Anyone who works with me knows I’m an avid coffee lover. Some people drink coffee to wake up. I wake up to drink coffee. As the sign in my office says, “No coffee, no workee.” After all, GENIUS doesn’t run on decaf.
Several years ago, a chiro I went to insisted that I stop drinking coffee cold turkey or risk “frying” my adrenals even worse than what they were and creating an “internal environment” in my body conducive to cancer, liver failure and all sorts of undesirable conditions. He sternly warned me: NO COFFEE.
Turns out, coffee is actually really GOOD for you. Multiple studies have shown that coffee drinkers have a much lower death rate from serious diseases, including heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes and it reduces your chances of developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Another European study of half a million people found more evidence that those who drink coffee — even those who drink up to 8 or more cups a day — are less likely to die early than NON-coffee drinkers. If you don’t drink coffee, maybe you ought to start. Where’s that doctor who severely warned me so long ago? Still in practice, I assume, and hopefully NOT preaching his anti-coffee sentiments. Good thing I stuck to my vice.
The point I’m trying to make is this: You really can’t blindly trust everything you see, read and hear from “experts.” And you CERTAINLY cannot believe what’s being reported on the news because ALL media outlets, including my own, have agendas. Covid taught us this. Get the vaccine and you can’t get the virus or spread it. Wearing a mask on an airplane will protect you. Stand 6 feet apart to prevent the spread. ALL of this has been proven to be completely and totally bogus. “But the experts told us!” you say? To quote Mike Rowe, experts sound every bit as convincing when they’re wrong as when they’re right.
This is why it’s critical to FIGHT the urge to form quick opinions and subsequently act without 100% concrete evidence and FACTS. Almost nobody takes the time to fact-check everything they read and hear. They see a single chart, read a headline, skim an article or hear a 10-second media clip and arrive at an assumption and belief about a person, a situation or an event and what it means, more often than not already hardened in their opinions and unwilling to entertain any argument or data contrary to that idea.
Getting to the TRUTH in any complex situation is akin to finding a needle in a haystack of bias and opinion, meticulously and doggedly sifting through the smoke, sensationalized statements, agenda-based claims, half-truths and outright B.S., questioning everything, fact-checking every comment and stripping out the hyperbole to boil it down to a few unalienable truths. You cannot do this with EVERYTHING, but you should be doing it about important matters.
Whenever I’m engaged with a client to create a campaign or solve a problem, I have to navigate through a LOT of the client’s opinions and beliefs to get to known FACTS. I don’t simply go by what they think, what they tell me, what they believe. I conduct my own investigation. I interview actual buyers. I comb through dozens of industry publications, blogs, articles (and the comments) that pertain to what we’re trying to sell. I seek out input from other people transacting with and selling to the target market we are trying to sell to. THEN we TEST, correctly and extensively, because none of us can ever know anything with certainty without testing. I deduce, not opine.
ALL of this is gritty, mundane, detail-oriented work. It’s NOT fun or easy. Most will never do it because it’s tedious and complicated — and people run from anything complex. Often you do all the research only to come to the conclusion that there’s not enough data to support any hypothesis with absolute confidence, which means you just have to TEST (which truly is the ultimate answer to whether or not a campaign will work).
This is why so many “gurus” sell “easy buttons” — there’s ALWAYS a market for it. The truth is, easy buttons are not how people run and build successful businesses and profitable marketing systems and sales teams. Successful CEOs actually do implement, manage and invest in complex systems and KNOW things — not because they like complexity, but because ANY successful process in a growing business is inherently complex, and you must have FACTS and KNOW what’s actually happening under your roof. The temptation to be divorced from the “details” of the “money-getting” side of the business NEVER works. Never.
Don’t let the allure of easy buttons blind you to the complexities of running a successful business. Discover how to navigate the complexities of mergers, acquisitions and strategic partnerships in the MSP industry from multimillion-dollar CEOs and industry experts at MSP Growth Day. Get your ticket now for exclusive strategies.
