Who are you listening to?

Hey folks, another month gone by and for many of you hopefully another step closer to financial independence. Maybe some of you are there?

On this beautiful thing we call the internet, there are a lot of opinions. Luckily as a subscriber, you only have to listen to me because I'm always right. Right?! Jokes aside, the world is full of interesting people with very interesting opinions.

One thing I've seen in my 30 years alive (basically middle-aged) is that people tend to listen to loud opinions. Or often just people with a platform. Let me give you an example. As an aspiring author #ihave2novelsout I wanted to improve my writing craft. As any self-respecting person would do, I opened Youtube. Low and behold I start watching this lady's channel. My goodness, the advice was great. Practical, applicable and relevant.

I thought "Wow how inspiring."

The thing was... I came across someone reviewing one of her 2 novels. And lets just say the review made me think it was the worst book thats ever been written. Now I don't often take the first thing I read to heart. However when there are hundreds of scathing reviews then there might be some validity to it? The book definitely doesn't sound like my cup of tea tbh.

The point was, that I saw someone on Youtube and thought that her word on writing was law. Now her stuff might even be useful, however she has produced a couple of mediocre novels while generating a very large following. It was a strange contrast that got me thinking about how much of that happens in the financial world.

Crypto, NFT's, FTX all of these come to mind. You would often see people speak very confidently who convince a large group of people to do a certain thing. In our example its pour a lot of money into something that in my humblest of opinions has no inherent value. The insane amount of Crypto pump and dumps that has happened I guess adds a bit of validity to my opinion. So.... Moving...

Find your truth (I almost vomited writing that)

One thing that has helped me stay the course in very difficult times is that I have found a semblance of 'truth' or principles that I stick to when I invest. You can see all of these in the Free Course I have out.

You have to base your wealth building on a set of principles that will help guide you, especially when things get tough. It's not always sunshine and roses out there. We lost some money over the past week and my wonderful wife said "Don't worry it will go back up."

Thanks, babe I wasn't nervous... 😅

These principles you stick by no matter what. One such principle for us is: once money is invested, it always stays invested. That means we can move it to a different investment but it will always be an investment.

Loud mouths vs Calm and composed

I've chatted above about people with a platform that say things. I remember seeing something about Blackrock and how they are buying up large swathes of land or something on YouTube (best source of truth) and thinking 'wow Blackrock will take over the world, they are ushering in Skynet.'

This opinion was reinforced by a friend who said something similar. Lo and behold a differing opinion from my boy the Plain Bagel. I won't do it justice, so give it a watch. You can make up your own mind.

Fruits of those doing well

I had one of the most interesting Uber rides in the past week. I spoke to a gentleman who was driving a couple of days a week. This surprised me so I asked if that was his full-time income. He said no he used to be in sales for a large energy company.

Being in sales myself, I was intrigued. I dug deeper. He said he made a good amount of money and invested in some liquor stores in India. His father was a banker and his grandfather taught him about money and how it can corrupt people. I dug even further and straight up asked him how much he made?

Turns out he makes about 30k per month passively from his stores.

That blew my mind! I love finding people who make money in interesting ways.

In our ride to my destination, he mentioned how some of his friends and people he knew always tried to flash money around. He said that the loudest ones always spoke about their new things, trying to show off. He found they were always the ones struggling the most with money.

How you can get going?

I mentioned above, but if you want to get moving I've created a start from zero investing course. It's absolutely FREE. The goal of this blog for the past 4 years has been and always will be to help people.

You can get yours here.

Until next time

Milan