Episode #36 – Troll: “You Give Terrible Advice! Absolute Rubbish!”

 

How can you invest in yourself? Why should you? A dive into my personal investments in myself and why they are worth it.

P.S. Once you listen, check out @socialbritify on Instagram and, of course, @indestructiblewealth 😉

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Troll: “You Give Terrible Advice! Absolute Rubbish!”

I knew it was inevitable. My first troll on social media, and he was pretty brutal. In this episode, I’m not focused on giving you a show about trolls. I want to share the advice that I gave, his response, and my response back. He responds to my reel on Instagram, which is a short-form video. This is where I said, “Guys, essentially, if you have $2,000 to invest, $10,000, $20,000, or pretty much anything under $50,000, the answer that I have as far as what financial assets you should buy is none.”

I know that this goes counterintuitive to a lot of the traditional financial advice that you get out there. They would say, “You want to start putting aside money, invest into the stock market in dollar cost average, and start like that.” I want to explain the difference of why my advice probably was terrible for that particular person or maybe a group of people that want to go about it a certain way and why it was fucking the best advice you’re ever going to fucking get in your life for some people as well. He wasn’t wrong when he said, “Terrible advice. Absolute rubbish.” That’s what he commented on my post. It was great.

Here’s the thing. I get this question a lot like, “What financial assets should I buy with $2,000?” My answer is always the same thing. Don’t buy anything. None. Why? When you only have $2,000 or $10,000 to invest, you don’t have an investment problem. You have an income problem. You’re not generating sufficient income to have enough money left over after you pay your lifestyle expenses and all of that to make anything interesting and make the needle move on your net worth.

Digital branding is the future of business. Click To Tweet

Everybody’s different, but I don’t think that you should be worried about investing in financial assets. What I would be hyper-focused on is developing your skills, starting a side hustle, and investing back into your own business. Focus on maximizing your cashflows. Once you have those optimized, you can start thinking about buying financial assets.

I don’t even know who he is or if it was a she. It had on his Instagram account. He didn’t have a profile pic, zero posts, and zero followers. Maybe somebody who follows me didn’t like it, made up a fake account, then wanted to tell me how bad I suck with my advice, which is fine. I can handle it. Here’s the thing. He said, “If you’re telling me I have $20,000 to invest that I can’t do both, I could invest in the stock market because if my money’s just sitting in the bank with $20,000 in the bank, I’m getting 0% return.” That’s what his response was. On the other hand, somebody else commented on the same post and said, “Gold.” I know for a fact that they’ve made a ton of money with the advice I’ve presented here with investing back into yourself. It’s funny. One says gold for the advice. The other says, “This is absolutely terrible.”

Invest Back Into Yourself

Let’s dive into what it looks like to invest back into yourself. I’ll give you examples of how I’m doing this now for this very platform. There are four things that you can do to invest back into yourself. It probably is more than this, but these are the four that are top of mind, which are awareness, books, courses, coaching, and going to live seminars.

 

Those, to me, are the most impactful and quickest things you can do to accelerate your own skills and learning so that you can exponentially increase your earning power. For me, in this brand, what I’ve decided to do is I’ve got to learn new skills. I’ve got to be able to master online marketing. There’s no way that I’m going to be able to grow my platform to the level of influence, level of impact, and level of monetization because I plan on making money off this platform. I am not doing this as a charitable business.

However, now, the whole focus is providing value, creating great content, helping you solve your own problems, and building up the know-like-trust factor to where my audience would say, “I love what you’ve given me in terms of free value. What can I pay you for that’s going to help me to take it to the next level?” What you guys got to understand about online marketing and personal branding in general, which I highly recommend that everybody interested in creating wealth, retiring early, young, and financially free, is you want to be starting to focus or start thinking about your own personal brand. This is going to give you the absolute best chance of creating that know-like-trust ability factor that’s going to create this influence and relationships with people that they’re going to want to buy from you.

Digital branding, to me, is the future of business and how giving away free content is a way to go. It is going to pay dividends into your future. The younger that you can start at it, the better. You want to be picking a specific niche that’s a focus where you can’t be talking about everything and expect to get an audience. You need to be focused on one subject, one type of audience, one niche, and hyper-focus on providing awesome value and solving problems in that specific area of your expertise.

