Taking advice from experts is usually a great strategy. It makes perfect sense. You can certainly learn a lot from them. It’s just that there’s one thing to be aware of.
That the advice “fits” in the stage you’re currently in.
For example, Donald Trump gives a lot of great advice about business and life in general and one of his more famous quoted words goes something like – If you’re going to be thinking, you might as well think big.
The thing is, Donald Trump is at a point in his life where he can think big. He can probably ink a multi million dollar deal simply by picking up the phone, calling the top dog at the biggest publishing office in New York, and pitch his book idea and get a verbal agreement over the phone on his cut of the deal and have his assistants iron out the rest of the details and paperwork.
Now take the average Joe who takes that piece of advice and thinks big by setting a goal of making a million dollars in real estate when first starting out.
He’s sure thinking big, he’s sure taking advice from the real estate king, but nothing’s going to happen.
The problem?
He’s missing out on the process.
I go more in depth on this in my article entitled The Myth of Thinking Big so I won’t go into any detail of that here.
But in terms of the scope of this article, he had a problem of applying advice that’s great for him, later on down the road. It doesn’t really fit in the beginning.
The thing is, when you become an expert, you forget what it’s like to be in the beginning stages. You forget the state of mind that you were in and the advice that worked for you at that stage. Therefore, experts tend to mistakenly give advice that helps them now, in the position they’re currently in, not necessarily advice that helped them in beginning.
But there are a lot of experts who realize this and make sure they will “go back” and see what worked for them and offer advice of that nature. Of course however, if the audience is at or right before the expert’s stage, then they sure can and should give “current” advice.
Take another common example of this in action.
Experts claim the road to financial freedom involves creating multiple streams of income and I agree to a certain extent. But it shouldn’t be the focus from the very start.
The average person will diffuse his/her time, little capital and energy trying to do a lot of things at once rather than focus on one venture. Then after going “deep” on that one venture, he can then leverage everything to create multiple streams of income. Again, I’ve written in more detail about this concept in the two articles listed below so I won’t go into any more details of that here.
The Unstoppable Power of Focus
The Myth of Building Multiple Streams of Passive Income
So given all this, the question that inevitably arises is:
How do you know if you should take a particular piece of advice from an expert?
Well, the next time you run across some advice from an expert, ask yourself – is this practical, will this work for me in my current situation?
If not, then simply file it away to look at in the future when you are in a stage where you can use that information.
If you’re not sure, try it out but if it doesn’t seem to working or if it doesn’t seem to jive with you, save it for later. You’ll learn through experience and gradually get a feel of the kind of advice that “clicks” with your current situation and the kind that will probably “click” later.
Depending on the stage you’re in, there’s certain types of advice that’s going to work particularly for that stage.
For example, working hard is something we’re always told to do. Then, you have some experts coming around and saying instead of working hard, you should work smart. It sounds sexy and appealing because after all, who wants to work hard. Just kick back and work smart – get twice down with half the effort.
But particularly in the beginning of any venture, the potential for working smart is just not there. There’s nothing to leverage with. At the beginning, you should work hard and then as a result of that, you gain leverage so it’s easier for you to work smart because you worked so hard in the beginning. As you progress, you don’t have to work as hard anymore and the ratio switches – you start working smarter and less harder later on down the road without sacrificing quality results in the process.
Different pieces of advice that’s applicable in different stages of a journey.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with taking advice from experts.
You just have to make sure it “fits” with the stage you’re currently in.
