Who You Should Listen To When Everyone Is An "Expert"

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With their FlexPath learning format, you can set the pace and earn your degree without putting your life on pause. You've built experience and you know what you're capable of. Now, this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. Who should you listen to when there's so much noise out there online and everyone seems to be an expert? Over my career, I've spent over $300,000 on coaching and education. And I've heard some of the absolute best advice ever in that process, advice that helped me scale my companies, helped me make me more money. But I also got some of the worst advice that cost me a ton of money and a ton of time. And through it all, I realized that there's a difference between good advice and bad advice. I realized that the difference between the advice that actually builds a business and the advice that makes you doubt everything that you do and every decision you make It comes down to one thing: how you filter it. When different advice is coming from everywhere, from podcasts to YouTube to newsletters to coaches to courses to Instagram captions that promise you to change your life in 3 bullet points, and it seems to all kind of contradict each other sometimes, it begs the question, how do you know who to listen to? Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom. Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week, and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Well, today I break down the exact 5-part filter that I use to separate the gold from the noise, a specific set of criteria that tells you whose advice deserves your attention and who deserves to just be ignored. Now, I really believe that if you want to continue to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to continue to learn and grow. And this is why this 5-part filter system that I created is so important to me because I'm getting information from everywhere and I want to learn from everyone and even people that I don't agree with, they can teach me something. But I always apply this filter so I know what to discard, what to throw out in the garbage, and what are the things that I consider when I come to make decisions or make moves in my business. Let's jump into filter number 1. Advice is data, not instructions. The first and most important shift is this one. Stop treating advice as something to follow. This is kind of hard to kick because from a young age we are taught to listen to our elders, to respect our teachers and do what they say. And we just think that somebody else knows best. And sometimes we don't shake that idea. But you have to start treating any information, any advice you get as data to consider. This is a huge mental shift that I had to make, which is not easy, especially from my background. I come from a traditional background. My parents are Egyptian who immigrated to the US. So respecting elders is like religion. You have to, and you just have to listen to people and not question. But as I got older, I started to realize that people are giving advice with good intention, but I need to listen to what they say and make my own decisions. When you follow advice, you outsource the decision to someone else who doesn't know your business, your customers, your market. Your risk appetite or tolerance, or even your life. So you have to realize that you can't just give somebody that kind of power. When you use advice as data, though, you gather inputs from all these sources that are at your disposal. You weigh it against what you already have and what you know, and you make a decision based on what you believe is best for you. In my experience, this allows you to make the most informed decision. And listen, like I mentioned, I spent over $300,000 in coaching over my career. And I have to say, even though some of that money was not well spent, but even when I got bad advice, I learned what bad advice looks like. So I spent money on business coaches, life coaches, communication coaches, voice coaches, acting coaches, because at the end of the day, I'm in front of the camera. I need to know how to perform in front of the camera. And every single dollar was worth it because I either learned what to do or I learned what not to do, but not because I did what they told me, because they gave me the information I can use to make a better decision for myself. And here's the truth. That took me years and a lot of money to fully internalize that I'm not paying for somebody to tell me what to do. I'm paying so that they can give me information that I did not have that can inform my own decision. I'm going to tell you something that it took me a long time to realize and understand and internalize. And I need to tell this to you and I want to drill it in your brain and I need you to listen to me clearly. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows your business better than you. Don't think that if you hire a coach that they're going to be able to make better decisions for you. No, they're here to help you, inform you, guide you. But at the end of the day, you know what's best for you and your business. Anybody that's telling you otherwise is somebody you shouldn't trust. Okay? Nobody knows your business better than you. Nobody knows your customers the way you do. Nobody has the full picture of your situation, your history, your constraints, your goals, your advantages. Not even the best coaches in the world are going to know that better than you. So use the advice Take it seriously, but make the decisions yourself. Filter number 2: They actually have done it. This is a very important filter that will allow you to fast-track your success because you're getting real valuable information. And this filter immediately eliminates most of the noise. And here it is: before you take any advice from anybody seriously, ask yourself one question. Has this person achieved what you want to achieve? Have they done it already? There's a big difference between following a Sherpa up a mountain that has been up that mountain countless times versus somebody who's never been up any mountain. So you need to be super vigilant about this. For example, if you hire a coach and they were successful, let's say in the podcast space, they have a very successful podcast