What Path to Follow? Part 1 - The Tendency That People Have to Choose The Wrong Path, Even if People With Professional Experience Tell Them Otherwise…

To be concise, I had the opportunity to train thousands of people directly, and the last ten years of my life I’ve spent doing presentations for possibly more than half a million people all over my home country.

An important detail is that the experience gives me a profound understand of people, I learned a lot and if you read my story you will know that I’ve been inside different social and business circles. I’ve played soccer with friends inside a favela and I’ve shared drinks with CEOs.

This was very important for me, and as I’ve shared on my other posts, I never really had a one on one mentor per say. I literally had to break my bones alone, and of course made mistakes as I’ve discussed before.

But when I was in the midst of training people, I discovered an interesting fact of about 90% of them. They ask for advice, because they need help and they are not doing well, but do the complete opposite and not pay attention at all.

I remember this one time this person I was mentoring called me to get some guidance on his finances, he had made some mistakes and he was not doing well. He had debts he could not pay, so it was very urgent for him to get his cash flow in check.

I do need to visit the cash flow idea with a lot more detail, since it’s not common knowledge, and it will require quite a bit of explaining.

But continuing my story..

I told this person about a possible solution, and gave him tasks to perform, step by step and to be quick about it so that it would work out.

Two weeks later I get a phone call, this person is complaining about everything. I asked him if he had done as I said, and he replied telling me he did not like my idea to begin with.

So I asked him, why would he waste my time asking for help? He answered because I had more experience. So I said: “that makes no sense… You understand that I know more about the subject that you, then why do you not follow it?”

Something that happens a lot is that people tend to think that our parents are all knowing, and ask them for advice on everything. For example, How much sense does it make to ask your parents for Entrepreneurial advice, if they’ve been employees all their lives? They can love you, but not know how to advice you. Their advice is always going to be based on opinions and good intentions, not in facts and experience.

In other words, advice given by people who have not experienced the situation are not very valuable. They are based in opinions and hypothesis, and if you ask for opinions from everyone you might drive yourself crazy.

Continuing the story, the person of course agreed with me and told me he would do as I said. I had guaranteed him it would work, as I had done this myself countless of times before.

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