A twenty-something man of my acquaintance has been bending the ears of anyone who’ll listen, talking about his Great Scheme to Become a Millionaire in No Time. I have to say I admire his enthusiasm and his energy, but I am dismayed by his naiveté. He has been studying his subject – stock market projections and wealth creation – for a very short time and in fact has no money to show for his trouble, though he can tell you all about how it works. His Great Scheme involves codifying his knowledge and selling it as a home-study course. He expects to retire by the age of thirty. He will fail.
Now, before you get all bent out of shape, I’m not picking on him because he’s young, and I don’t think he’s stupid – quite the contrary, he’s a bright guy. The problem is not that he’s dumb, it’s that he has no experience – he has no idea what he’s actually up against, because he hasn’t had the chance to fail solidly enough, yet. And believe it or not, failure is a very important part of any education. He’s also missing three other very important things to make his plan work: sales ability, a good suit and at least a million dollars in profit from using his system. Five million dollars would be more convincing.
Without the proof that his system will work – verifiable proof, by the way, not just his word – he hasn’t got a prayer of hooking even the most gullible investors, let alone enough people at $200 a ticket to set him up for life. (That’s what he wants to charge for seminars.) Not to mention that he needs to hire a lawyer to look over all his written and spoken material to make sure he’s not putting himself in an actionable position with anything he puts out there. As well as learning to follow the lawyers’ accepted script precisely. People who feel they’ve been swindled (whether they have or not) are very nasty customers, and they lawyer-up quickly.
A good suit and a well-groomed look is far more important than many people realize. Unless you’re already an internationally famous Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, walking out on a stage in sweatpants and sneakers is going to make the audience get up and demand their money back. Once you become a Personality you can wear whatever you want – until then, no. This guy has no idea how to properly wear clothes, let alone what to wear. His current outfits (mostly sports-related or even pseudo-gang-related stuff) will undoubtedly appeal to the younger set, but they don’t generally have money to invest.
Finally, one of the most important skills anyone can cultivate is the ability to stand up next to a microphone in front of five to ten thousand people and speak calmly, clearly and concisely – to sell not just your product, but more importantly yourself to a large audience. Most people never do this. Most people would rather face a man-eating lion than give an after-dinner speech, which is partly why most people remain losers. The young man in question has a confrontational manner, speaks poorly and is no kind of salesman. He will fail utterly. The sooner, the better.
I can almost hear the growling resentment from the younger members of the audience, the ones who insist that I’m just throwing dirt in their faces because I’m jaded and cynical. As well as old. Nothing could be farther from the truth. (Well, yes – I am old.) I actually want this young man to succeed, and if he keeps at it and learns the hard lessons of business, I think he will. But I’ve been in his shoes, with starry eyes, full of huge ideas and no real understanding of what the world expected of me. I am not rich, I have never run a huge company or owned a house on a mountain top. But I have started and closed several small companies, I have been down the myriad paths that wind through the brambles on the way to success. I have the scars to prove it. What I want to do is help this guy find his way, quicker and easier than I ever did, but I’m afraid that can’t happen. You see, like most people – especially those with more ideas than experience – he probably won’t want to listen to me. He’ll think ‘that’s fine for you, old man, but I’m different! I’ll succeed where you failed.’ Probably not. The reason I say that is because when I was his age, I said something equally silly to someone who was trying to help me, and I was too proud and too stubborn to listen. I had to learn the hard way because I left myself no choice. I drove away all those who might have mentored me because I felt I was smarter than they were, and my path was different than theirs. Both of those suppositions may have been true, but that did not give me the right to push aside their proffered help. I offended them and severely hindered myself. Because I was proud. So saying, Lesson One: pride is worthless to you. Get rid of it as quickly as you can. Lesson Two: find a mentor and listen. Lesson Three: practice, practice, practice.
I predict, if my acquaintance can take the lessons to heart and improve himself, there’s no reason he couldn’t become a stellar success. If he continues to think himself too smart to need help – he could still be successful, just much later and with a painful history. From personal experience.
From time to time in these blogs, I will try to pass on a few things I have learned in my long and apparently directionless journeys. You will not offend me if you pay no attention to my warnings or fail to learn the lessons I try to teach. If you have that much of a cob up your ass, that’s your issue, not mine. But I will continue to try to pass on what I’ve learned. If even just one person takes what I say to heart and profits by it, I have won.
TGC