Giving Advice vs. Wasting Your Time
Host: Isaac Mashman · January 24, 2022 · Episode 89 · 20 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, yo, yo, what is going on everybody? Isaac Mashman here and you are not listening to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast that is here to help you become a more capable individual through me sharing my experiences and knowledge and business, life, and personal growth. Now whenever I say, I feel like I need to make this statement about what you guys can expect and not expect. And I say business, life, and personal growth, but I want to make that distinguishable factor that I'm not just going to be talking about business. I'm not just going to be talking about personal growth.
I really want to emphasize the life aspects because whenever I say life, that can mean a lot of different things. It's an open-ended statement. And that's a beautiful thing because it is an open-ended statement.
I have room to talk about a million different things pertaining to life. If you were to go to my Facebook profile or go to my Twitter or go to my Instagram or LinkedIn, which you should, by the way, Click that follow button, shameless plug on my own podcast. I will say, I say that I'm here to share my experiences in business, life, and personal growth, depending on how large or small that bio is. Now, life is about me. It's about my experiences. It's about where I go, the lifestyle I'm working to live, the lifestyle I have lived, where I travel to, how I deal with people, how I have conversations.
It can pertain to relationships, to family issues, to friends that can pertain to interests in certain movies or subject matters that have nothing to do with business.
Now don't get me wrong, I love a good business show. I love Shark Tank, I love a lot of these other podcasts that are business related, but there comes a time where I also want you guys to understand, there are gonna be times where I talk about things that are more entertaining. I talk about things that have a more personal interest to me. And this is something I would encourage you guys to do as well. There has to be a good balance with building out your personal brands between your personal experiences, the things that are unique to you, your personality has to show through online, and then with your business and your specialty and your profession.
And so just keep those things in mind as you go through listening to my podcast, because I really, the last thing I really want for somebody is to come listen to my show and have this expectation that every single thing that I talk about is business or every single thing that I talk about is very niche down to personal branding, which is my main focus in my main business. That is not the case. I want you guys to know that whenever you come and listen to me, I'm going to be speaking from the heart and sharing things from a variety of different realms, because I think that's how you become well-rounded.
That's how I became well-rounded. I understood and and picked up on how virtual mentors handled associations with different people and how they held theirself in conversation.
I paid attention to the business, focuses and the business emphasis on, hey, conversations, networking, your elevator pitch. But at the end of the day, it's not just about business. But personal growth, actually, thankfully, does encompass business and life. Because as you're living your life, you're also growing as an individual. as you are getting better at life, you are having personal growth. You are improving. And I think that's a really important fact to keep in your mind because you can get stuck in this personal development loop, thinking that you're not growing when in actuality, you're having experiences you've never had before. And this is essential for young adults.
This is essential for teenagers and people who are entering maturity in life. You might not think much of what you're doing right now, but it is personal growth.
And if you were to be put in that situation that you were recently put in or that you're in today, five years ago, you wouldn't know how to handle it. Yet if you were to put yourself in that same situation five years in the future, you're going to be just fine because you've already went through a similar circumstance. And so just keep all of these different things flowing in your mind as you're listening to me because I'm not your guru, right? To go and play off of the Tony Robbins Netflix series. But I will say that I am somebody you can learn and trust when it comes to business.
But I also want you guys to know that I am a human being and I have a bunch of different interests that I enjoy sharing, the books that I read from the movies that I enjoy watching to the series and all these different things I hope to be able to build that connection with you, even if we might have never spoken ever before. And so to come and jump into today's subject matter, I want to talk about relationships. I want to talk about giving advice because this is something that I've been going through over the past week and I've been in similar circumstances way before to where it's like somebody comes to you saying Isaac I need your advice in this specific area.
I need your help. What do you think I should do? You've always given me great life advice but what do I do with it? Right? What I need your advice again and then somebody else comes to you and says, I need your business advice in a specific area. And then another person comes in and goes and says, I need your opinion. I need your opinion, not so much advice, but your opinion. And it can become exhausting, especially if they're not paying you. And I know that sounds a little bit, you know, a little bit self-centered. But the truth of the matter is, you have to be able to distinguish who you are giving advice to and whether or not they are a client, a future client, or a friend.
You don't give advice to strangers usually. Sometimes you do to put your best foot forward and to establish that friendship and that relationship or maybe you're just going to help, right? You're not expecting and looking for anything to come to you in return. I think that is the most selfless advice you can give. But then you enter into the friendships and the acquaintances around you who are coming to you for advice and they're not looking to pay you and you're probably not looking to get paid.
