5 Hard, Real Lessons from 2021 🥵

2021 was pretty hard for most people, and I'm going to share with you some behind-the-scenes, down-and-dirty, hardcore lessons. At the end of every year, before the start of the next, I sit down and ponder over many days over the Christmas and New Year period. What mistakes did I make? What lessons did I learn from them? What was in my control and out of my control that I can leverage to have a better year the next year. And a lot of people show their best self and their best side on social media, and that's not really me. I'm a kind of no-filter person, warts and all. So I want to share with you now 5 of the hardest warts-and-all lessons I've had from 2021 that you can leverage into 2022 and beyond. You could probably use these every year. But first, I want to thank you. I want to thank you wherever you are in the world and whatever platform you follow me on. I just want to thank you for your faith in me and following my work. It means a lot to me. So, um, you know, if you're listening and watching wherever you are in the world, I really love and appreciate you. Please do make sure you're following me on all channels, because if 2021 was a big year of content for me, 2022 is going to be bigger. I actually 10x'd my following in 9 to 10 months. Followers in 2021, and that wasn't going from 1 to 10 followers, by the way. So I'm going to be looking to do the same again in 2022. If you're up for the ride, if you want to saddle me up and ride the stallion into the sunset, then make sure you're following me because 2022 is going to be huge and disruptive and challenging and exciting all at once. Okay, so here we are, the 5 lessons that I'm going to share with you that were hardcore in 2021 are number 1, what your biggest threat is, and it's probably not what you think. Number 2 is what you can plan for, and it's probably not what you think. Number 3 is what the biggest energy was in the world, and it's probably not what you think. Number 4 is, um, about disrupting, and it's probably not what you think. And number 5 is the new age that we're in now. If you think about, we had the industrial age Then we have the Information Age, and I believe we're in a new age right now. At any time, if you find any of my content useful, please just hit the share button. People are always asking me, hey Rob, you know, thanks for all the content you give. What can I do for you in return? Well, other than buying all my stuff, you could do that. But look, just hitting the share button would, you know, be a way that you could show your gratitude to me and others. Okay, so number 1 in the hardest and best lessons of 2021. Do you know what your biggest threat is in business and life? It's actually probably the government. Now, it pains me to say this because I'm a guy that likes to take personal responsibility. It pains me to say this, but in reality, 2020 and 2019 proved that the government can make one decision and your livelihood can be totally at threat. Now, that might be a right decision. I'm not saying it's right or wrong necessarily. I don't want to start talking about lockdown. In this piece of content. Let's have a lockdown-free piece of content. However, what I do want to say is surely the best lesson in the last 2 years is the government can make one decision and that can completely disrupt you. So what can you do to combat this? Number 1 is you have to make sure that your income that you generate and your livelihood is not disruptible by government, is not breakable by government, which probably means you need to leverage um, the internet and have an online business, not just a local business. You probably need multiple streams of income. You probably need to be on many social media channels. You know, there are many lessons, but if the government or your employer could make one decision locally or nationally that could affect your ability to trade, that is your biggest threat. And I never thought I'd be saying this 2 or 3 years ago because I really believe in personal responsibility. I believe you control the controllables and you are ultimately in control of your destiny, your financial future, and the success in your life. But when the government can put income tax up and corp tax up a third and National Insurance up 25%, and when they can introduce all these restrictions of your ability to free trade, that was a massive rude awakening for me. It was a slap in the face, not just with a kipper, but with a massive tuna. Slap, slap, slap, one side, other side, one side, other side. And it was one of the greatest lessons ever. You know, I am a believer in what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and I am a believer in we need challenge to grow. Um, and you know, we become harder when we are put under pressure, like a diamond does. I am a real believer in that. But the problem is emotions. And so these things that are hard happen to you and you're like, I don't want it. I'm a child. My life, take it away. Save me. Because there are immature emotions coming out. So I just think this has been one of the best lessons ever. And I can tell you this, 2022, 2023, 2025, those of you that follow me pretty consistently, you will see me introducing products and services and content and launches you will see my work be