Episode 19 – When Too Much Knowledge Is Bad For You

Introduction    00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses, how to market themselves for high growth.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:24    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth about marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones. I’m your host Tudor. And in today’s episode, I want to address a topic that often comes up amongst our listeners. A lot of the listeners here, they’re always asking what books they should read about marketing, about business, about entrepreneurship and so on. And I actually recently spoke with, um, a guy from the Fast Lane Forum who reached out to me through Discord and they came to me and they said that they’ve read 900 books on self-development on business, on marketing, and yet they’re still working a job. They don’t have a business and they’re, they’re basically getting nowhere and they just couldn’t figure out what’s wrong. And I think that this is a problem that many people nowadays are falling into, namely that you’re tempted to just read more books and you don’t take enough action.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:32    You don’t actually do what is necessary to grow your business and to get your business to the next level. And books and reading are becoming a sort of addiction that people are faced with. And this is the topic that I want to address in a lot more detail in today’s episode. And what do I mean by reading being an addiction? You know, so normally, we think of addictions being things that we can’t really control such as alcohol smoking phonography or whatever it is. But the thing is that reading in the context of creating a business and being a successful entrepreneur can also be an addiction. It functions in the same way as smoking does, you know, many people start smoking as a way to deal with stress. You know, they, they feel some stress, they light up a cigarette, they smoke and then they feel better. They don’t feel the same stress anymore. 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:31    So the habits, the addiction becomes a way of hiding from the anxiety and not facing it, not facing the stress. And the same thing happens here. So when you focus on reading as an entrepreneur or marketer, you can use that. You can get to the point where you’re using that as a way of avoiding action and avoiding actually going out there in the market and doing what it takes to be successful. And if you don’t take action, there is no way for you to be successful. That’s the first thing that needs to be very clear. You can read all the books in the world. And actually if you check the statistics on this, they’re around 130 million books in the world and you know, more are written with every passing day. And I mean, even if you actually read one book a day, you know, every single day you read a book for the next eight years, you will only have read around 30,000 books, right?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:35    So if you compare that to 130 million, which are out there, it means that pretty much, you only get to around 0.02-0.03% of all the books that are out there, which is pretty much nothing. I mean, if you, if you invest so much time and you read one book per day for your whole life, you’re still not going to get anywhere near close to capturing all the knowledge that is recorded out there. So, I mean, you need a more efficient way to move forward in your business. And that’s clearly not going to come just from reading more books, aimlessly, without any sort of purpose, don’t get me wrong. I mean, books definitely have their place. You can get a lot of value from them, but you must also be taking action and engaging with the market, and doing meaningful things to actually grow your business.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:04:28    If you don’t do that, and if you don’t actually apply, it’s not going to take you anywhere. If you use reading as a way to, you know, spike the dopamine in your brain so that you feel good and you feel like you’re moving forward while not actually moving forward, because you’re not actually taking any meaningful action, then you’re misusing books. You know, you’re not using them the way that they were meant to be used. And you’re only harming yourself. I mean, there’s only so long that you can prolong this without realizing it it’s an addiction and it’s harming you. It’s an addiction because it takes you away from facing the fears, which you probably have related to the entrepreneurship and tackling them, finding a solution to them. So what’s a better approach? Well, I think that if you ask me in terms of the knowledge, that was actually useful for me in growing my business, in helping my clients and so on.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:25    I would say that probably 15, maybe 20% of this knowledge came from books and the rest of it. So 80, 85%, it came from actually taking action running into a problem and then figuring out a solution to that problem, trying a bunch of stuff, you know, seeing what works, what doesn’t work, and then ultimately landing on a solution. And that’s the truth. Most knowledge that is out there, especially in something like marketing, which is so fast, things are always changing. You know, tactics that used to work five years ago or even one year ago, in some cases, no longer work today. You want to be at the cutting edge. And the only way to do that ultimately, is to learn to figure stuff on your own. And I mean, ask yourself the question. Why, if you’re one of these people who’s always jumping from book to book, you’re always reading something and you spend hours everyday reading, ask yourself the question.