But that does not mean that you shouldn't receive some sort of value from that transaction. Just because they are a friend does not mean that they shouldn't be able to provide value to you to where there's some reciprocity there, right? Going and speaking to the law of reciprocity. And I'm sure that all of you listening can relate to this. You have this friend that comes to you and they ask for advice. You give them your honest opinion that you know is the best opinion you could give, that you give them the best advice possible for you at that current circumstance. And then they come to you a week later, two weeks later, even a month later, and they virtually ask you the same exact questions.
They're like, I need your advice again. And you're over here sitting and thinking to yourself and saying, you know, Johnny, I've already given you the advice last month.
I already told you what I think. But then rather than bringing that up and making them feel bad, you say, I'm going to be a good friend and I'm going to give you the advice again. I'm going to say the same exact thing again. You're not charging them, but at the same time, they're not providing value to you at this point. They're actually kind of being a hindrance to you because they're wasting your time. And then a month later, they come back to you and they say, Isaac, I need your advice on them. You've always given great advice. Yet if you look at their life and circumstance, they haven't executed on the advice you've ever given them.
They ask you the same question. At this point, you need to go ahead and put your foot down and say, look, I've already told you what you need to do and you just don't like the advice that I've given you because you know it hurts or because you know it's true or you know that it's accurate.
You know that this is the answer, but you are looking for some alternative way of going about and achieving that result that you really want me to tell you that you need, right? And so rather than continuing to go and give this advice and spending all of your time, There comes a point where you have to be firm in your conversation. You have to say, look, man, I love it. Respect to you, but you cannot continue coming to me for advice. If you're not going to listen to me, if you're not going to actually use the information that I'm giving you, that's not respectful of my time.
That's not respectful of what I have going on. And this is where you have to be selfish with your time with your energy, especially because they're not paying to you.
Now typically a friendship the value add is a time spent together. It's the relationship, it's the experiences that you have together or maybe it's a professional friendship. But if they're not doing that same thing for you, there comes a point where you don't have the time, you don't have the ability, you don't have the, you know, the, the, try to think of the best word of saying here, it's just you're not able to give free handouts to every single person who comes to you. You have multiple friends coming to you for advice. And next thing you know, you're not spending any time building the business or going out having experiences because you're so focused on their problems and then you go and you don't even focus on your own.
And that's a very, very sticky and tricky situation to be in, but it requires you to understand that what you offer and what you normally do is valuable.
And it is not worth wasting your time and staying the same things over and over and over again. So up until this point, I've covered the friends, I've covered the strangers, and now let's go ahead and talk about the clients. And this is a particularly interesting situation to be in because somebody has paid you to help them with something. Now, I'm not talking so much for the done for you realm or the product realm or the sass realm or the virtual realm. talking more so as a done with you service. This is something that that Mashman Ventures and everybody in my public relations from does, you know, the consultants, it is a done with you service.
I am here to help you build out your personal brand. I'm here to give you reputational advice. I'm here to help you navigate these waters and build out your personal brand in a way that helps you organically gain traction and credibility without all the pay to win crap.
And in my model, I am being paid to give you advice and to tell you the steps that you need to take. And so this talks more about the accountability of giving advice and not so much of the advice or the accountability itself. And you as the service provider, have an obligation to your client to hold them accountable to what they should be doing, assigning homework that they do in between this call and the next call. you have an obligation to them to hold them accountable, but at the same time, your client also has that obligation to you to do what you told them they need to do.
That's how the business relationship works. But what if you get this one particular client that is a little bit more difficult to manage, more difficult to work with because maybe they're not doing everything that they need to be doing?
Well, in this situation, you have to make sure that you do this in a very respectful way, but a very firm way that demands and commands respect, saying that, look, you know, Jackson, you're not holding up and doing the things that you know you need to be doing. Whenever you clicked on the counter, like I said, you do understand that it's up to you, right? Check, you click that check mark, what is going on? See if you can get to the root of their problem. Now, don't act as their therapist, but be like, why aren't you doing this? Do you need more accountability? Do you need me to text you?
Do you need me to call you on a random day and make sure that you're doing the things that I'm assigning you and the things that you know you need to be doing without me even needing to assign them to you, right?
Do you need that accountability? What can I do to make sure that you are here to get results? What can I do to make sure that you are doing what you know you need to be doing? That is the difference between a professional and the difference between an amateur and amateur. Amateur would let that client flow. they would let that client just float and drift away, right? Like if they're lost at sea and they're just on a boat and they don't have no firm direction. The professional is going to hone in and say, you were right here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but I am coming to you in a boat and let's go ahead and bring you back to shore. Let's get you back in the right direction. You have to lead them.
