Why learning tactics from business gurus will never work for you
Business owners just want to win.
They want it to be easy to win, too.
It makes sense then, that millions of dollars of self-help/personal-development “I can teach you to do what I did” products are sold to business owners every year.
That industry is entirely fueled by your sneaking suspicion that someone else has figured out a shortcut that you don’t know yet. That there’s an easy way to win, if only you know the trick to it.
If you only knew what that enthusiastic-sounding guru knows, you’d be getting the same kinda results they are!
… or so the thinking goes.
It’s not hard to convince yourself that you’re simply missing a secret. It’s tantalizing to think that the only thing standing between you and massive success is the “blueprint formula” that this well dressed person in the Pay-per-Click Ad surely knows.
It’s not hard to convince yourself of this, because deep down we all believe we deserve success. And we all desperately hope it can be easy.
When business is tough and we don’t get what we want, no-one wants to see the truth:
That this whole business thing is tremendously hard work and takes a ton of perseverance.
Another Truth we’d all rather avoid:
That you’ll only win after fighting (hard) to gain experience-based wisdom. And that wisdom is only found in those super uncomfortable blindspots you can’t possibly be aware of, until you’re already knee deep in them…
… yeah.
No one really wants to believe all that is true.
The problem with those truths is they suggest that if you’re not winning, it’s because you’re not good enough. And that the only thing to do is to grind away patiently to get better.
Yuck.
On the other hand, the “Business Secrets” industry offers an alternate worldview that comfortably protects your ego: It tells you the reason you’re not winning is nothing to do with YOU, your experience or smarts… it’s simply because you’re missing a simple secret.
Buy my program. Learn the secret. Get the results you deserve.
^^^ This sales pitch works because it soothes and reassures you. It tells a story about reality that almost everyone desperately wants to believe:
That the only thing between you and your dreams is a couple of technical how-to guides.
Not back-breaking hard work.
Not the hard-won self awareness to know what to prioritize and how to execute on it.
You’re not missing any of that, you’re just missing a few step-by-step strategies…
(… or so the guru industry would have you believe.)
Hard work & experience VS secrets & easy breakthroughs
I know which reality I’d rather participate in, if I had the choice.
The problem is, reality doesn’t care what you think.
There isn’t an easy way that you just get to “choose”. Certainly not with your credit card.
That’s the definition of reality: It goes on existing regardless of whether or not you believe in it.
As an entrepreneur you need to live in reality.
Gurus peddle tactics so successfully because the human mind is seduced by the idea that someone else has all the answers. We desperately want this to be the case. We want this so badly because if it’s true we get what we really want: For everything to be easy.
Lifestyle-design entrepreneurship (or “wanna-preneurship”) has exploded as a career choice precisely because so many people believe that it’ll be easy.
- Find the right guru with the right blueprint.
- Make money while you snooze by the pool.
- Order up another cocktail and post to Instagram.
That’s the dream.
It has to be. The alternative… is a terrifying nightmare.
If every aspiring, wannabe entrepreneur knew what the truly successful veterans know, they would crawl back into their 9-to-5 cubicles faster than you can say “push-button-profits”.
If they knew that execution is everything and that the shortcuts don’t work, they’d be outta here.
Creating concrete, lasting success in business requires patient, relentless execution.
A blinkered, tunnel-visioned and even slightly stupid entrepreneur who nevertheless relentlessly executes on his bad ideas — learning from all the results and non-results they yield — will eventually outperform a whip-smart shortcut seeker who’s trying to win without working.
Execution is everything.
Context is what makes the tactics work
Someone else’s shortcut tactics won’t work for you, because you can’t remove them from the context they were originally executed within.
Business is complex. (Sorry to say it!)
When a guru stands on stage at some marketing conference with a slide reading “How I grew my revenue to seven figures using Snapchat” … they’re about to sell you a tactic.
What the audience — and sometimes the guru themselves — don’t realize is that even though the tactic likely worked, it worked because of a confluence of complex, right-time-right-place dynamics.
Complexity and ultra-specific context are what made the guru’s Snapchat tactic (or Messenger Bots, or whatever) into A Big Win*.
The asterisk stands for the fact that the win only happened…
… in that particular sub-niche…
… of that particular industry…
… used by that particular brand…
… at that particular time…
… not six months earlier…
… or six months later…
If you follow a map someone else has given you, you only ever get to where they’ve already gone.
(And you arrive well after they already got there.)