and you're really impressed by their podcast. And all they've really done is have a successful podcast. They've never built a business or they never done anything else. You, on the other hand, are growing a retail company, okay? You're selling e-commerce items on your website and you want to grow your business. This person might be impressive in one area, but they've never done what you are doing or what you'd like to achieve. So it's better for you to find somebody who's built a great e-commerce business and has been in retail for years and has all the success that you always wanted and ask them, how did you do it? That is a cheat code in life, is figuring out who has been on this journey before and getting advice from them, asking them what to look out for. And when I was trying to grow my SaaS business, Webinar Ninja, this is exactly what I did. I hired a coach. My coach was Dan Martell. He's a big shot now on social media, but before that he was coaching people one-on-one. And I say this with love and care because Dan's a dear friend. I say big shot. Because he is a big deal now and he's got a best-selling book and he's built a great empire with media. But he built and sold 3 SaaS businesses, 3 software businesses. I went to him because he has done 3 times what I wanted to do: build a business that's successful enough, that's big enough, that could be acquired. So ask yourself the question: are they speaking from experience? Are they just a consultant who's, you know, advising other companies but have never actually built company like that? Are they someone who reads a lot about the topic but has never really done it? You need to make sure that they actually have done it. They actually have been in the trenches, have fought the wars, and are alive and can tell you the stories. Why? Why am I telling you this? Because the advice and the information they're going to give you is not theoretical, it's practical. They lived it. They know exactly what's going to happen because it's happened to them, okay? And there's something about life and business that is really magical, and that is that there are no unique stories. You know, the same challenges that you're having in your business, in a similar business like your coach or somebody you're taking advice from, happened to them. It's just history repeats itself. So instead of you learning lessons the hard way through failure, you can learn through their successes and their failure. They're going to tell you what to look out for. Also, they're going to tell you how to take advantage of opportunities that they didn't take advantage of. So before you go deep with following somebody online or taking their advice or, you know, watching their YouTube videos, take a quick moment to do a Google search on them. Look at what they've actually built, what they actually have done, what they've achieved. Does it match what you want to achieve? If yes, listen carefully. If no, be cautious because they might steer you in the wrong direction. Running a business means you're always reachable until you're not. And the moment you miss that call, that text, that follow-up, a competitor is the one that picks it up. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QO, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. With QO, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. Set up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. 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Filter number 3: What does this person in front of me have to gain by giving this advice? This is one that a lot of people ignore and frankly, they don't even think about, but it's actually the most critical. Why? Because we're all human and we all are motivated by incentives. For better or for worse, when someone gives you advice, they're always operating from some level of incentive. Sometimes that incentive aligns perfectly with your interest, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes both can be true at the same time without there being any kind of ill intention. Let me give you an obvious example. If someone tells you that NFTs are a great investment and they sell NFTs, they have a financial incentive to tell you that. Now, this might not be conscious. They're not maybe conscious of this, but they have some sort of motivation to tell you that you should buy NFTs. Their entire worldview is shaped by their stake in the outcome. They're hoping that you buy the NFT because they sell this product. So whether you like it or not, this shapes their advice regardless if they intend to or not. So let me apply this filter to myself, who's giving you advice right now. Why should you listen to what I have to share here on this podcast? What do I have to gain if you follow my strategies, you follow the frameworks I share with you on any of the episodes that we produce? Honestly, I'm telling you, think about this for a moment. Let me break it down. This podcast is free. I don't charge a dime, right? It's free to listen to, but my incentives are real and I got to be transparent about it. If the advice I give you works and you keep listening and you keep coming back and you subscribe and you know, the audience starts to grow, guess what will happen? If the audience grows, the sponsors keep coming back. So my incentive is to give you the best possible information and have it actually work for you because that way you're not only getting better and continue to listen to the show, my incentive of getting sponsors continues to grow. So my incentive actually serves you. This is why you'll notice that I very rarely even talk about, let alone sell, any other products or service on the podcast, because I want to make sure that this is a pure, easy to listen to show that costs you nothing, that you don't feel any pressure to do anything else other than listen to the podcast. That is not in conflict with your incentives. You continue to get the information, you can continue to get good strategies, advice, and continue to use it in your business. So as long as your incentives are aligned with mine, I believe that makes a great combination. That makes a great relationship. Hey, if this episode is giving you the framework you're looking for so that you can filter out advice and know who to listen to, awesome. I want you to subscribe. That's the way you can say thank you to us and the team. Us is the team. But we also have an upcoming episode that I want you to know about, and by subscribing, you'll get it immediately. Now this one's actually a pretty serious one. A fan of the show who's been listening for some time asked for advice. It's a Q&A Wednesday episode, uh, where I answer the question from somebody who did hard time for over a decade and he wants to become an influencer, somebody that has a personal brand, and he wants to share life skills with young people so they stay out of trouble. His only problem is, is that he's worried about his past. He's worried that his past is gonna come to haunt him or people won't trust him because he was in jail for a period of time. We all have some version of this in our life where we have something that maybe we feel like people will judge and we don't want to share too much of ourselves in that fear, that fear that maybe somebody will judge me. