuff. You don't have to worry about any of it. Start the smallest way possible. Doing your research includes testing it out on a small scale. And then my last thought on this is I think it's also important to understand that your customers are doing their research too. You know, one of the things we do and pay a lot of attention to at Toronto Dance Salsa is our Google reviews, right? Because people are searching for dance schools. We show up number one with SEO, but there's also tons of great and positive reviews on Google. And, you know, on Yelp and the different sites. And so understand that your customers are doing research to find you, and so are you accessible? Are you reachable? Do you have good data out there? Are you giving them white papers, and are you educating? Are you telling your story? Are you sharing your mission so that when people see it and they're doing their research, they find you, know you, like you, trust you, and wanna work with you? So I've touched on a few points there. The question today is, How do you do your research? Leave it in the comments below. I'm going to join the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning with espresso, keep me going.