I love to learn.  I don’t think a day’s gone by in the last 40 years where I haven’t read a book… or a magazine, or an article online, hoping to shove something into my thick skull that’s not already there.

Learning something new or getting turned on to a new way of thinking is not only exciting, it’s often very profitable once you take that information and turn it into an action step.

So along these lines, I recently logged in to a forum for ‘entrepreneurs’ that American Express runs.  I was hoping to get turned to some new marketing ideas people are using, or a new way of marketing an old business.

Boy was I disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s is a ton of information in there.  Much of it about new ways of managing employees, inventorying paper clips, laying down dark carpet while keeping spirits high… new innovations in office space, human resources, pencil tips, lowfat yogurt and all kinds of other virtually useless things like this.

And perhaps dozens of articles on the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.

I don’t know, maybe I’m jaded.  But who, in the first place, wannest to listen to people who don’t run businesses, or people who really aren’t very successful… about the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs?

Am I missing something?

You know what I’d love?  I’d love to see a few of these ‘experts’ simultaneously saying something like, “Nearly all successful entrepreneurs are highly addicted to opiates.”  I guarantee you a run on oxycontin like you’ve never seen before.

Or maybe this one, “Few people know this, but most successful business-owners all have small furry pets they get intimate with.”  I can just see headlines in Forbes, Money, and The New York Times, “2011: Squirrel Porn?”

It seems to me, in business… you pretty much measure success by how much money you’re making, and by the quiet confidence that comes along with this.

And call me a cynic, but when I see people writing articles like this, and then when I go to their website and then see things like, “If you like what I have to say, use this button to put a tip in my tip jar using Paypal”… this doesn’t exactly wreak of whirlwind success, no?

When I was a kid growing up in New York, along Fifth Avenue, they used to have these blind men standing there with dark glasses on, and long walking sticks.  They’d hand out pencils to people passing by.  After you took a pencil, they’d give you a card that said, “Please donate, I am blind.”

At least these guys had the decency to show up.  They didn’t pretend they were successful and an expert in anything.  They told you right up front – I’m broke, and I need your help.

Today it’s all positioning, and people fall for it, which amazes me sometimes.  (I said, “sometimes,” lol…)

I wrote a book, and it wasn’t based on things I read, or research I did… or something some professor in a school deep inside the Adirondack mountain region wrote an article about.  It’s based on 21 years in sales, and almost 11 years in specifically direct-response marketing.  How could I write about something otherwise?

I’m not really sure why so many people are so damn preoccupied with telling everyone how much they know, or how smart they are.  Since when did that make you any money, anyway?  It’s not the brain power that pays your mortgage, it’s the application of “some” brain power that rings the register.

Why can’t they just be real enough to ask questions like, “How can I monetize my website?”  Or, “My business just isn’t doing what I want it to.  How can I get more qualified leads?”

Now THAT would be a good use of someone’s time, as opposed to telling everyone the six characteristics of successful bird callers in outer Uzbekistan.  Don’t you think?

I really try and be open minded here.  I even go so far as to try and benevolently help.

For instance, one guy on in some forum was saying his leads have all dried up and what should he do.  So I ask him how he was getting leads when they were plentiful.

His answer “Referrals.”  So this is a guy who’s never spent a penny on advertising and who knows nothing about marketing, and he’s suddenly wondering why he has no cash-flow.

Yikes!

I can’t help this guy out.  Imagine, me coming in and now telling him he has to go out and spend money to get clients?  I might as well tell him he needs to spread VD all over his ankles.

Does anyone else beside me, see a HUGE problem with this?  Is it just me, or are the inmates truly now running the asylum that seems to be my life, whenever I try and venture past the four walls of my house and the beautiful lake outside of it?

Would you go to a doctor and let this doctor deliver your first-born child if said doctor didn’t know anything about… delivering babies?  If his only training was, “I watched a lot of other guys do this?”

How about this one: would you let someone babysit your child whose training was limited to watching the movie “Babies?”  Even if they did watch it twice?

Look, the only thing virtually any business owner should be thinking about — unless they already have all the cash they need, and unless they already have all the leads they can handle — is how to market themselves better.  How to make more with their existing customer base, how to get more leads, and how to convert them to paying customers, faster.  How to make the sun shine in the middle of a rainy day.

Want to read about gumdrops and teddy bears?  Great – go ahead.

Just don’t confuse knowledge with wisdom.

Now go sell something, Craig Garber

P.S.  Want the rest of the story?  Then find out “Why Men Crack” in Chapter 25 of “How To Make Maximum Money With Minimum Customers”

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