If you want to never make money, listen to the advice of millionaires online. It’s going to help you with your goal.
If you want to improve in the real world, it will be necessary to recalibrate your expectations to something more realistic and learn a forgotten skill known as reading between the lines.
Three properties make advice useful:
- Relevancy + Accuracy
- Practicality
The random interviews of millionaires online do not provide either of those.
You can listen to Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Musk all day, but you won’t learn much because the info they provide does not satisfy the criteria above in YOUR case.
Relevancy
Would you use a spoon as a wrench? Even if you say yes, your attempt will make for a comical experience at best no matter how nice and luxurious the spoon is.
The brutal truth is that most of us are in a situation where the advice of 1%-ers is completely irrelevant to our lives for the following reasons:
- Times have changed
It’s one thing to start a business in 1989 and completely different in 2024. Consequently, listening to “boomer’s” recommendation is akin to repairing an electric Toyota while reading a car manual from two decades ago.
It just doesn’t work regardless of how much effort you invest into decoding the instructions.
The levers that made it happen before are just not present anymore.
- You are not them.
Many of the elite present themselves as poor orphans who went from collecting plastic bottles to building supercomputers in their garages, but the reality is always different.
Most had trust funds and connections that were left into obscurity when the PR teams were writing their autobiographies. That’s done on purpose to sell you the “you can do anything you want if you work hard enough” dream.
- Red Pills are Always Excluded
Interviews with millionaires NEVER contain the true red pills. The entire talk is always focused on commonly known principles a.k.a. blue pills that get you nowhere.
The reality of this world is this, my friend:
No one gets to the top 100% honestly. No one. Everyone cheats one way or another. And that cheating may not always make all the difference, but it’s always a needed ingredient.
The same happens on smaller scales too. I bet many of you can name people in your country who’ve gotten where they are thanks to suspicious circumstances.
And if we are going to miss the most important element of the strategy, why analyze it in the first place? Why waste precious time living a weird hallucination?
- Conflicting Opinions (Success is 99% Luck)
Many successful people have conflicting opinions. Some say to focus on the customer’s needs and desires while others advise you to ignore the voices around you. Both have worked and failed in different situations.
Why?
Because nothing works all the time…
And because success is mainly dependent on timing and luck. Hate me all you want, that’s the reality.
Hard work and talent do not matter if the right circumstances are not there.
Example. If Michael Jordan was born in 1920, you won’t know his name today.
Accuracy
If you’re trying to build a store selling woodworking instruments, why would you take advice from tech millionaires?
The best advice always targets your specific goal.
Lifting is a good example. If you are an ectomorph with skinny arms, another ectomorph who has overcome this issue will be a better teacher than a mesomorph with thick bones.
The person who is going to provide the best advice for you has the following psychological profile:
- He/She resembles you in terms of (age, nationality, social class…etc.)
- He/She has accomplished or gotten close to what you want to achieve.
Those people make ideal mentors as their advice is not only relevant but also accurate.
If you’re learning from someone who hasn’t faced similar hardships to yours, you may end up spinning your wheels for a long time.
Example. If you are a short, balding dude, taking dating advice from a 9/10 6’3″ Chad with green eyes, a trust fund, and a Ph.D. in dental medicine is akin to putting a Ferrari label on your push scooter and expecting a miracle.
Of course, you don’t have to find a successful carbon copy of yourself. But you should be able to derive many similarities, at least in principle.
Practicality
The most important advice of all is ALWAYS practical. You can spend all your days reading motivational books and listening to mind-altering Instagram reels and TikTok videos made of podcast cuts, but if that information doesn’t lead to practical action in real life, it’s all a waste of time…a glorious one at that.
I’d say that 90% of the content on those topics pushed in your face doesn’t answer the criteria above. It’s entertainment at best.
How To Acquire Real Business Knowledge (190IQ Business Advice)
It’s very important to understand the following, like mega important:
Nobody wants you to succeed.
I’m serious.
If someone is allegedly giving you advice on “how to get rich/successful”, you need to activate your brain and ask this question:
“Why do they care? Why are they bothering me? Why are they so concerned with my level of success?”
The answer is obvious.
Because you are the key to THEIR success. They get rich by telling you how to get rich. Some do it more blatantly than others. Some promise more realistic results than others. Some are more helpful than others.
But all “success advice” always boils down to this – You Are The Product!