de-risked as much as it can from governmental intervention. Now, if they don't reduce VAT and they bring in another lockdown, or they're bringing in all these restrictions and they don't reduce corp tax and income tax and national insurance, etc., then there's going to be big problems in the world, and people are going to probably look to earn their money in other countries where the taxes are less You know, in many Eastern countries you get a really flat rate of tax. You know, you can get 15% flat in some countries. Well, in the UK there's VAT, corp tax, income tax, National Insurance employers, National Insurance employees, business rates, council tax, yada yada yada yada yada yada. And massive increase in taxes is a big disruption to your wealth. So what can you do about it? Well, there's lots of things you can do about it. And bitching and moaning and whining and complaining is not one of them because that won't change anything. Although there's a difference between complaining and campaigning. So by the way, make sure if you're not already, you do follow me on Facebook, because on Facebook in the last few weeks I've been campaigning to support and save the small business. And on any of my Facebook Lives that I do, you can put a pitch for your business on my thread in my comments. You can link to your social media handle, your product, your service, you can generate a lead or a client, and you can do business on my social media because I want to support the small business, because I do not think our government in the UK are doing enough to support the small business. Now, by the way, if you agree with that, hit the share button and make sure that, you know, we get out to the masses that we must support and save the small business. 5 million businesses in the UK, up to 90% of the revenue and the employment generated by small businesses. So stop complaining and start campaigning. That's what I would say. Okay, hardest and biggest lesson number 2 is you have to plan for what you can't plan for. And, uh, you couldn't plan for COVID lockdown, Omicron variant mutation. You couldn't plan for it because 2 years ago we were all blissfully ignorant and naive of the reality of where our world would be now. Plannable. You have to have contingencies for things that blindside you. And how do you do that? Number one, you've got to always be adaptable. You've got to be ready to pivot immediately. You've got to be lean and agile. You've probably got to have some kind of cash reserves or liquidity to be able to burn through, you know, loss-making months. I haven't really revealed exactly how our main businesses have gone through the lockdown, um, and coming out of the lockdown, because I kind of wanted to be a bit respectful for those that are struggling. However, you know, you need the reality, and the reality is it's been a roller coaster for me and my businesses, as I'm sure it has for yours. Now, when COVID happened, I was on a semi-retirement, about my fifth, enjoying life, doing not much but sharing content on Clubhouse. By the way, if you're listening on Clubhouse, make sure you're following me. And it was all life is good, chilling on Clubhouse, and then bang, lockdown disrupted, unretired. And I started working, getting up at 3, 4 in the morning and working through to 9, 10, 11 at night for a good few months because I'd never seen this before. And this was the biggest threat to my businesses and my real estate portfolio that I'd ever seen. The biggest ever. Like, if they shut down our sites, which at one point it looked like they could, that would have meant about $25 million worth of developments I wouldn't have been able to build, and millions and millions worth of loans I'd have had to repay, and contractors I'd have to have paid. And that could have, you know, there was a real possibility that that could have maybe not wiped us out, but certainly wiped a lot of our cash out. And I've never experienced that before. And no, I've never read that in any business books. And then my education business— so I have a training business. At one point it was doing over $20 million a year, and then the government made it illegal for me to trade, and the government stopped me from running any events because they stopped us all from running events. So my sites could get shut down and my ability to trade in my training businesses could be completely and utterly taken away from me overnight. And that's what happened. That is what happened. Now you can never plan for that, but you can plan for what you can't plan for. So some lessons that I got that I should have got already. Number 1, I should have already been a global business. Number 2, I should have already had online courses and trainings and masterminds, et cetera. Number 3 is we were doing 2 big developments, probably should have just been doing one. Number 4, and actually we were this, and this was a good lesson. You need to be liquid. You know, there's a lot of these American gurus saying cash is trash. Cash is worthless, get rid of all your cash, it's trash. Not in a freaking lockdown, it isn't. It's pretty valuable, and you need liquidity to be able to burn through months or years of an inability to earn or trade. So when you make plans, you also now have to make plans for what you can't plan for, which