How to network and invest in youself, with Michael Ellsberg | Ramit's Brain Trust

So I'm fascinated by this, by this idea of soliciting advice. I want to dig into it because I think so few of us do, because it's very intimidating. And even if we do, we ask the wrong people and we ask in the wrong way. Like if I go up to someone I trust, let's say a good friend, I say, hey, man, what do you think about my business idea? And 99% of the time they're going to say, yeah, that sounds great, they're going to find it positive. So. So how do you actually get candid feedback from people?

So you have to ask for it. You have to say, I want you to be candid. I want you to give me your hardest shot, and I won't be offended. And you gotta follow through on that. Cause if you say, I want your hardest shot, and then you become a crybaby when they give it to you. They're gonna pull their punches in the future. You want people to be as brutally honest as possible. I learned this one from being a writer where I would submit drafts to editors that I trusted and it would come back a sea of red. And it was painful, it hurt. But I learned how to write well through that.

What do you think in your experience is the difference between someone like you, who's been able to solicit hard feedback and then actually take it and improve, versus other people who they get some critical feedback and they either disappear or they get really defensive, or they simply change nothing. Like, what's the difference? And what do you notice about people like this?

It's understanding that it's a. It's not about you. So it's not about that you're a bad person. You're wrong. It's about your performance. So think about any sports person. They've got coaches. Anything you're going to learn is essentially you're being coached by someone who's consistently giving you feedback. So a musical instrument, a sport, a dance, anything like that. All it is is feedback. And basically your level of success is how open you are to that feedback. So getting that, it's actually not. It's not. Just a lot of people think like, oh, like in school, like, I'm going to write this essay. The main work was writing the essay, and then the teacher will give a few little comments and that's the feedback. It's almost like an add on. No, the feedback is the main reason you do it. That's how you learn.

Love that. Why do you think people don't solicit feedback?

It's these negative spirals. So if you have low confidence, if someone is going to say something negative to you, it's going to trigger that low confidence and you're just going to go down in a spiral again. What we have to do is create an upward spiral where your confidence goes up a little bit and you get some more feedback, you improve based on that feedback and you come back for more and you get just a little bit better. So it's a stepwise thing where you're stepping up. More confidence, more feedback, more confidence, more feedback. So today, for example, I just finished introduction to my new book. I've been working on this for almost a year. No one's seen anything. I sent it out and I said to everyone, I sent it to be brutal. And the reason I'm able to do that is because if they come, I have enough confidence now where if they come back and they say this, this is horrible, you have to do it over. This is a disaster. I just know that I'm going to be able to take it. Whereas when I was struggling earlier as a writer, stuff like that could have devastated me and had me depressed for months.

How do you know when you're getting bad advice? A lot of people, especially in Brain Trust, they have people around them that are critical of self development. Like there's actually a thread in our community where people said, what do you tell your friends about Ramit's brain trust? What do you tell them? And people like, I tell them, it's like this community. And then their friends will say, sounds like a cult. So they're not supportive and they're critical and they're concerned trolls. They're like, are you sure? I'm really concerned that if you put this personal information on the Internet that people can find out about you, like all these subtle ways of making you doubt yourself. And the fact is, a lot of us do doubt ourselves. We know it. We're kind of like, hey, I don't know if this is the right thing to do. Should I be in this program or should I be at this conference? And then when you have 10 other people saying, I don't know about that, you really start to feel very low self confidence. So what do you do when you're getting bad advice? How do you recognize it? How do you deal with it?

There's a saying, the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. So the fruit is the advice. So just look at the tree. So if someone is saying, oh, you shouldn't do those self development programs, that's all a bunch of bull, you know, you should hide yourself on the Internet. You should stick with the crowd. That is advice. So look at the tree. Who's the tree giving the advice? And it's probably someone who, my guess is is in a middle management job who in a kind of bureaucratic situation where there's a premium on fitting in and on not sticking out. If that's what you want to do, you should follow that advice. My advice tends to be pretty edgy, pretty individualistic, pretty in your face. It's really bad advice if you want to fit into a corporate bureaucracy. I'm totally unemployable. Like I'm just. That's why I'm self employed is because I can't be employed. I speak my mind. I like to keep my own hours, I like to sleep in all these things that don't fit in with working in a bureaucracy. So if you want to work in a bureaucracy, you shouldn't listen to my advice. If you want to be self employed you should listen to my advice over someone who's not self employed. So it's really just looking at what results you want and listening to the people who have those results. Sa.