Make huge money milking frogs
Just yesterday I got off of the phone with a professional friend of mine who was super excited about ANOTHER webinar that is going to show some secret to making huge money milking frogs on youtube or some super obscure trick one person did and duped a bunch of people out of their gas money.
On my way to my favorite little hide away @queencitybakery I was thinking about how many of the professionals I know have this insatiable appetite for training. Scratch that...education. And it seems the more educated you are the more you think MORE education is the ticket. Are they wrong? Well I think so. I think in this DIY age it isn't about having tons and tons of education, it is about having tons and tons of experience.
Here are a few folks you may have heard of that erred on this side experience it is worked ok for them:
- Mary Kay Ash
- Halle Berry
- Michael Dell
- Henry Ford
- Bill Gates
- Andrew Jackson
- Rachel Ray
- John Rockefeller
- Steven Spielburg
- Mark Zuckerburg
Ok...I'll just stop there for now. Right now if you are overly educated you are probably saying, "Hey you punk drop out, the world is run by people who have Master's and PhD. and blah blah blah." Yup, you are sort of right. The world is managed by those folks, but it is mostly owned by dropouts. Ok...let's table the college vs dropout argument and get back to this concept of overly educated.
I don't know if I can really say it better than Akhila did here, "We have become dependent on higher education to boost our lacking self esteems." In the world of entrepreneurship that is webinars, trainings, seminars, teleseminars, events, the latest books, mashable.com, linkedin groups, whatever. Look folks, if you don't get your ass in gear and put some of that stuff into practice it doesn't do you any good.
"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." - G. M. Trevelyan
"I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver. Then they would really be educated. "- Al McGuire
"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. " - Robert Green Ingersoll
"The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas." - George Santayana
My grandfather, my dad's dad, is under educated and over experienced. This allowed him to do things that all of the Master's Degree folks on the board said were impossible. In fact, I believe it takes those folks who aren't stymied by a head full of knowledge to actually get stuff done. So he worked for the company that later became Gulf Stream, the exclusive jet manufacturer. He started sweeping the floors in 1950 and worked his way up taking every promotion and eventually working in every department. I can safely say there was no one with more streets smarts in that whole corporation than my grandfather, and management knew it.
So the owners had the bright idea that they wanted to move the manufacturing assembly line from Atlanta to Bethany, OK, roughly 850 miles. No problem right? Load that puppy on trucks and trains and let's get going. Oh, but there was a caveat. They could not stop production. That's right. The assembly line had to keep churning out planes as the company could not afford to stop production for the move.
Every analyst they hired said it was impossible. Think about it...have you ever seen an assembly line? Here is their current assembly line, now back in Savannah.
Go ahead and tell me how in the world you keep all of that stuff and people turning out planes while it is going down the highway. I'll give you a moment. See if you can figure it out....See...pretty crazy huh?
How did he pull it off? He did it by not having a head full of so much over analyzation that paralyzed his ability to problem solve and just get it done. What he did have was 20 years experience and street smarts in getting people to get junk done. Did he do it? Hell yah he did.
After the whole thing was moved and not 1 plane was delayed the CEO took my granddad out on the tarmac and said, "Burt, we have no idea how you pulled that off. Every consultant said it couldn't be done. But I knew you were dumb enough to pull it off. Thank you." My grandpa said that was one of the best compliments he ever got. The cotton picking farm boy who proved THE MAN wrong. Love it.
I am going to give you a tip that flies directly in the face of how I make money. STOP BUYING SO MUCH TRAINING AND START ACTUALLY IMPLEMENTING SOME OF IT. Yes I am yelling this as I type.
Not only are you sabotaging your success with this little internal conversation, "Well maybe after I watch this webinar I will be able to _________," but also you are wasting time. I intellectually understand you probably get some sort of dopamine release in your noggin when you finish yet another training and you actually probably get some sort of adrenaline rush when the anxiety of not knowing how to do something sinks in. So in affect this process of realizing you don't know how to do something and then getting educated on that something is your own little drug addiction. The trouble is that you never get to work putting it to practice. And the few times that you actually put it into practice your results were shoddy but you forgot about learning curves and so you told yourself, "Well nice job idiot. There goes another $197 on a education that doesn't work." Again, drug addict behavior.
Bill Urell over at addictionrecoverybasics.com said, "A person can become less capable of making decisions. One thing that drug use does is it “freezes” or immobilized as a person’s decision-making capacity. They become less assertive and have great difficulty expressing opinions or needs. Often a drug user will describe the effect to be “sinking into yourself”. The world around them feeds into meaninglessness."
Had he typed "overly educated" instead of "drug user" it would have still been true. "A person can become less capable of making decisions. One thing that over education does is it “freezes” or immobilized as a person’s decision-making capacity. They become less assertive and have great difficulty expressing opinions or needs. Often the overly educated will describe the effect to be “sinking into yourself”. The world around them feeds into meaninglessness."
See...
Listen. I deal with entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs every day. And the one thing that separates the successful from the not is their ability to take what is in their head and put it into practice.
Currently their are 142 "tennis instruction" books for sale at amazon.com. You could read every single one of those and still not be as far along as have a couple of lesson out on the court.
Lack of knowledge isn't the problem. Lack of experience is.
Oh...I want to add one person to that list above.
- Mitch Jackson, owner of Queen City Bakery...quite possibly the best bakery in the country.