means can you change your business model instantly? Can you adapt and evolve? Can you reach the masses? Can you build a community quickly? What happens if your Facebook account gets shut down? Can you replace all of those followers and fans? What happens if business as you know it and as you trade stops? Can you trade somewhere else? What a great, hard, real lesson of 2021. Thank you for that lesson. And you know, the government intervention— what a great, hard lesson. But thank you because it's real. Okay, number 3, big hard lesson. Of 2022 and beyond. By the way, make sure you stay and watch and listen to this entire piece because I've got 3 more pieces of content to share on my hardest and best lessons of 2021 to take you eyes wide open in 2022, ready for anything the government fire at you. Um, I've got a special gift for you. I'm actually celebrating a 6-year anniversary And it's not me being sober or coming out, just saying. But I am celebrating a 6-year anniversary and I want to give some gifts with you to celebrate. I do have an ulterior motive. That's why I'll be giving all these gifts away for free. So make sure you stay with me. Okay, number 3 hard big lesson of 2021 and beyond is, um, emotions of fear. So look, I'm, I'm pretty rubbish at a lot of things. I'm not very good at research. I don't have a filter between my brain and my mouth. There's no valve there that other people have. Think before you speak. No, I speak before I think. One thing I'm usually pretty good at is managing my emotions, and I don't sell when everyone else is selling. I don't buy when everyone else is buying. I don't let my latent emotions usually get the better of me. Be greedy when others are fearful. Be fearful when others are greedy, you know, big gurus had said, like I think Warren Buffett. And observe the masses and do the opposite, like I think it was Walt Disney that said. You know, manage your emotions and master your life. And I got pretty good at that over 15 years worth of practicing. And then there was global fear. So I can just about handle local fear. I could maybe handle national fear. That's pretty hard. I can kind of just about handle fear in myself or my peers, but when there's a global pandemic of fear, that makes wise decisions really hard. And the last time I really felt that sense of global fear was the 2008 recession, you know, the banking crisis. But my business partner and I were fairly lean. We'd only started up a couple of years ago. We didn't have a massive overhead. And actually, all the issues in the banking sector and with these big bloated businesses it didn't really affect us. And actually, it was a really good time for us. You know, they say more millionaires are made in a recession than any other time, and that was probably the fertile ground for my, my business partner and I to become millionaires. In fact, I was a millionaire by age 31, and 2008, I would have been about 28. So you could say it's a pretty good time. But you know, when you've got a much bigger enterprise and the world is in fear— I'd never felt a pandemic of fear before. You know, everyone was talking about the pandemic, but let's be honest, the, the fear was probably the bigger pandemic than the pandemic itself, or at least equally as big, I would say. And I'll be honest, I succumbed to it a little bit, and I'm going to forgive myself because I didn't know what I didn't know. But yeah, I, I've been building up a watch collection for many years. I love watches. I'm a passionate collector, but it's also a good store of value and a good investment. And I was pretty pleased with myself that pretty much every watch I'd ever bought had gone up in value. My Patek Philippes, Richard Milles, Rolexes, Audemars Piguet. I bought pretty wisely, not just watches that I liked, but watches that I thought would go up in value. And, you know, they say in holding, the best holding period is forever. And, you know, a lot of the hodlers that hold on for dear life, you know, just hold Bitcoin forever. And, you know, Warren Buffett, my favorite holding period is forever. And I knew all of this stuff. Logically, intellectually. I've read 3,000 books. I love business and entrepreneurship. I'd studied a lot. Yeah. And then bang, global fear. Everyone panicking. My wife panicking. My business partner panicking. My MD panicking. Everyone panicking. Everyone's saying, you need cash, sell everything. Shit, everything's gonna go to shit. You need cash, sell everything. Ah. And I succumbed to it. And I don't usually But let's be honest, I can forgive myself for it based on what the world was going on. So I sold a Patek Philippe Nautilus. I sold it for £35,000. I actually made £10,000 on it. That's a lot of money to make on a watch. I made a third of its value. Anyway, it's worth £120,000 now. I sold my favorite Richard Mille. I bought it for £75,000. I sold it for £90,000. Look at Rob making money on every watch he sells. It's now worth £250,000. I sold my Audemars Piguet, £60,000, up to £160,000. I saw my Bitcoin sold a lot at $10,000, it's now $50,000. And I made the mistakes I never thought I'd make. And the reason is because of fear. Fear in many ways is your greatest ally, it is your greatest protector. But in modern society, it can be your greatest enemy, because what we do is we