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Filter number 4: You are the one who lives with the consequences. A lot of people learn this the hard way. You don't have to learn the hard way. You can learn it the easy way by just listening to the rest of this episode. This is a filter that puts all the responsibility back to where it belongs with you. Okay, here is a scenario that plays out constantly in business. A coach gives you advice. You follow that advice. That advice doesn't work. What happens? Okay, the coach moves on to their next client. They don't deal with the consequences. You deal with the consequences of that decision. You alone, because the consequences are yours. You own the consequences. They always were there just to give you advice, but they don't have to deal with what you do with that advice, you know. So that applies to anything, by the way— a financial advisor, a coach, a podcast host, a YouTube strategist, whatever it might be. But I actually found this to be good news. That means the decision is always yours, no matter how compelling the advice may sound, no matter how confident the person sounds when they deliver it, no matter how many testimonials this person has on their website, you take the information in, you weigh it against what you know, and then you make a decision because at the end of the day, you know, whatever happens, the win or the loss is going to be on you. You're the one who's going to have to live with it. Now, this is not a reason to distrust advice. It's a reason to take your role as the decision maker super seriously. The advice is input, like I mentioned, but at the end of the day, you're the person that has to take action with that advice or not take action. You get to decide what to do with the advice. And on that, it's not a burden. It's actually a power. The moment you stop outsourcing decisions to other people's frameworks, to other people's ideas, and you start using it to empower your own decisions, you start realizing, oh wow, I have a lot of ability to influence the outcomes of my life, of my business, of the trajectory of my success. And what this does is it stops that paralysis feeling of conflicting advice. A lot of people, they get all this conflicting advice and they're like, "I don't know what to do." Well, at the end of the day, if you believe that you are the person that has to make that decision, then at the end of the day, you are the person you have to listen to. Okay? You take the advice, you filter the information, and it's your job, no one else's, to make a decision and take action or not take action on that advice. Now, what I love about this is that you start to realize that I have to take extreme ownership. Now, when you do this, you stop blaming other people for the conflicts or the issues or the things you have to fix in your business. A lot of people, they're like, oh, I hired a coach. I've been listening to all these audiobooks. I've been watching all these podcasts on YouTube. And nothing's working. This is somebody blaming external forces. You can't do that. Why? Because what if you're successful? Are you going to just say, well, I'm successful because of all these awesome people. These people did it for me. No, you're going to take the credit, right? So if you want the credit, you also have to take the responsibility of making the decisions and owning that. This is why I always say that everything in your business is your fault. If anything is going wrong, at the end of the day, it's your fault. And I don't say this to point some fingers or make you feel bad, but I say this so that you can take ownership and realize that, hey, for example, if somebody in your team is not doing their job, whose fault is it if it's not yours? You hired them, right? If you don't train them, that's your job, right? To make sure they're getting trained, whether you train them or somebody else. You know, if something is not going well in your business, like you're not selling a product or service that you're hoping to sell, whose fault is that? You can't blame the market. You have to blame yourself. You got to say, hey, maybe I got to change the sales copy. We got to change my pricing, my packaging. Maybe I gotta show people the value that I offer. At the end of the day, when you take ownership and say, it's my job and it's my decision, you also have the power to make the change. Filter number 5, or final filter: high integrity only. This is one that is something you're going to learn as you get older and understand how to recognize integrity quickly. I personally only give advice to people I believe that have high integrity, that I believe I can trust, people that have shown and proven to me they have high integrity. You want to be around and be exposed to people that you genuinely believe have your best interests in mind, not just their own. Okay. And here's how to evaluate that. Have they been around for a while? Okay. Have they been around the block? Okay. Have they seen a few things? Have they had some experience in the world that you are part of? I'm talking about people that are not just popular and have a big following, people that actually have been in the industry for some time. They have a reputation. I'm looking for people that are consistent, that have been around for a long period of time and have been doing what they're doing for some time. This shows me that