If you want to continually grow, expand, and stay relevant, you can't just keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. Click To Tweet

Social Media Platforms

How did I approach this platform? Why am I trying to get on other platforms? If you build it, they’re not going to just come. Just because I’m putting out a show doesn’t mean that people are going to find it, even though this is great quality and life-changing content. I want to exponentially increase the readership. In order to do that, I’ve got to be on multiple platforms and understand how they work. There are other platforms that are, in my opinion, now that I’m studying, learning them, and getting involved, that are probably more fun levels of scalability than what Facebook does. Facebook drastically reduces your reach on posts, especially on business page posts. You could have 10,000 people like your page, and they’re only going to show your organic posts to maybe 1% of those if you’re really lucky.

What I found is that I’ve got to break away from the traditional because that’s the only social media platform that I’ve done for the last decade. That’s just not a way that I’m going to be able to scale this brand. Looking at all the things I’ve invested into, Brand Builders, the company that I got started with to help me figure out my core message and who I’m going to speak to, teach you how to build a digital personal brand. I put some coin down in order to get two days of full intensive training for personalized, hands-on, one-on-one, or two-on-one. I have a monthly coaching call as well as access to some incredible courses.

On top of that, I hired two LinkedIn coaches. I took two LinkedIn courses. I’ve got a YouTube course that I subscribed to and paid for. I hadn’t dived into it yet, but it’s right there, ready for me to go. This is where it probably gets funny to you. I am taking a TikTok course with the TikTok coach. I don’t intend to dance if that’s what you’re asking. If you keep an open mind, which I’ve been trying to do, you realize that TikTok is for the audience I want to reach, ages 20 to 35. They’re very heavily involved in this platform and are on it engaging. If I want to reach that audience, you got to go where their attention is. I got to learn how to do this and how to be relevant.

 

I hired a coach, and I’m going through the platform. I submitted two videos for him to review. He’s going to go through them, tell me how bad I suck at them, and what I need to change. It’s way out of my comfort zone. That’s the thing, guys. If you want to continually grow, expand, and stay relevant, you can’t keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result. That’s called the definition of insanity. You can’t just stay on Facebook with your 300 crusty fucking friends who aren’t going to buy shit from you. They’ve already proven that they’re not. You’ve got to because you’ve been posting them over and over again with your offer. This is if you have a business. I’m assuming I know a lot of you do.

I don’t think all of you do thinking that things are going to change. You’ve got to figure out, “How can I pivot? How can I learn new skills? How can I learn a new platform or two?” and start expanding your reach to a new audience. I did an Instagram consult. I found this gal who will do one for you for $99. I asked her if she would continue to coach me, but she was booked up. She gave me a full audit of my Instagram page. She gave me incredible value for $99. I’m like, “You’re undercharging. It was more valuable than that.”

Here’s what happened from the LinkedIn course and hiring the coach. I want you guys to think about this for a second. With my very first post on LinkedIn, I got 101 views and 1 like. That was from the coach that I paid pretty much obligated to like my post. Talk about depressing. It was the same post that I’d posted on my Facebook page. I got 30 comments and tons of engagement. Everybody loved that post, and now I take the same post, repurpose it a bit, and I don’t get fucking crickets. It was awful.

Volatility is the price that you pay to retire young and rich. Click To Tweet

I then took two weeks off. I’m like, “Do I really want to pursue this? This is painful. This is going to take some time.” I kept working with the coach and kept refining the way I was posting. I had to work on my hook line. That’s the first line that gets people’s attention and stops their scroll. One thing I would suggest that you guys put some attention to your social media what that first line is. The hook line is everything because you only have three seconds to grab somebody’s attention and stop them from scrolling to read and engage with your posts. There’s a great book on this too. It’s called Hook Point by Brendan Kane. It was an incredible book on this subject of the new three seconds of attention span that we have.

I took a couple of weeks off and decided, “I’m going to show up consistently. This is not something I’ve ever done before on social media. I’m going to post every day for 365 days straight. I’m not coming up for air until 365 days of straight posting. I’m not going to get discouraged. I’m going to embrace the ups and downs.” Thirty-four days later, I’m up at over 29,000 views on that one post with 30 comments. The post continues to get pushed out by the algorithm because people are stopping and reading it. They like it. The headline said, “Employees and entrepreneurs should invest differently.” That’s it. That was my tagline. That’s stopping the scroll apparently because that audience on LinkedIn is like, “That’s different. What does he mean?”