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:06:24    You know, why am I doing this? Because underneath this, underneath your addiction, there is something that’s supporting it. And that’s a misguided belief that you have about what reading can do for you. So, um, that belief for most people, and certainly for this guy that I spoke with was that there’s a missing piece of knowledge that if you just have this piece of knowledge, then everything would fall into place and everything would just work out. So there’s this fantasy that if you just capture this, then you can find a solution to everything that’s out there. And that’s not actually how things work. The market is very complicated. Nobody knows the solution that you’re looking for, because if people did it, they will already be running your business. You know, the markets are competitive. It’s not like ideas will be found in a book that was read by millions of people.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:07:18    And now suddenly you can take that idea and go to market with it and be successful. It doesn’t work like that. You’ll run in to be successful. You need to solve problems that other people are not solving. And that’s what really matters and to solve problems that other people are not solving. You need to, first of all, engage with them and discover them. And you’re not going to discover them in books. You’re going to discover them by taking action, running into problems that are inevitably going to show up. As you try to get closer to your goals. And then of course, figuring out a way to deal with them. So this belief that you missing a piece of knowledge and you can gain it through books is wrong. In addition to this, another way to question this belief is to think about the example that I gave before.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:07    There’s 130 million books in the world. You simply do not have the time to acquire knowledge in this manner. If you’re actually looking to succeed, you know, it’s, even if this knowledge did exist and your belief is correct, that there is a missing piece of knowledge. And if you just had this, you will be successful. Even if this is correct. Your chances of actually finding that knowledge by reading books is minuscule. I mean, as I said, you can only hope to read. If you read one book per day, 0.02, 3% of all the books that are out there. So it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, you know, basically you’re hopeless. There’s no way you’re going to succeed at that. So hopefully all this is making you question this underlying belief and question the value that books are having to you. And if you’re addicted to this, and if you find that your idea hop too much, you jump from one idea to another, you jump from one book to another.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:08    You’re always looking for that new book. You’re always asking people what books they read. And I know that this is matters to a lot of our listeners and this episode will actually be very valuable to a lot of you because I always could get questions from listeners. You know, what, what books do you recommend? What books do your guests recommend and so on and while valuable? I think after a point, I mean, I think that there comes a point when this is more of a crutch that you using to trick yourself into thinking that you’re actually making progress when you’re not. Uh, so I think that a lot of people are going to need a change of approach. If you find that you’re in this situation yourself. So how do you actually change this round? Well, it all starts with getting very clear about your goals and what you’re trying to accomplish, and then figuring out a plan, going back from the goal, working backwards of the steps that you need to take to go from where you currently are, to where your goal is, you know, to your ideal situation.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:16    And of course, you’re not going to do this perfectly from the get-go, but even a first way of doing it and figuring this out for yourself is going to help because I mean, what’s going to happen is you’re going to figure out a set of steps, right? They’re probably not going to be correct. And you’re going to realize this when you actually start taking the steps, if you’re not moving closer to your goal, you know that you have a problem, you know, in the steps and you need to reassess and figure out a different way to approach your goal. And this is hard, you know, it takes thinking, it takes patience and it takes experimenting. You know, you need to try stuff out when you, for example, let’s say that one of the steps is reaching out to people on LinkedIn. And if that’s the case, if that’s how you’re going to find your, um, your customers, let’s say you might be a coach for example, or you might be a service business or a B2B business, and you figure out this is the easiest way.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:11:15    So you want to contact people on LinkedIn, your first impulse, if you suffer up this, maybe to check out Google, you know, go and Google, how to connect with your customers on LinkedIn and read articles, read blog posts, listen to YouTube videos and whatnot. So when that happens, you know, I recommend that you actually try to resist that temptation, you know, resist the temptation to open a book and figure out a solution. And instead, try to think for yourself, you know, so if I want to connect with these people, how could I do it? And start to brainstorm? You know, look at the features LinkedIn has available, can send them a message. So try sending them a couple of messages. You know, you can try 30 prospects with one message 30 with another 30 with no message and whatever, and see what kind of differences you obtain.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:07    And this is actually very relevant because all these differences, they’re going to basically change how you’re going to approach this. And they’re going to give you the options that you can go out there and test and see what’s actually working. You also have to ask questions about your profile. You know, so for example, maybe you’re not reaching to those people to sell them. Maybe for example, you reaching to figure out what sort of problems they have. You’re just in the stage where you’re developing your product. In that case, you need to ask yourself some questions. Obviously nobody on LinkedIn, for example, wants to be sold stuff to, you know, people run away from salesman. They don’t want to engage with them and so on. So if you were selling something and if your profile screams like you’re selling something, are those people likely to interact with you?