In 2018, when digital platforms are being fundamentally transformed by the companies that own them every few months, you can’t afford to be late to the party.
(Remember that day Facebook decided business pages should pay for visibility?)
Super smart business gurus are in the business of being absolutely cutting edge, forging an innovative path to success… then turning around and selling the map to the plebs, once the party is already over.
Figuring it out for yourself
The lion’s share of profit and success goes to those entrepreneurs willing to do the messy, uncomfortable work of figuring out business growth for themselves.
Extraordinarily high leverage entrepreneurs become that way by developing a firm belief that execution is everything.
They believe that tactics are fine and good, but that the juice comes from the squeeze of doing itself. The best strategies are the ones you yourself formulate from first principles derived through execution, creating real market feedback then interpreting and learning from it.
This isn’t to say you can’t learn from other people
There are plenty of amazing authors and thought leaders who do incredible work. And every entrepreneur would do well to learn from them.
The ideas of great leaders and thinkers can typically be applied laterally to all sorts of industries, niches and even projects outside of business. They’re principles, not tactics or hacks.
These people don’t share the specifics of the latest social media shortcut to grow your followers, because they know that the window in which that strategy works is rapidly closing… and that the results the tactic creates probably don’t matter in the long run anyway.
The best leaders also tend to offer high-level abstract principles that can seem ambiguous and unclear to beginners. This is a good thing. It’s because the beginners need the experience of simply executing on their own ideas, in order to grok what the experts are really talking about.
HINT: If a recognized expert is teaching you something about business that it’s hard or uncomfortable for you to understand, that’s a sure sign you’re leaning into a personal blindspot that’s worth shining a light on.
Conversely, shortcut-hawkers never offer up material that challenges their audience in this sense. Why would they? They’re selling hope, not results. Their products are designed to deliver a feel-good sensation at the checkout page, like buying exercise equipment from late night infomercials.
Price is another dead giveaway that you’re dealing with a quality thinker and not a shortcut peddling guru.
Ideas want to be free. The internet makes information universally accessible, which means there’s no scarcity — ideas aren’t really worth anything.
That’s why the best business ideas come in book form, which only cost the few bucks that pay the author for her work, the publisher for packaging the ideas and for the memento of a physical book you get to proudly display.
Some things are worth paying for: Curated community, services bundled with education, things like open office hours and quality coaching. When done right, they’re very valuable. Especially anything that turns you into an execution powerhouse.
Huge price tags for pure information alone should be a giant red flag.
The ultimate proof is the fact that, if any of the info-products these gurus sell were any good… they’d be shared illegally by content pirates on peer-to-peer bit torrent networks.
People go out of their way to upload bootleg copies of Netflix shows to these networks. And Netflix only costs $10 a month for a truly quality product. So why isn’t that $2500 e-course ALSO on ThePirateBay.com?
(Answer: Because it’s not actually worth anything.)
Choosing radical self reliance instead
You can check yourself out of the shortcut-seeking, guru-worshipping world in an instant. All you have to do is simply acknowledge the truth that has been there all along:
You know what to do.
You know — deep down — what you have to act on, in order to win.
This idea is hard for people — especially anxious beginners — to accept. It’s scary. And it’s true.
You know precisely what it is you should be doing.
When you think you don’t — when you’re lost and confused in business — you know where to look for answers.
When you choose to read someone’s article or book, it’s you who makes the choice. Deep down, it’s you who knows what you need and where you need to go to find it.
Even if you’re someone who chooses to follow a real “guru”, giving them the attention and faith of a religious zealot AND giving them unspeakable sums of money… well, who is it who ultimately decided that the guru was worthy of being followed?
It was you. It always comes back to you.
Enlightenment for entrepreneurs is the realization that success actually can be easy. It’s a schlep for sure, but it’s not something that requires you to drown in self doubt and anxiety. It’s easy, because you know what to do.
Do what you know you should.
Put stuff out into the world and do not be afraid. Not everything is supposed to work, but everything you create and share will teach you something. Act on everything you learn.
Extraordinary high leverage entrepreneurs build a dynamo that oscillates between execution and learning. One begets the other, which improves and informs the other. On and on.
Don’t be fooled: This is NOT a chicken and egg problem. It always starts with execution. Execution is everything.
Thanks for reading! If you dig what I’ve said here, hitting the 👏 button (a bunch of times!) will help other people discover this piece.
I’m Peter Shallard, the founder of Commit Action: An Executive Aide for Effectiveness service that high leverage business owners use to outsource their battle for focus and productivity.