Motivational speakers couldn’t care less whether you inject heroin after their show or fap for 10 hours like there is no tomorrow as long as you pay the entrance fee or get an “early sale” for their webinar.
But to make this even more vivid I will tell you a personal story.
My phone number is in the database of some marketing company. I occasionally receive calls with offers. A while back, they were calling me from abroad to advertise a stock trading platform.
I decided to listen to the entire sales pitch more out of a desire to practice my talking skills than curiosity.
The idea was that I could make a lot of money by joining their platform. They were offering “free tutoring” too.
It immediately hit me. Why do they need me? Can’t they just make their own money on the stock exchange market with their exceptional skills?
Well, they were obviously trying to make money by getting people to sign up.
Always ask yourself this – if someone has something special to teach you, why don’t they use it themselves?
If someone has the winning lottery numbers, why are they selling them to you?
Once you comprehend this on a deeper level, you become ready for the next lesson which is:
You have to find a successful pattern yourself. Learn from that pattern and try to recreate it while respecting the laws of fair trade (no copy/paste).
How do you do that?
You stop searching for people who are directly “educating” you. Instead, you educate yourself by finding individuals who resemble you and have accomplished your goal or something close to it.
For instance, if you want to have a popular YouTube channel, you search for a similar channel in that niche and analyze how they made it. Don’t focus on their current status but on their beginning and try to determine the engine behind their success as well as the “turning point”.
Then, try to build your channel while following similar principles but give them your twist. You have to provide something unique. Otherwise, your work will be soulless.
Never steal. It’s fine to get inspired, but never steal. Always give something that only you can produce and look for leverage that other people may not have. For example, if you have a nice recorded voice, look into starting a podcast.
The same technique applies to everything else. Learn from those who’ve done what you want to do.
And always be realistic.
True Secrets Are Always Hidden
Why do you think trade secrets and patents exist?
It’s precisely because companies and individuals want to hide their insights and the true mechanism behind their businesses.
No one will ever reveal their secret formula for two reasons:
- It may be somewhat illegal/immoral
- They don’t want the competition.
If you figure out a genius way to make money, you gain nothing by putting it out there in the open.
The only outcome is that you gain more competition. And more competition always results in a smaller piece of the pie for you.
If you want blue pills, read the lines.
If you want red pills, read between the lines.
If you want the black pills, put the red pills through your intuition.
Get Practical!
And finally, we arrive at the most important business/career/result-generating advice of them all.
Get practical!
What does it mean?
Simple. Instead of listening to the fake stories about people who’ve started multi-billion dollar companies while living in the trunk of their cars, try to generate 10 bucks of net profit a month while respecting the following rules
- The activity must be legal where you live.
- The money can come from selling an item or your services.
- Don’t sell possessions that you already have. (It’s fine to buy and resell something new.)
If you manage to generate 10 bucks of net profit, you are doing well. Yes, that’s a low barrier in a world where everyone is rich.
But this is what getting practical means. It’s better to have 10 real bucks in your pocket than an imaginary pot of gold in your intoxicated brain.
Earning 10 bucks a month from a legal activity puts you ahead of more people than you might think.
Then, of course, you try to scale up. Those 10 bucks are essentially proof of concept.
One of my friends just joined Andrew Tate’s University because he wants to make money with crypto.
But my friend is broke and doesn’t have much to invest in crypto. However, Andrew Tate’s University has a secret method that allows you to invest in crypto even if you don’t have money to invest… somehow.
To get access to the information, you need to pay 50 bucks over the course of a couple months because the information is hidden from you unless you complete exams on their platform.
To make you stay on the platform longer, they don’t tell you which of your answers are wrong when you take the exams. You can retake the exam for the rest of your life if you’re unable to get 100% of the questions correct because you really need that “top secret information” that will allow you to become a crypto millionaire and date hot Russian models.
Andrew sure knows how to make money.
Good example.
If an expert in crypto is making money by telling you how to invest in crypto, he isn’t a good investor in crypto.
If someone knows how to make money from something, they won’t tell you and won’t bother you.
Great observations. I am also sometimes thinking why would someone sell their top secret to success, maybe it’s not so successful after all and it’s only about earning money from average Joe and not helpful in any way. The reality is people who don’t know you couldn’t care less about you, your achievements, most of my neighbors and people I know don’t care, would be too crazy to think some stranger at the other side of works really gives a *git about people he never saw.
