How To Deal With Negative People

Hey, how's it going? It's Olly here. Very warm welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. So just before we dive in, I've got two special new resources for you. First resource is a PDF with 15 smash hit products on it, ready to go. Examples of products you can sell on Amazon. So you can use this for inspiration or you can just see, you know, what types of products do really, really, really well. I've even included revenue examples so you can see the amount of money that each product is likely to generate the Amazon Marketplace. If you want to grab this free PDF, just go to ecommercefreedom.com and you'll see a link at the top of the page where you can grab the PDF. The second resource I want to give you is a free Amazon accelerator call. The whole point of this call is for us to have a quick chat and we'll gather up a little bit of information about your situation and together we'll develop a plan for you to build an Amazon business that either works as a side hustle for you or could replace your your job and will take into account your situation, your experience, your background and give you a clear set of action steps to go ahead and build the business. If you want to book one of Those, go to ecommercefreedom.com, go to the top of the page and click Amazon Accelerator call. You fill out a quick form and you can book the call. Alright, thanks so much for joining me for another episode. This one's going to be good and enjoy it. Do you have people in your life who will doubt you, judge you and act like it's really weird that you want to build a business, improve your life, make big changes, do all this self development stuff, learn new skills and just really push the boat out. Well, if that's the case, then this podcast episode definitely for you. So this is a big, big issue. In fact, it's really sad when I see it happening because you know, if you're listening to this episode of a podcast, if you follow me, the chances are you're probably quite ambitious. And you know, there's loads of people out there who are really ambitious and they want to do these amazing things and it's just so sad when they have this desire to go and achieve something incredible, but then they allow people around them to push this desire down and pull them down to their level because they're doubtful and they're miserable and they don't want you to grow. Like at the end of the day, people around you don't Want you to hit your goals a lot of the time. Some people around you don't want you to be successful. They don't want you to make more money than them, get more great things than them, reach your own potential. Because if you do that, right, if you step out of your comfort zone and make this amazing stuff happen for yourself, you're shining a beacon on them and then showing them, well, clearly they're not. They're not trying hard enough. Clearly they're not reaching their potential. Clearly the delusions they have about what's a normal amount of money to earn and, you know, about luck and about things like that to do with success, they'll all be shattered, right? Because if you. Right, the normal person that they live with or their friends with or in their family has done it, there's no reason why they can't do it. So, you know, a lot of people will be scared for you to push through and actually achieve things. So today I really wanted to talk about this. Talk about my philosophy about dealing with people who are negative about your success and just come up with some strategies for how to deal with it. And I also want to tell you some funny stories about what happened to me when I broke the mold and, and started to go towards success for myself. So, first of all, it's important to know, like, my family are the most amazing people ever, okay? They're really supportive and they're so cool. Parents are still together, you know, which is, like, amazing, right? And it's just amazing family, right? So anything I say in this podcast episode, like, I want you to remember, I have the best family ever. And, like, it wasn't their fault. But the thing is, even if you have the most amazing supportive family, like, they might still end up blocking you from getting success subconsciously just because of the belief systems that they have surrounding business, money, and all these things. And it's not their fault. These things have been passed down for generation through generation. It's because of the people they hang out with as well. And this, you know, it's a huge, like, heavy web of stuff that's preventing them from breaking through the mold. And they're just passing it on to you so you could have the most, you know, amazing, supportive family. And this stuff can still all happen. I remember one time when I was living with my parents right before I started selling on Amazon, you know, I was really interested in business. Like, business to me, just sounded like the coolest thing ever. And I bought myself a copy of the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, right? And you know, to me this book just nailed absolutely everything I wanted in life, right? It's basically to make a shit ton of money, not really have to do much work, not have to have a 9 to 5 job, be able to do a lot of the stuff online on my laptop, which is where I like to be, right? And just pretty much be wherever I want. Travel, see the world and just have a lot of fun, right? The book just, it was the perfect book. No wonder the thing was so successful. As a side note, everybody who was in my demographic, my age group, who I have told about this book, with pretty much no exception, has bought it on the spot. I've shown this book to several people who are similar age to me when I was like 22 or 23. And I've shown it to other people who've been around that same age. And in all occasions where I've even mentioned the book, they've gone on to Kindle or Google Books or ibooks and they've bought it right there when I'm standing with them. That proves just how powerful this concept of the book was. Anyway, I bought a copy of the book, like a physical copy, and brought it home into my house. So just to put this in context, like, my family are quite kind of creativity oriented. They're always interested in music, in the arts, in culture, these kind of things. Not exactly business oriented, right? They're not really into that kind of thing. It's just, it's just not their thing. So I bring this book home and you know, I went to university and studied music and I've just been focused on music my whole life. So this caused a lot of disruption in my house. I was doing something way out of the ordinary by even thinking about a book like