Now, sometimes if they don't want to be led, you might want to let a client go. There's this other conversation where people feel like they have to work with somebody. Just because there's a deal on the table and because somebody's offering $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month, you have to work with that person. This is especially true for young business owners. Myself included last year, the year prior, there were several deals that I ultimately turned down, but I felt like this expressed obligation to work with this person because the money was there, because I knew what I offered, because I had that self belief in my business and my model and my service, and I was going to take deals that I knew I would not enjoy working with the client.
But now looking back, I'm thinking about some clients I'm working with and I'm like, it might be time to depart and make sure that we're doing what is best for not only myself but but also the client and saying no to that renewal of that contract, saying no to initially working with the client and making a referral to somebody else that you could trust, somebody else that you know could provide an exceptional service.
You do not have to work with everybody. And that's the power and the benefit of being a business owner and being an entrepreneur is you are in control of many different things in your life. You are in control of saying, yes, I'm working with you or no, I can't take on this job right now. You don't have to say all the reasons and say I don't like you or et cetera, et cetera, but you can say and depart ways with this client or prospect and make a referral, send them to somebody else that you know that can be of benefit to them. You don't have an obligation, just like you don't have an obligation to give advice to all of your friends or acquaintances. You don't have an obligation to give advice to a stranger.
But the fact is, sometimes you want to. Sometimes you want to do that good deed. And I think that doing good deeds are great, but at the same time, if all you're doing it is hammering the same information, and wasting your time, and it's not going and sticking, you have to ask yourself, is this something that I'm going to continue doing, or do I have to have that hard conversation? The hard conversations, oftentimes, are the ones that need to be had the absolute most. And one additional thing, and then I'll wrap this episode up, sitting at 15 minutes right now, absolutely loving this, is you have to stand by the advice you're giving out. Right, if you're giving somebody a piece of advice and it backfires on them, wow, you have to take responsibility for that.
You have to take responsibility for that piece of information. Now, I know a lot of people today are giving out crypto advice and NFT advice and all this other stuff. And I'm into a podcast here very soon over that subject matter and give my honest opinion of it. But they're saying, oh, go into this coin, go into this altcoin. And I saw a post that says, he's like, I never expected Bitcoin to drop this low. He's like, I'm sorry if I convinced you to buy it 50k. I'm like, seriously, this guy is not educated. This guy does not have any professional certificate, but he's telling people to buy Bitcoin and now if they were to buy one Bitcoin, they would have lost $15,000 in a matter of a week of buying it because they listen to some person, right?
That would have been a form of advice that is online. Now, I could have an entirely separate conversation about social media and the things you're posting and the different things that you have going on and saying, hey, do this, build your business this way. Me giving you advice on this podcast, right, is allowing me to touch multiple people at one time and provide value in multiple lives. That's the beautiful thing about creating content and why it's just that you do the absolute same because rather than having one conversation with 10 different people talking about the same exact subject, I'm able to give that speech once, give that conversation and talk once, and now 10 people are listening to it.
100 people are listening to it, 1,000 people are listening to it. And it's kind of funny because if I was to be having this conversation with a person one-on-one, I'd be like, why are you giving advice to somebody else who's not taking your advice, and I'm the person giving that person advice?
It's kind of a, that's a funny situation to be in. And so at the end of the day, understand that if you're giving advice, make sure you are an expert or you are at least at mastery level of that subject matter have personal experiences with it. Stand by it. Make sure that's not going to harm them and be honest, open and truthful and respect your time set boundaries and boundaries are something that are vastly important and underrated and friendships relationships business partnerships set boundaries. for the people who want to get access to you. That access is gifted, it's granted, it's never taken. You have to have that level of control over yourself, over your image, over your conversations, over your time and over every other aspect of your life. So guys, grateful for you tuning into today's episode.
Have another episode coming out this following Friday, which is going to be episode number 90. Actually, we're nearing that 100 episode mark and getting back on track with everything. And I think this upcoming episode might actually be a conversation on investing, and my opinion on where the world's at right now. That's going to be something that I've never done before. But I've been seeing so many things online where I'm like, man, seriously, seriously have so many different opinions right now that I want to share because a lot of people are curious about them. I've gotten into some debates and conversations online over these very, you know, the subject matter.
So without further ado, if you've got any value from today's episode, which I'm certain that you did, go ahead and pay the dues and send this episode to somebody in your life, send it to that friend who needs advice or that stubborn person who never listens to you.
Send this to a parent, send this to your friends, send this to your significant other. If you do the significant other tread lightly, I'm not gonna tell you to do or do not do that. But regardless, this helps my show grow. This helps us get into the household of more people into the vehicles of more people as they're commuting throughout their day. And it helps me grow because I'm not blasting ads on this podcast. There've been some shows recently that I've been fans of for years and they started putting in advertisements after every 10 minutes. And I'm like, no, I hate that. And I know that you guys hate it as well. So much love and until next time, always chase after your vision.