Don’t JUST think in terms of earning; also think about reducing costs and expenses. The money you spend on that $100/year net flicks subscription, if you canceled the sub and save it instead, compounded at 6% over your working life (30 years) will end up giving you close to 9K dollars in a tax-free retirement account.
Consistency — in investing as well as in sport — is key. The late, great Jack Bogle’s simple investment advice made a lot of people successful without charging them anything for it (something the scammers will never be able to do).
This is exactly the case. Often, it’s easy to cut expenses too by making just a few changes in life. At least compared to earning more. Sometimes different goals in life align well too. For example, health and saving money. I lost a lot of weight last year, and as a side quest, I also saved some money because I wasn’t spending on emotional eating that much.
One of the biggest regrets in my life is that I found Bogle too late in my life. If I had found him when I was young, I would be in a very different situation now. Although I’ve never made that much money in my life (and I never will), there still have been times when I did earn a lot by my standards. Sadly, the money often came from stupid things like working long days, night shifts and weekends. Nevertheless, at least some of that money should’ve gone to low-cost index funds, but I just didn’t know better.
I just always thought that investing money was some shady business. I misunderstood it to something like day trading, which is the furthest way from what I should have been doing with my money. And the big banks in my country do not make it any easier, they just try to con you to buy their overpriced products that eat your profits pretty much completely in the long run, making the banks bigger and bigger.
And consistency, that is indeed the key. In health and in wealth. It’s so difficult for us to think about the future. It’s unfortunate that we often realize these things when everything is fucked. Health is the big one here of course. It’s terrible how it can be neglected for decades but then you’re at a point when it must become your main priority in your life. At least if you want to enjoy the money you may have potentially saved on the way.
As a side note:
I got a warning from Facebook for posting this article on the page. They said that it doesn’t follow the “proper language”.
Imagine this. Seriously. This article is offensive to Facebook. What era are we living in?
This is starting to be ridiculous. Except that it doesn’t really make me laugh. You’d think that Facebook has a lot more on their plate they should worry about than this “offensive” article.
For real?
Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true though. Either their moderation AI is getting even dumber than before, or this article is the kind of “misinformation” they are actually scared of (because it is hard and honest facts, not silly conspiracies that are empowered on purpose to further divide and distract the masses). Crazy to see how the distortion of reality in all senses is becoming the norm thanks to this age of social media.
It said something like this “this publication doesn’t meet our criteria and will be pushed down” whatever that means. They didn’t delete it.
Yes, it’s possible the AI robot is just…well AI.
Facebook is a fascist! They have “liberals ” working for them, and they program the AI to ban certain words because they don’t fit their current agenda.
If a teenage sl*t posted a thong picture at the beach it’s normal and “empowering” (because of the agenda that is being pushed on people today)
The article probably got tagged as offensive and dangerous because you used the term “black pill”. To main stream media this is a term used only by violent far right extremists.
Maybe. But I don’t think their AI actually goes to the link and reads the article but who knows…
This is the kind of content I decided to follow your blog for despite not being really into bodybuilding.
Great insights and valuable advice about a topic that is often sugar-coated with pretty lies and delusions, especially in 1st World countries. I feel that in 3rd or “2nd” World ones, the reality of how most people rise to the top is more evident (and ironically, more honest), so those who grow up in them can see more easily through the facades than those who don’t.
Thank you for the support! I try to keep the content mixed and avoid repeating the same stuff forever. Sometimes it works; sometimes it fails.
I agree with all of your points, great article.
On a side note, I’ve always found Bezos to be interesting. If you see pictures of him very early on, he looks like a VERY normal guy. What he has achieved with Amazon is nothing short of amazing. He seems somewhat organic and legit. I do not see him giving out advice or selling seminars. He did what most of us would do after making his money, he look look amazed by shaving his head and lifting, retired, found a chick with a great rack and sails around the world.
After watching the documentary about how Amazon workers are treated…I can’t be a fan. Sorry.
I say this stuff all the time to people and nobody listens, especially the younger crowd. I’m in my 40’s and have made the mistake of trying to explain these things to a couple younger 20 something guys at my workplace. Was like pulling my own wisdom teeth with no anesthetic.
Also I find it hilarious that facebook would flag your stuff. What a backwards ass world.
The entire Internet is filled with that thinking. Everyone is a millionaire that we should be listening to. In practice….lol.
You should add your own audio widget/podcast option and avoid sending your hard earned traffic to YouTube.
YT is all about control.
Keep your audience here.
You mean like a button that you press and it starts automatically?