this, let alone bringing it into the house and reading it. And I remember having dinner, right? My dad said to me, you know, Oliver, these get rich quick scams have been going on for decades. He said to me, you know, Even in the 80s, you'd see these adverts in the newspaper which would be get rich quick scams. And they weren't real then and they're not real now. It was basically just being really honest, which I really appreciate about his own beliefs about making money and about, you know, his version of, you know, what it is to be successful. Like to him to have a business, you pretty much already have to be millionaire. You already, you have to be like greedy. You know, that kind of whole mindset is how he feels about business. And I Don't blame him. That's how I felt too. But anyway, that was his belief about the four hour work week. So that was my first encounter of kind of resistance against me wanting to do this stuff. And again, it's not my dad's fault, right? You know, it just wasn't life. I would have had the same reaction a year before, but actually one of my friends was getting successful in business. And if something crazy happens with something, someone you know gets amazing results, like if you're not a negative person and if you believe in yourself, then if you, if you see your friend getting crazy results in something, it's like one of two things can happen. One, you become the negative person and you try and pull them down, right? Subconsciously in most cases, right? Or number two, you get inspired and you want to do the same thing yourself. Well, number two happened to me fortunately. So therefore I knew it was possible. So when I heard about the four hour workweek, I was like, well this surely is one way of doing it because I know that he mentioned the book, right? So I was like, well, it's real, you know, this, this, this is what I wanted to do. Anyway, that was my first encounter. The second thing that was very, very clear was when I ordered a credit card. So I wanted to get started with Amazon, right? Picture this. I wanted to start with Amazon. This was around about January 2015 and I had no money, I had nothing at all, right? At that point I didn't even have a job, okay? I had no income. I was at my parents house and I needed some capital. Now the good thing is I didn't have expenses, I didn't have a mortgage to pay, didn't have kids to look after. So in one way I was okay. But I still, still had no money. So I needed some capital to buy some stock to get started. So I got this credit card, okay? It was an aqua credit card with 600 pounds on it. A ridiculous, just a ridiculous interest rate. I don't even know what it was. Something like 40% APR or something horrendous. It was one of the first credit cards I paid off and just got rid of when you know, things started to go well. In fact they upped my limit to like four grand eventually and I just got rid of it because interest level was so crazy. Anyway, ordered this card, it comes to my house and my mum sees the letter, right? So she sees the aqua logo and I think she, she's had one of those cards in the past and it rings alarm bells for her, alright? So she's like, you know, instantly associating this with all the trouble you can get into with debt, right? Whatever it is, whether it's having to write it off, having, you know, debt collectors chasing you and all the bad stuff that can happen with debt, that's what she's thinking. So she kind of sat me down and wanted to, like, have a talk. She was like, oliver, I noticed that you've got yourself a credit card. And I was just a little bit concerned because you do know that, you know, you have to pay the money back. And she started saying, like, thing is with these business things is they just don't always work out. Like, sometimes it will fail, and then, you know, you'll get into a lot of problems. And I don't want you to get into any debt. Now, look, this was coming from a very good place, right? And if I had a kid who just got a credit card, I'd have probably the exact same reaction because, like, that, damn it, those companies will come after you if you can't make the payments, right? They don't care, you know, so it was definitely, definitely good parenting, right? I think it was actually awesome. But again, like, for me, this was another bit of resistance. I had to push through to keep going with my goals and actually buy some products and get Amazon business moving. Like, in the end, I ended up using 300 pounds to buy a little course on how to actually do the Amazon thing and learn how to set up the account and what products to buy and all that stuff. I used the other 300 pounds to buy the stock and did a bit of arbitrage, got started and, you know, started to make things happen. So that was another little bit of resistance, right, that I had to deal with. And it was. Yeah, it was. It was challenging. But one thing I started to realize at this point is that now, because I believed in myself so much, I started to use this resistance to my advantage. Now, anytime someone doubted me and anytime I felt a bit of this resistance, like, you can either let it break you or you can let it make you stronger. And now it was starting to make me stronger. So I was like, okay, Mommy. I said, look, don't worry. I didn't want my mom to worry at the end of the day. So I was like, don't worry. You know, I'm only going to spend it if I really genuinely feel I'm making an investment. Like, I'm not going to be buying, you know, clothes with this credit card. It's not going to be going on you know, any consumer goods it's just going to go on stock if I feel like I make a return. So I made a promise to myself, look I'm going to make this work even more now because I want to be right, I don't want to be, I don't want my mum to be right and be worried and you know, I don't want to get into all this debt. So this actually gave me even more motivation to make the business work. And this is another point I wanted to make. Like if you have resistance you can turn that into, into motivation, you can turn it into right I'm gonna prove this person wrong and I'm going to make it real. Now this by the way this is quite short lived motivation. I don't think that kind of motivation will last for like years but it can certainly get you through a bad day if something's not going right. You can get the grrr I'm gonna prove this person wrong and not let these obstacles overcome me etc, etc right? That it can give you like a spike of motivation. It certainly did for me that was one of the things that really kicked off my arbitrage. Interestingly a couple of like a week or two later I bought my cool blocker which is a super cheap product