they are resilient. That they have learned a lot of tough lessons along the way and stuck it out. Okay, so they're not jumping from one trend to another. They are a pick-and-stick kind of person. Okay, they pick something, they get better at it, they become a master at it. I can learn something from somebody like that. When I Google them, I find out that the overwhelming information that's out there is positive. Okay, there's going to be some haters out there once or twice, or some bad reviews here, but if 95% of us out there is positive and there's nothing like crazy scandalous, then I know that I can trust this person, that this person is credible. The next thing I look at, which is critically important, a lot of people don't look at this and it's something that needs to be examined carefully. And that is how do they make their money? Is their business model aligned with giving you good advice, or does their revenue depend on keeping you confused, keeping you in the dark, keeping you dependent on them so that they can continually make money. This is very common online, by the way. I'm talking about people that teach you how to start an online course with an online course, right? Like, that really doesn't show you that they actually have a successful online course. It shows you that they know how to incentivize you to buy their course so that they can make more money, so they can get other people to buy their course. Another thing you can look at is how do they spend their money? What do their choices say about their actual values versus the ones they say online, the ones they say on TikTok Reels? Okay, do they actually support any charities, or are they just, you know, doing these, you know, skit charity things just for views? These are not easy questions to answer or to get information on about a particular person, and I understand that, like, there's so much information out there, there's so many Reels you're thumbing through, you can't do deep research on everybody. But if you're gonna follow somebody consistently, if you're going to listen to somebody's advice or their information or their content for a long period of time, you owe it to yourself to vet this person and find out a little bit more about what makes them who they are. Are they high integrity? Is something that you should be asking constantly. One of my favorite pieces of advice that I got from Jim Rohn, who's like the founder of personal development, he says, stand guard at the gates of your mind. You can't just let anybody jump into your mind and dump their trash in your mind, okay? You need to be vigilant. You gotta stand guard. You gotta make sure that no one gets in there without your consent. You, you vet them. Hey, who are you? Who is this person that's getting in my mind? Oh, all right, you're, you're all right. I looked you up. You're, you got integrity. You've been around for a while. You do what I want to do and you achieve what I want to achieve. This sounds good. Okay, come in. Let's see what happens, right? Let's see what you got. Don't just let anybody go in. And I personally love this advice, especially when you start your day. When you start your day, don't just Open up your phone and just let whatever the algorithm wants to give you. Don't just let anybody dump anything in your mind, right? Stand guard at the gates of your mind. So I want to get really practical with you. The next time you encounter a piece of advice that makes you question your direction, what decisions you should make in your business, run it through all 5 filters that I mentioned today before you start making decisions that will affect your life, your business, or even the way you think. Remember, anything you hear, use it as a data point. Gather all the data and then you can use all this data to make your decision. 2, make sure that the person actually does what you want to do or want to achieve. Okay, have done it before so that you are listening to somebody that understands the journey you're going on. The Sherpa that's been up the mountain. Number 3, what do they have to gain if I follow their advice? Does their incentives align with my incentives? Number 4, am I making this decision or am I outsourcing my decisions to this guru, to this person? Okay. And number 5, are they a high-integrity person? Do a quick Google search, find out what the internet says about them. 5 filters. Run every significant piece of advice through them. And as you do this over and over, you get very fast, you get very quick at this. I, I do this constantly because I like to consume a lot of information and a lot of knowledge. And I often, you know, will stop for a moment and be like, you know what, I'm gonna pause right now because this is the first time I've heard of this person. I'm gonna look 'em up later. I'm gonna go back to somebody I trust before I continue. That wraps up today's episode. If this episode has helped you think more clearly about who to listen to and how to filter what's good for you and what's not, awesome. If you wanna continue learning, there's an episode that we recently published that's all about answering the question, are successful people just lucky? Or is there something else at play? I want you to check it out because we go deep into this idea of like, yeah, of course there's luck in life, but you got to make sure that you know what to do with luck when it is at your door. You got to capitalize on your luck so that you can become successful. Because one of the most common pieces of noise you will encounter online is content that attributes success just to purely luck and that people don't work hard in combination with being ready When Luck Arrives. Go check it out. Thanks for listening and making it to the end of the episode. I'm here in your corner. I'm cheering for you. And listen, we're here. Make sure you subscribe so that whenever you need great content, great information that you can filter and you can figure out what to do with and make your own decisions, just tune into the podcast and we'll be here. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode. Courage. I learned it from my adoptive mom. Hold my hand. You hold my hand. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care at adoptuskids.org. You can't imagine the reward. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council.