aren't able to contextualize fear. And I acted like my life was in threat. Sell everything, liquidate, just have cash and hide. And it wasn't really what I wanted to do, but it was, you know, the people I trust and love around me and the people I admire who hadn't been through anything like this. That was how they were feeling, and that fear leaked into me. So what's my greatest lesson? Do not succumb to other people's fear. Do not succumb to national and global fear. Do not succumb to your market sphere. Have a clear strategy. Make sure that you're covered from government intervention and you're protected. Make sure you have a plan for what you can't plan for, and then follow your mission, follow your path. Stand strong. Have you seen the film 300? You know, they all hide behind their shields in a little pack and they keep their formation. Hold your formation. Few people are saying, Rob, why are you shouting? One, because I love this stuff, and two, because I've got a new podcast microphone that I've plugged in and it makes me sound louder than I really am. Okay, right, so I've got two more things to cover in my five hardest lessons in 2021. These are real, that I experienced, aren't read in books. You know, I've read 3,000 books in my life, on physical books and audiobooks. And I was asked recently in an interview, I was interviewed on someone's podcast, and she said to me, Rob, you know, what are the best books you've read in 2021? And I said, I've only read one book, and I've only read two books in the entire lockdown. And the reason is I didn't need to read books in the last two years to get business advice. I needed to have a business, and I needed to just deal with COVID and lockdowns and government interventions and global fear and panic. It was actually the best lesson ever that I couldn't get in 3,000 or 30,000 business books. So yeah, you know, there's always an upside to the downside. I'm a real believer in that. Okay, so 2 more lessons to share, but before I do, I want to give you the gift before I, um, forget it. Or just, um, those of you that have stayed with me, I want to make sure I award you. So it's actually the 6-year anniversary in a few days' time of my podcast, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. Now I want to celebrate with you, therefore I'm going to give you some gifts, and I have an ulterior motive, which is why I'm giving these gifts away for free. So first thing you need to do is just go to robmoore.com/pod. Rob Moore dot com forward slash pod. I'm just going to share the link with you, uh, robmoore .com/pod. Now go there right now because I'm going to finish this in a moment once I've finished my last 2 hardest lessons of 2021. Now at robmoore.com/pod, there's 4 special new gifts waiting for you, and I'll tell you what they are in a minute. But I want to tell you the reason why I'm giving you these gifts at no cost, even though they've cost me a lot of time to create and I could sell them for good money. My ulterior motive is when it is my, um, 6-year anniversary the day of, which is in a few days' time, and I want to make sure I'm in my rightful position in the podcast business charts, which is number 1. So my ulterior motive for giving you these gifts at robmoore.com/pod is that on the thank you page, once you just pop your details in so I can send them to you on email there's a link to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or on Stitcher, which is non-Apple. All I ask from you is that you subscribe to my podcast. That's the, the fair exchange. The more of you that subscribe, obviously, the higher up the rankings I'm going to go. Now, of course, nearly 1,000 episodes in 6 years of the Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast is also massive value to you. I've interviewed 16 billionaires. I've got my 17th coming soon. I've interviewed Floyd Mayweather twice. I have got hundreds of interviews with people who are worth $100 million, $500 million, um, and more. So that's a massive benefit to you. But my ulterior motive for giving you all these gifts for free is so that you'll subscribe to my podcast. And by the time my anniversary of 6 years and nearly 1,000 episodes is here, hopefully that'll help me bump up the charts. So here's what you need to do. Just go to robmoore.com/pod. Um, and you'll see on that page, just do it right now and I'll talk you through it. Pop your details in, make sure you put your proper email address in and you, you're clear, you know, you don't, um, move into spam. You make sure that my email is whitelisted because I'm actually going to send it to you in the email. And so if you put a fake email address in, you won't be able to get access to it. But, um, in the last 9 months, I more than 10x my following, following from the previous 7 years on social media. I went from half a million to 1.1 million. So I'm going to share with you 19 lessons learned on 10x-ing your social media following. I also make, um, money on about 15 different monetization tools on social media, and there are about 20. