You have no doubt heard the expression “be a leader not a follower”, but sometime it’s not a bad idea to be a follower.
Take the case of starting an online business. There are two main approaches you can take. One is to plough along on your own trying to make things work, spending lots of time and money on things that are not helping your business and then eventually giving up.
The other way is to find someone who has gotten the success you want and learn from that person (or in a lot of cases more than one person). This can be info products, seminars, coaching, whatever. In most cases these people have made the mistakes and you can learn from their errors. Knowing what works is half the battle. The old saying “success leaves clues” or “success leaves traces” is true. As much as you can benefit from not making unnecessary mistakes along the way, you can definitely benefit from having a roadmap of what works and how you can apply it to your own business.
I saw a great cartoon the other day of two caveman creating a wheel. One had the picture and was creating a perfect wheel and the other was trying it on his own. Needless to say, the one doing it alone was going to fail miserably. There is a reason why there is the expression “you don’t need to recreate the wheel”.
I am not saying that as you go along in your business there won’t be times that you discover a better way to do things and you can share that with others and make money. Early on in my career I was getting frustrated in manual tasks that were eating up a good chunk of my day so I created some simplistic tools (very simplistic if you compare them to today’s AI robot tools that make life easier) to make my days easier. It wasn’t long before others started seeing what I was doing and wanted me to teach them how to incorporate these tools into their businesses as well. This was long before the digital marketing business as it exists today so I mostly did this knowledge transfer through in person sessions, but if it was today I would have created a digital video series teaching others and only had to do the presentation once. As advanced as technology has become, there will still be opportunities to make things easier and quicker, so keep your eyes out for these opportunities.
When I first started out in online marketing there were very few people teaching others how to do it. If people were having success they were keeping the methods to themselves. Now there are loads of programs out there. Some require you to learn the methods and then figure out how to implement them, but some are truly step-by-step programs that walk you through the process so the only ways you can fail is if you don’t follow the map and think you know more and try things on your own or if you make the investment and then do nothing with it.
Stop being the second caveman. In this day and age there is no excuse for not following someone’s lead and having the success you deserve. The answers are all there, you just need to know where to look.
To your success,
Chuck
P.S. If you want to find someone who will tell you to “do this, don’t do this” and has the success and the student stories to give you the confidence you need to follow a true leader, CLICK HERE