Hire A Coach

You’ve got to be thinking about that with your social media posting. I know that most of you are interested in growing your businesses and income. This is a very important part. This wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t invested in the course and hired the coach. No way I would be at 29,000 views. Think about that for a second. That wouldn’t have happened on my own. I don’t know enough about the platform, structure posts, get engagement consistently, show up, and fight through the ups and downs. The last three since that post have only had 400 views. LinkedIn feels like my cryptocurrency portfolio. There are fucking ups and downs, massive swings and volatility, and highs and lows.

 

You got to be able to embrace that volatility that you’re going to experience as you go about building your business to be able to get the outsize gains. Volatility is the price that you pay to retire young and rich. Volatility is the price you pay for outsized gains. In thinking about these four areas that I’m suggesting you hyper-focus on, which are books, courses, coaching, and seminars, what are you doing in this area? What are you investing with your own time, money, and energy to enhance your skills? You don’t want to go spending randomly on books, courses, coaching, and seminars and say, “I’m investing in myself.” You want to be strategic. You want to give it some thought. You want to be hyper-focused on what are the skills that you need to develop in order to take your earning power to the next level.

I can’t answer that question for you, but I want you to start asking that question yourself. Great leaders ask great questions. With high performers, the way that they are high performers is because they’re great question-askers. They stay humble, teachable, and are constantly in learning mode. They want to keep getting better. They’ve never arrived. Keep working on yourself.

I want you guys to take that away from this particular show that question, “What books, courses, coaching, and seminars can I get and involved in? What’s going to make the most sense for me to take me from where I’m at to where I want to go faster and more efficiently with less headache and less trial and tribulation?” There’s no way you’re going to go from where you are to where you want to be without trials, tribulations, ups, downs, and headaches.

It’s the degree of which you’re going to experience that you’ll never avoid, but you can mitigate it and make that growth pattern a little bit more fun, friendly, fast-paced, and all of that because you invested in yourself and increase your own skills. I applied this concept in every area of my life. In my spiritual life, I have a spiritual coach, AKA my pastor. When I’m encountering a situation that’s very difficult, he’s the first person I go to. He studied the Bible a lot more than me. Let’s just put it that way. He’s got a lot more wisdom in that regard, so that’s who I go to. For my golf game. I want to get better. I’m still struggling in that area, but I’m getting better than I was when I started a little over a year ago.

I’m not going as fast as I want, so that frustrates me. Things and objects get thrown occasionally on the golf course because I’m not personally developed enough to be able to handle the fact that I’m not better than what I think I should be. Let’s put it out there. That’s the way it is. I’m going to get better, but still, things are probably going to get thrown occasionally. I have a business and life coach. They’re going to be sharing with you guys entrepreneurial mindset tips. Those are the coaches that I have in my life now. You can’t spend probably all the money that I am on all the coaches that I’ve got. I also got a tech strategy team. That costs me $1,000 a month, but I’m at that stage where the earning power that I have is so strong that I need to have that team to be able to reduce my taxes.

They save me far more money in taxes than what I’m spending with them on the strategy consultation fee. What you’re going to be doing as you increase your businesses and grow is you’re going to be looking to consistently build a team of people that are going to help you in specific areas of your life, businesses, and finances that are going to help you get where you want to be. Pretty soon, I’m going to be available as a financial coach. I’m going to be probably super expensive on a one-to-one basis. That’s because my time is so limited and valuable. The earning power that I have per hour now is high. In order to make it to where it’s worth my time to be able to do one-on-one financial coaching, I’m going to have to charge quite a bit.

I will be having group coaching coming out where you’ll be able to be a part of a course and be part of a small group environment if you’re next level layer of implementation and strategy in your financial game. That’s not for everybody. Whether you do it or don’t do it, I don’t give a shit. I’m doing well financially. If that’s something you want to invest in for yourself, then great. That will be available, and I’ll announce probably pretty soon as well. I hope this helps you guys get a little bit clearer about what it exactly means to invest in yourself, what questions to ask yourself, and some overall higher level thinking about who you want to surround yourself with coaches and mentors so that you can take your game to the next level. Thank you, guys, for being on. Here we go.

 

Important Links

• Brand Builders
• Hook Point
• https://www.Instagram.com/thesocialbritify/
• https://www.Instagram.com/indestructiblewealth/