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:59    Probably not, probably not in a way that’s actually going to be useful to you. If you’re actually looking to uncover problems that they’re facing, you know, instead you want to focus more on a profile that says that you building relationships that says that you’re a friendly guy and you want to connect with more people and interact with more people. That’s probably going to get a lot more people to actually connect with you. And that’s, what’s meaningful to you at that point. And by doing this, you’re actually going to figure out that 80 to 85% of the knowledge that you can find in books, you know, that cutting edge knowledge that you have to figure out for yourself. And once you start doing this, and once you see that you can figure stuff out for yourself, you’re not going to rely on a crutch like books anymore in Juno.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:47    Your addiction will pretty much be gone that moment because you see that you can discover so much knowledge by yourself and you don’t actually need anyone to tell you what to do and how to approach it. And that’s very empowering. You know, when you get to that point, there’s a lot of re realizations that come through and made you realize that look, actually, I don’t need to spend so much time reading and going through all those books because I can actually figure out what problems I have, you know, by looking at the, at the space between my goals and where I’m currently at, I can figure out what I can try to do to get closer to my goals, you know, by creating a plan. And then I can figure out what’s not working, ask better questions and get closer to the goal. And once you learn this framework and start applying it for yourself, you’re actually going to find that it’s exciting to go out there into your business and try to figure things out from scratch, you know, without having to rely on anyone else.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:14:48    And there’s a few more things that you can do to actually, if you find that, you know, you’re just opening books and you find that you’re always going back to them and you don’t want to, but your mind somehow still thinks that there’s a missing thing there. And you must read that book, otherwise you can be successful. And what I will say is two things actually here. So number one, I will say, think about business people who were successful before that book came out. So a lot of the books that will come to your attention nowadays will not be books that were published more than 20, 30 years ago, right? Because the books that are most marketed at the moment are the new books. Of course, you know, new books by new authors and so on. They are the ones that come to your attention most often.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:37    So, you know, you have to ask yourself, you may see that everybody’s praising this book. For example, bill gates, Warren Buffett, whatever. Everybody’s praising a book, but ask yourself, where are these people successful before they read that book? And for the vast majority of entrepreneurs out there who are successful, the answer is yes. You know, they were successful without reading that book are there, for example, successful entrepreneurs who have never read, think and grow rich, at least before they were successful. For sure, you’re going to find many such people, even with a book such as think and grow rich, which is perhaps the most popular and most well-known business book out there recommended by a lot of entrepreneurs. So, I mean, that’s the first thing, the second thing I would say is start figuring out the triggers. You know, when do you actually go to search something in books or to search for stuff on YouTube and so on, what’s actually happening?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:16:38    Is it, for example, when you trying to figure out what to do, what sort of business to start is it when you’re trying, when you run into a problem in your business and you have no idea how to solve it, when exactly is that trigger moment, do you just open a book, for example, compulsively you just sit at your desk for example, and you find yourself that you start reading, what’s actually happening. Maybe you have books spread out all over your office and you see them all the time. So whenever you’re supposed to be working, you’re actually end up reading. You know, you have to figure this stuff out for yourself. What are the triggers what’s actually getting you to compulsively read? And once you do this, you can actually work back to remove them. You know? So for example, if books are spread all over your desk, you can hide them.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:17:28    You can put them, for example, in a library that’s behind you or whatever, where you don’t see them. If your problem Springs up, when you run into an issue at work, something that you don’t know how to solve, then you can come prepared with what we discussed beforehand and try to figure it out on your own first, you know, before you actually go to bookstore to searching on YouTube and so on. And by doing this progressively, you’re going to gain more and more confidence in your own abilities. And this is actually very, very important because this is how you actually get to the next level in business. You know, this is how you, it’s sort of a Rite of passage. The way that I look at it, you know, every business owner has to get to that point where they sort of start figuring things out for themselves, where they say that, look, I have enough knowledge.