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you the 20 ways to monetize the creator economy. Now that's a massive bonus, by the way. I'll come back to that in a minute. I'm also going to share with you all the best strategies and tactics that I've learned to build a vast personal brand for free on social media, repurposing, omnipresence, and newsjacking, how to hack virality, how to do collaborations and partnerships. These are all individual, unique, and new documents that you can gain instant access to at robmoore.com/pod, uh, and then people always asking me, Rob, I need outsourcing help, admin help. Um, so I've collected a document on finding a VA, a PA, and a social media manager, and then managing a VA, a PA, and a social media manager, and then interview questions and job descriptions. So there's a heck of a lot that I'm giving you for free at robmoore.com/pod. Now, the reason I'm doing it is because I want to celebrate the 6-year anniversary coming soon of my podcast, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. And I'd like to bump up the rankings so that when I'm on my anniversary, I'm hopefully at number 1. And how you can help me with that is once you've popped your details in at robmoore.com/pod, the thank you page will just ask you to click a link. And if you listen on iTunes, subscribe on iTunes. If you listen on non-iTunes, i.e., um, you know, your Samsung phone, then just subscribe on Stitcher. Jessica's just done it. Give me a done in the comments if you've done it. Um, really appreciate your support in this, by the way. This would be good for me and good for you. Now, the final document, which I think is a killer, um, gift from me, is, you know, people are often saying to me, Rob, I like the idea of multiple streams of income on social media, but how do I actually unlock the features? How do I get Facebook Stars? How do I, um, sign up on Patreon? How do I get, um, Facebook supporters, Instagram badges, etc.? Well, what I've done is I've got my VA to do a massive amount of research, and he has found the 20 different ways to monetize social media with the upfront monetization tools— support to stars, badges, gifts, coins, etc. And then what he's done is he's written a document, a 20-page document, one page per monetization tool— how to unlock it, what criteria needs to be met, how to apply, what links you need to go, because it's really hard to navigate social media and you know, get anywhere messaging TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and YouTube. So he has kind of, um, simplified all of that for you. So you get all of that— 19 Ways to 10x Your Social Media Following, 20 Ways to Monetize the Creator Economy, How to Build a Vast Personal Brand on Social Media, and a VAPA and social media managing and outsourcing document. It's all at robmoore.com/pod. Let me know in the comments. And once you've registered, um, someone's just said here on my TikTok Live, this guy got me into property, I'm now 27 and financially free. Thanks, Rob, you're a legend. Matt on, I really appreciate you. Okay, I want to get cracking though. I just wanted to give that as a gift and celebrate. I'm a bit of a loner, to be honest. I don't really celebrate at all. I don't know if you can relate to that as an entrepreneur. We don't celebrate enough. On to the next, on to the next, on to the next, on to the next. We never really pat ourselves on the back. So I wanted to celebrate with you 6 years in podcasting, you know, 1,000 episodes. I reckon there's not even 0.001% of the population that have done 1,000 podcast episodes. So let's celebrate together. All right, great. So I want to cover the final 2 points on the hardest real lessons in business and entrepreneurship and life in 2021, behind the scenes, no filter. So could you please hit the share button? I just want to help as many people as possible. Of course, my ulterior motive is I want to reach more people as well. I don't mind sharing my ulterior motives. A lot of people hide them. I share them. Okay. Number 4, hard lessons in 2021. If you don't disrupt yourself, someone else will. The government might disrupt you. COVID might disrupt you. A lockdown might disrupt you. A competitor might disrupt you. An illness might disrupt you. A piece of bad news might, you know, catch you blindsided. You. So you have to be ready to disrupt yourself before other people do. So a great question to ask is, if I was a competitor of mine, how would I beat me? How would I break me? How would I outthink me? So for example, if I was a competitor of me, I would look at me before COVID and go, well, Rob's training businesses aren't really global. He hasn't really mastered the livestream online or the Zoom event. You know, he's pretty good at the online events, but they're local and national, they're not global. If I was going to disrupt and outcompete Rob Moore and his businesses, I would be running global Zoom livestream events. I would be having outsourcers across different countries. I would probably be translating my content into different languages because the globe is a bigger audience than the UK. So there you go, there's an example. So you have to think about how you would wipe you out and defend yourself from wiping you out. Now, when you think about how you would wipe you out, you come up with strategies and tactics to grow. So it's actually quite a valuable exercise. Disrupt yourself, otherwise someone will disrupt you. Um, and there's big, um, examples of that in the world. Kodak, you know, they invented digital photography