that I found for £5. I was selling for £40 and I made £900 profit in a week doing arbitrage. So very, very soon after this credit card thing I managed to prove that the money was well invested, I was already profitable and had I could have paid the card off at that point although I didn't, I just kept reinvesting the money and again it's resistance but you can turn this stuff around, right? Another instance is whenever I would play like any video to do with self development in my house it just didn't go down very well. In fact the usual content my family watches is music stuff, right? They love like later with Jules Holland. They love you know, music videos, classical music content, concerts and stuff. I love all that stuff too. Also comedy, right? So usually quite cynical comedy, the IT crowd, Ricky Gervais stuff, you know, things like that. Like British comedy is usually what's being played in my house. So definitely nothing to do with Tony Robbins or any of that kind of American self development stuff. Anyway I was finding that this stuff was really helping me because if there's one thing that American self development people can do is they can get you fired up to go out and build a business. As I was sitting in the living room in my house watching Tony Robbins videos. In fact, if you go to YouTube, they've got his events that he's run over the course of like five days, and there's like eight hours of content. So I've watched basically everything he's got on YouTube, all the super, super long things. I've watched all of it because I found it just really helped me to get motivated, to put things in perspective and just to believe in myself. Anyway, anytime a member of my family would walk in and one of these things would be playing, you could just sense that they just hated, just rubbed them the wrong way. And they just think I'm like, I've gone crazy and joined some kind of cult. They think I'm just like, weird. And they think it's all a scam. And, you know, it just rings alarm bells for them. So that was another thing that I found again, just more of this resistance. More of this resistance that you just have to fight through. But one thing that happened is like, as I just kept watching the videos, like in the first few weeks is the hardest. It's kind of like quitting smoking. I smoked for four years and then quit. The hardest bit is in the beginning because you don't know if you're fully sold on actually quitting yet. Like, you don't know. You don't know if it's a real thing you're gonna do, like a life choice or if it's just a fad. And then in the next few weeks, you'll be back on, you know, smoking again. Same thing, right? With this self development stuff. You know, the first few weeks are the hardest because your family don't know whether this is just a phase you're going through or if it's really changed. So that was difficult and you have to stick to your guns. But after a few weeks, right, this stops just being a phase and it becomes like a life choice. And like, this is the new you. And a few months down the line, instead of it being like, what's this weird, you know, Tony Robbins video that he's watching? Instead it becomes, oh, well, it's, you know, Oliver watching his video again. I was just doing his thing that he does. It's just becomes normal, almost part of the furniture in the house. You know, it's like a standard thing. So these were a few examples of resistance that I encountered while building my business, you know, and you'll notice that it pretty much all came from family. In fact, one huge piece of advice that I would recommend to you is to, as a rule, stay Very quiet about what you're doing. Stay very quiet. You might feel really motivated, excited to tell everyone about this new thing you're doing, you're selling on Amazon, that you're looking into launching private labels, you know, whatever. And you might expect the same kind of excitement from the people you speak with. You might expect them to say, oh, that's so cool. So you're going to build a business. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it's a really good opportunity, you know, etc. Etc. But what you might find is if you say this to someone you know, who's in a negative mindset, which a lot of people are actually, it will work out very bad for you. Like, they might start being really cynical. They might start making fun of you, you know, in a joking way, but with an undertone of kind of meaning it, right? And they might just start trying to talk you out of it. And it all goes back to the stuff I said in the beginning. Like, some people want to pull you down so you don't show them up, right? So the best strategy, really, except for the people who can't help it, like your close immediate family, I would just keep quiet, right? I would just keep quiet and just do this stuff and just get results. And rather than telling people how amazing this opportunity is, just show them. Because now people in my family and a lot of people, you know, who know me, just think I'm a freak. They just label me as like the weirdo who out of nowhere went from someone who just makes music and is really fairly laid back to now who's just made millions online. I'm almost like a freak. But it's just accepted that I'm just like, you know, they're just like, well, I don't know how he does it. I don't know. I don't know how this happened and how this business has gone so well. It's like, what are you forgetting? Like, all the times I was watching Tony Robbins for like eight hours in a row, all the time I was locked in my room doing ebay listings when I had an ebay business right before Amazon to build capital, the time when I got my credit card, the time I spent watching course after course after course, all the boxes that were in the house, all the product research I was doing, you know, like, they forget all of that stuff, and all of a sudden now you're just a freak who's just got all this success and exactly the same thing can happen to you, right? But the key is just to keep a little bit quiet about it in the process and just accept that sometimes people don't realize that, you know, they're pouring water on your bonfire, they're dampening your enthusiasm, and that they're pulling you down. They don't realize they're doing it right. So it's good to just be a little bit strategic about this. Like you would be choosing a product to sell. Right. Have a strategy. And then when you have a strategy, stick to it and everything else will fall into place. All right. Hope today's episode has been good for you. Absolutely. Go crush it. This week we're getting closer and closer to quarter four, so that's always exciting. And I'll catch you next Monday.