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:18:20    Now it’s time to take action. It’s time to jump in the ocean and actually learn how to swim. You know, I’ve read for example, all those books about swimming, but now I have to actually do it. And of course the anxiety and the fears and whatnot, they’re going to be there, but you have to learn that by facing them, you can actually overcome them. You know, the biggest thing about fear and anxiety, especially when it comes to businesses that all the fear and all the anxieties are unreal. The moment you actually face it and you engage it and you stop trying to escape it and you actually run towards it. It disappears. You know, you find that the fear is actually are real. And what was actually holding you back was only internal. It was the belief that the fear is scary. You know, some people call this the fear of fear.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:19:10    You know, you’re afraid of actually feeling those emotions of fear inside your body and whatnot. And you can get past that. And the moment you start doing that, you get to the next level in business, you start taking action a lot more easily. You start learning from life directly and you start being an originator of knowledge, you know, because all the knowledge that you find in books and on YouTube and whatnot, that’s second-hand knowledge. And second-hand knowledge comes from people in the best-case scenario, it comes from people who went out there, they face the unknown, they face their fears, they figured out the stuff for themselves. And now you can become one of these explorers. And it’s really cool because you’re actually going out there. You don’t know how things work and you figure them out for yourself. You learn from the ground up.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:20:03    And it’s a level up from actually reading a book because you actually find the original knowledge. You figure out how to be like the guys who wrote the book, you know, that’s who you want to be. You want to be like the guys who wrote the book and in the best-case scenario, as I said, they’re the guys who went out there and figure this stuff on their own. In some cases, they may also be the guys who read the guys who went out there and figure this stuff on their own. I mean, this is why a lot of the books tend to be repetitive, right? Because you have people who just write books, right. And they don’t necessarily figure stuff out for themselves instead. They, um, they just read other people, you know? So if you read, for example, a lot of business books or a lot of marketing books, then you’re going to have a lot of knowledge that you took from those people who wrote those books.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:20:57    You know, many of them, they would have figured this stuff on their own. It was secondhand knowledge when you took it from them. And now when you share it with others, it’s third hand knowledge and so on. But the point that I’m trying to make here is that if you’re stuck on the level of second, third, and so on, on knowledge, you know, second hand, third hand, and so on knowledge, that’s not going to be very good for you because it means that you can never uncover knowledge for yourself. And it’s foundationally. This means that you lose control. You know, other people, the people who write the books, they have control over you because whatever knowledge they share, that the knowledge that you have, you don’t have any actual first-person knowledge that you gain yourself from actually going into the unknown and figuring stuff out.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:21:48    And that’s a problem because there’s only so far, you can go in business like that. You know, this, this can take you to building a 10 million business or whatever. You know, there, there’s no way that can happen. You need to actually learn to figure stuff on your own and build this muscle because it’s really a muscle. That’s what it is. You have to train it. And one of the things that people will often tell you, which is not actually true, is that this gets easier over time. You know, they tell you that all you have to build a habit and it’s actually going to get easier for you over time. But that’s not actually true. Every time you face the unknown. It’s just as hard as ever. Of course, the more references you have in the past are facing the unknown and being successful at it.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:22:37    The more capable you are to combat that fear that you feel, but you’re still going to fear feel it right. There is no escaping that it’s sort of like working out at the gym. You know, it never gets easier. The same set of exercises never gets easier just because you’ve done it. So let’s say that you have a workout and you do that workout every time. And let’s say that you go to the gym three times a week, and you’ve been doing this for the past six months. The workout today after six months of doing it is just as hard as it used to be in the beginning. And a lot of people who work out and give up, they realize this, you know, they, they get to the point, they’ve done it for two months. They’ve formed a habit. 60 days, 90 days, whatever they have a habit, but it takes just as much energy and concentration and willpower to push themselves through because these things are hard. 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:23:32    You know, it’s not easy. And that’s another mistake that people make, you know, in the lot of books, actually, they create this false image of how business really is. And they tell you that if you actually know the staff, it’s supposed to be easy, but that’s actually false. You know that there is no easy in there. The easy never comes. You know, you can read all the books in the world. It’s never going to be easy. And the only solution to that is actually learning how, how to do it from the ground up. That’s what you have to do. You, and you have to face it and you have to do this repeatedly because that’s how you train the muscle. You know, that’s how train the muscle. And again, it’s not going to get easier, but you’re going to get stronger over time. Mentally, you’re still going to face the same.