and it disrupted them. And, uh, Netflix disrupted Blockbuster, but Blockbuster was streaming before Netflix were. So they're very, you know, their very thing disrupted them. Okay, and then number 5, hardest and best lessons of 2021, is, um, the new age, I believe, is decentralization. So we had the Industrial Age, you know, where the factories were built and the Henry Ford, you know, ethos of, um, the factory line and making production quicker, easier, and more scalable, lower cost. And then we had the Information Age, didn't we, with Google and the internet and social media and the free nature of global information exchange, low cost or free, at the speed of light through fiber optics. I am currently right here, right now, information exchanging on Wisdom, on Clubhouse, on my podcast The Disruptive Entrepreneur, on my Facebook Lives, and on TikTok. So information was the previous age which disrupted the industrial age. The new age is decentralization, and that is where more and more social media platforms disrupt and decentralize media. That is where the metaverse disrupts and decentralizes web. That is where cryptos and NFTs, etc. Decentralized finance and banks and currency. You know, there's a movement called DeFi, decentralized finance, disrupting the big banks and taking the power out of the globalists and into the individualists. And you know, the DAOs, the decentralized companies where real true democracy in enterprise is created, where Social media is your radio show, your TV show, where what used to be Sky and HBO and Fox, you know, they owned 80% of the media narrative. Now you on Facebook Lives, you on Wisdom Rooms, you on Clubhouse rooms, you on Facebook Audio rooms, you on TikTok Lives and Instagram Lives, you, you are your own media channel now, your own TV show, radio host, your own DJ. That's what you are, your own entire media empire. You can create your own currency, you can create your own creator coin or social token. You can essentially decentralize out— decentralize yourself away from control of banks, control of government, control of media. And this is a massive movement. And someone's just said in my comments here, decentralization is really needed. It is the new movement, uh, and, um, Raoul Pal calls it the exponential age. Exactly. Well, everything's exponential now because of Moore's Law, of the doubling of the speed of technology and information, or the amount of, um, I think it's, um, capacity on a, on a chip. But basically, in layman's terms, every 2 years technology doubles in its speed and capability and size and memory. So everything is exponential now. So in the future, you have your own TV show, your own radio show, your own talk radio show, your own community. You have your own currency, your own bank, your own market, your own economy, your own rhetoric, your own opinion, your own voice. Really, really interesting, powerful times. But we need to embrace the decentralization economy and movement. We need to be agile and liquid. And this is why I've been shouting at you for so long: get on all the social media channels. Because people have donated me stars here on Facebook. I have sponsors on my podcast. On Wisdom, you earn mentor badges. On TikTok, people donate you gifts. There will be live ads fed into my Facebook Live video. So 3 or 4 times I'll earn income from this one piece of content. And if it was controlled by Skype, nothing. In fact, I'd have to pay to play. All right, exciting times. Let me do a quick summary. So I wanted to share with you the hardest and best lessons of 2021 that were real, behind the scenes, that actually happened. I wanted to, um, full transparency, no filter. So 2021 was an up and down roller coaster for myself and my businesses. We made £13,477,000 net profit in November 2021 in one of our real estate developments. But I wouldn't say we nearly lost it getting there, but it was hard times. We're just securing and finalising the, the drawdown of a £12 million loan on that building. We've got 159 tenants in it. We lost a couple of contractors. We had to take one contractor to court and settled just beforehand, and we lost a couple, one or two main contractors. So it was up and down, but it ended up good. Um, in my training businesses, we had months where we were losing more than £100,000 a month and months where we were making £100,000, £150,000 a month. It was up and down. We had 6 dark months losing 6 figures every month, and then we had up maybe our best 5 and 6 months ever, pound for pound ever. We had our best August and our best December ever. So it's like, I think that COVID and the lockdown and the government interventions, I think what they did was they polarised life. The highs were higher and the lows were lower, and I definitely felt that. So the hardest and biggest lessons of 2021, which I would just ask you to share with as many people as possible, because these are real from real experience. The biggest threat to you is probably government intervention, even more so than your own management of what you can control. So protect yourself from lockdowns, from shutdowns, from semi-shutdowns, from regulation, intervention, from increased taxation, etc. Number 2, you have to plan for what you can't plan for, which means you have to be ready at a moment, at a moment, to be agile and liquid and fluid. And pivot and change and evolve and adapt. Okay, number 3 hard lesson of 2021 was that, um, there was a global pandemic of fear, and it was harder than you've read in any book about managing that fear. Observe the masses and do the opposite. Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. It's easy, that's just what you do. Yeah, and then when everyone is panicking, that's a bit harder. And I succumbed to some of the fear. I liquidated some assets I shouldn't have done. I made some short-term, um, you know, just keep the ship afloat. You know, if there's a little bit of a hole in the hull of a boat, the captain should still stand on deck and look into the future and guide the ship. Everyone else should be, uh, hands on deck. And I got too much hands on deck and bought into, you know, yeah, it was definitely a great lesson. I will much more stand firm despite what's being thrown at me. You know, I used to plan religiously every year. I didn't make a plan for 2020 because the plan was survival, but I should have made a plan anyway. Okay, number 4: disrupt yourself or someone will disrupt you. Figure out how to disrupt you and you will know how to evolve yourself and your business. And then number 5: if we went through the industrial age into the information age, we're now in the decentralization age, and I am now currently sharing content, content in a decentralized form. Live on Wisdom, live on Clubhouse, live on Facebook, live on Instagram, and live on my podcast, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. So the first thing I would just say is make sure you're following me on all those channels. The channel that you're not following me on but you're listening to or watching, follow me. The channels that you're not following me on, make sure you're following me. I do different content on different channels. I go ranty and do rants on Facebook. I do how-to tactical step-by-step content on Clubhouse. I do interviews on my podcast, The Disruptive Entrepreneur. So just make sure you're following on all the channels and go right now to robmoore.com/pod for your special anniversary gifts from me. Rob Moore dot com forward slash. And those gifts are to celebrate the 6-year anniversary in the next few days. Of my Disruptive Entrepreneur Podcast. So I've done about 1,000 episodes and been being a podcaster nearly 6 years. And to celebrate with you, I've got some gifts waiting for you at robmoore.com/pod. Now, my ulterior motive for giving you those gifts and not charging you, just make sure you put your correct email address in, is that, um, I'm looking to go back up to number 1 in the charts on my anniversary. I think that would be a nice place to be. Someone's nicked my spot. I need it back. So, um, when you go to robmoore.com/pod and claim those— not one, not two, not three, but four gifts from me— you'll see on the thank you page it just asks you to click a link to subscribe on iTunes if you use an Apple device, or subscribe on Stitcher if you use any other device. That's all I ask of you in exchange for the 19 Ways to 10x Your Social Media Following, which I did in 2021. The 20 ways to monetize the creator economy, um, and I monetize many of them, 6 figures a year on many channels. And when you add that all up, that's 7 figures a year. How to build a vast personal brand for free on social media and how to find and manage VAs, PAs, and social media managers. That's one big missing link that most entrepreneurs have. So I want to thank you so much for tuning in. It's been a real pleasure. Make sure on Facebook you just hit the share button. Now I am campaigning to support the small business. I believe that the government could really damage the small business. The PM is just getting some guidance from scientists right now, and today or tomorrow there's going to be another announcement. And if businesses are restricted from their ability to trade but taxes are going up and not down, we have a massive problem in society, and it must stop. We must stand tall and support the small business. So on my Facebook Live, please hit the share button now and tag in your small business. Put an outrageous overt pitch for what you do. Share any links or websites or anything that you do on my Facebook videos. Do it now, and then tag in any other small business you know about, because it's going to take people like me to stand against the government because writing to your MP will do nothing. I wrote to my MP and the MP came back and went, well, actually, you know, we're not introducing COVID passports because you just need to have a lateral flow test. Thanks for writing, bye. And did absolutely nothing. You get 10,000 signatures, what's that going to do? Nothing. Whereas some of my videos have been getting 100,000 views, 500,000 views, nearly a million views, and there are thousands of comments and thousands of shares of people like you Supporting— save and support the small business. Tagging your businesses in, tagging small businesses in. That's how we can make a difference together. So if you're watching on Facebook, hit the share button, tag your small business in, tag another small business in. And if you're not yet following me on Facebook, go and do that right now. If you don't risk anything, you risk everything.