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:24:20    Let’s call it quitting mind. You know, every time you go into the unknown, the mind is going to be uncomfortable. I don’t like it here. Let’s go back. Whatever. You can build as many habits as you want. You know, and I’ve seen people, for example, they’ve built a habit of working out for 120 days. Every day, they went to the gym and then one day they don’t go and they never go again. You know, I’ve seen it happen. It’s very easy to quit something. That’s hard. You know, that’s why peak performance in the world is a rarity. You know, and being an entrepreneur, if you want to be successful is peak performance. I mean, most people who try entrepreneurship or marketing and so on, they fail. And the reason they fail is mental more than physical or the fact that they lack knowledge and so on, you can gain the knowledge if your psychology is right and you know how to use your mind, you actually face your fears.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:25:16    You go into the unknown, you’ll figure stuff out on your own. You don’t have addictions. You don’t rely on crutches like books and so on to take you all the way because they can’t, you know, books are often great introductions to a topic, but you actually need something more to get to that next level in business. So that’s pretty much what I wanted to discuss in today’s episode. And I hope that it’s actually going to be useful for a lot of you. I know that many of the listeners have asked me in the past for books to recommend there is some help in that. But by all means, don’t mistakenly. Believe that there’s this one book that if you’re just going to read it, it’s suddenly going to solve all your problems and everything is going to be okay in business. And your marketing is going to work out pants on because that’s not how it works.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:26:07    So to briefly summarize a lot of people nowadays, it seems to me are becoming addicted to reading. And that’s because reading is actually a lot more comfortable and gives you the illusion of moving closer to your business goals while you’re not actually taking action and you’re not facing your fears and you’re not engaging with the unknown and you’re not learning what you actually need to learn to be successful. So the way to escape from this addiction is figure out your triggers. You know, when do you actually go to reading books? Is this a problem for you? You know, are you spending hours everyday reading? Do you always think that there’s one big idea that’s missing that you’re going to find in some books, are any of these beliefs going through your mind and other stuff such as do you find yourself compulsively reading? Are there a lot of books all over your desk and you randomly pick them up when you don’t know what to do, figure out your triggers and then figure out a way to stop them, move them out of sight, you know, learn when they spring up so that you can be more aware and you can stop yourself and so on.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:27:12    And once you do this, you can actually get out of it. And once you get out of it, the next thing you need to do is you need to start figuring out how to solve those problems that you’ve come up with on your own. So for those of you who haven’t started a business, yet you have to start by creating a goal. You know, who do you want to help? Very important start from who, who do you want to help? And then once you’re very clear about who do you want to help figure out what problems they have, and then finally create a solution and have a goal, you know, figure out a process or a set of steps that are going to get you closer from where you currently are to your goal, and then start implementing it, figure out problems that come up and solutions and start moving forward.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:27:58    That’s basically what I would say in a nutshell. And I mean, it doesn’t have to be complicated if you think about it. If you have, let’s say that you don’t have a business, you’ve just figured out. You want to help. Let’s say e-commerce stores because you had an e-commerce store in the past, for example, and you’ve made some mistakes, it didn’t work out and now you want to help them solve similar problems. The first thing is you need to connect with e-commerce stores to figure out if they actually have the problem and what sort of stuff they need help with and what sort of stuff you can actually help them with. So you need to contact them. That’s your goal speak. For example, you can form a goal, speak with 50 e-commerce businesses about their problems and whatnot. That’s your goal. So then you need to figure out the steps, you know, how can I find these businesses?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:28:47    Do I look for us that they run on Facebook? For example, do I search on Google in niches that I’m interested in, for example, and so on, that’s how you can approach it. And then you figure out how to contact them. For example, cold email, you may find the people on LinkedIn and whatnot, and you start testing all these methods and you’re going to figure out problems. For example, you can figure out maybe if you actually do it, that cold email doesn’t work very well. You know, that it’s much easier to connect with them on LinkedIn, or it’s much easier to comment on, um, one of their posts on their Facebook page to get in touch with them. You know, whatever it is, this is actually real knowledge that you figure out for yourself. So once you say no to the books, you have to actually start engaging with whatever your goal is.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:29:33    Get very clear on it and get very clear on the steps that you need to take to move closer and start taking action, start facing the start, facing your fears and do it. You know, that’s what it ultimately ends up being. So that’s pretty much it for today. So stay tuned for the next episode. And until next time, keep growing your business and providing massive value to the world. Because remember you are the reason why we’re all growing richer, our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Thank you. And until next time.