Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today we’re going to address a question from the audience out there. Listener J sent in a question about what to do when people don’t believe in you. Now, I’m, I’m lazy. I think if you listen to this show, you know, I don’t want to do extra work if I don’t have to.
And one thing we’re on episode 500 and I think 38 is the one for today. So there’s a lot of episodes, uh, behind us and it turns out. There are some good ones and there’s some, uh, there’s some bad ones, right? They, they can’t all be great. So what I can do is go back to some of the episodes that are pretty good, like this one from Jay.
So it’s a rebroadcast, but I published it well over two years ago. If you listen to it back then, then you probably. Probably don’t even remember what, what I said, and, uh, it’ll be fresh and new and hopefully insightful. So I talk about what to do, uh, maybe a mindset approach for what to do when people don’t believe in you.
And you know, that, that could be tough. It’s, it’s certainly a struggle. Like it’s good to have. People in your corner that are cheering for you and all that stuff. But sometimes you don’t have that. You don’t have that exactly. So I go over some of the thoughts there before I send it over to, to the rebroadcast portion, just want to, yeah, well, it’s a Doug show.
I’m going to talk about myself a little bit here. So a couple of things going on, a couple of things that I’m thinking about. One, I. ordered an e bike. So I’ve, I’ve been on e bikes a couple times. One, I was visiting some friends down in Arizona that, uh, they, they lived in, or my friend, he lived in a, uh, Development called cul de sac and it’s sort of a carless, um, apartment complex, um, living situation.
And one of the things is like, there’s no parking, uh, at the place and they have sort of like common area and like courtyards and there’s some retail there and all that. The other thing is like all the residents have access to an e bike. So you’re like assigned an e bike. So I went out with my friends and rode around the Tempe and Phoenix area, uh, down there months ago.
And it was fine, I’m not super confident riding on the roads, so it wasn’t, um, it wasn’t perfect. There was also like a big festival going on that weekend, so we had to like take detours and like it was, you know, it was a little bit more stressful than what I was hoping for, but it was still fun, and I enjoyed that e bike.
It actually was electric, um, e bike. There’s many, many brands, but it was electric. That’s, that’s what I was hoping for. Electric, but without the E at the beginning. So anyway, I wrote one then and later, a few months later, my wife and I were on a trip to Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, a little outside of the Cleveland area there, and they have a lot of like greenway and biking areas.
So I was like, My wife, she hasn’t been on an e bike before. I was like, we, well, we, uh, let’s rent an e bike. We’ll go out for a few hours and ride. And it was great. It was pretty fun. Um, those bikes weren’t as good. They were, it was actually a single speed. Um, I don’t remember what brand it was. They were comfortable enough, but the, uh, single speed made it hard to go uphills.
The, these e bikes were a little bit underpowered where the one down in It was, um, Pretty powerful. It did what it needed to do. So anyway, through research, um, I finally decided on getting a electric express seven 50. So it looks a little bit more like a traditional bike versus, uh, the electrics have, um, like smaller tires.
The people that, I mean, if you don’t know the brand or you don’t know e bikes, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but basically. it should be a good sort of like cruiser slash commuter bike. I really wanted something comfortable because a lot of times I, I ride my bike and I’m like, I don’t really enjoy this that much.
And then my butt sore. So got a bigger seat. I got a couple things to make it more comfortable, including like the more upright, um, riding situation. So I should feel more comfortable and yeah, it looks like a great bike. So the thing is I ordered it. They got this great black friday special going on so and of course black friday nowadays starts in fucking november 1st Right, so the deal came out right away.
They even had a halloween deal and I almost ordered one before The black friday deal came out, but the black friday deal was pretty good Pretty epic. The thing is they throw in a ton of extras. So it was like, you get fenders, you get like a rear rack, an upgraded seat, upgraded headlight, some other thing.
And then, um, there’s like a discount on an extra battery. So I went all in, got some good stuff. I’m going to try to sign up for the affiliate program. So if you’re interested in checking out an e bike. It sounds like electric is, is one of the best out there as far as like customer service, their bikes, I think they’re on the more, um, economic side.
So because of that, I think we all know, right? You get what you pay for. I think some of the components are probably like more entry level. They’re not like a super premium quality. So keep that in mind. But when you look like when I went to a shop in town here, a comparable bike was going to be like, I don’t know, three to 4, 000, something like that.
And ordering from electric, it was, uh, before taxes, it was like 1, 600 with like all the accessories and all that stuff, including the extra battery. So if I didn’t get the extra battery, which might be overkill, to be honest with you, cause I think that puts the range like a hundred miles and I can’t think, A time when I’m going to fucking ride a hundred miles where I need like a second battery, but I was like, you know what, it’s a good deal.
They got me. So I, I ended up getting the second battery anyway. It should be fun. I’m very excited to get it. The funny thing is, um, you know, a lot of places where I’m watching, um, well, I watched a lot of reviews on YouTube. I’m a YouTube consumer. So I watched a lot of reviews. A lot of those folks are located in like Arizona, Southern California.
Uh, California, Florida, like other like pretty warm places where like winter is, uh, still pretty warm. So the thing is, I ordered it and it’s going to take a little while to get here. I was hoping I was going to get it even sooner, but the thing is like, it’s, uh, the first week or two in November right now when I’m recording this, it’s like snowing outside right now.
And that’s not super conducive to go, uh, riding a bike, like in general, your hands will get cold and all that stuff. Like this particular bike, it’s a class two slash class three bike. So it can go 20 miles an hour on class two mode, 28 miles an hour on class three mode, which is very fast. I can’t imagine I’m going to be going that fast in many situations.
I’m not going to be on the road or anything like that, especially in the near term. But. Anyway, I’m very excited about getting the bike. I like the idea of riding the bike more in the, the cool part. Instead of driving my truck, I don’t mind driving my truck. I hardly drive. Um, I think I only fill up my tank like every six to eight weeks or something like that, unless I’m doing some, you know, driving to go to a hike farther away, but overall I think I’ll be able to like use the bike on the greenways.
That basically is attached to my neighborhood so I could. Pop over there and get to a lot of different places. A lot of breweries around here, actually, uh, very easily on the e bike. So pretty pumped about that showing up. The other thing I want to plug is Mint Mobile. So I talked about this in a recent episode.
I’m an affiliate, but the thing is I used to be on. One of the big brands and it has three letters and I won’t mention what it is. It has three letters and I actually worked at that company for a little while, um, as a contractor back in the day. And the thing is I was on that plan for so many years and I knew I can get cheaper service.
I heard of Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile lays on top of the T Mobile network. And basically if you’re in a big city, if you’re on an interstate, if you’re anywhere that’s roughly populated, like you’re probably going to have pretty good service, but you can test it out for a few days. And that’s what I did. So my wife wasn’t sure about it.
She was dragging her feet. She was like, I don’t want you to switch. I don’t want to switch. Like, what if it doesn’t work? And I’m like, you know what? It’s basically free and risk free for me to try it out. So I. Used an eSIM and I was able to test it out for a week and I was like, it’s totally fine I’m getting insane down download speeds.
I’m getting insane upload speeds. It is I Can’t even tell them on a different network. It’s absolutely fine. But instead of paying I think about 60 just for my portion of it. So as the two of us were paying like 120 It’s only like 15 bucks a month. It’s insane how cheap it is. And that’s 15 bucks a month for five gigs of data.
But if you’re a new customer, you can get any of their three month plans or any of their plans for three months at 15 per month. So basically you can get the much bigger plan than what you think you need, see how much you use, and then you know which one to get. That’s exactly what I did. When I first signed up, I signed up for like, uh, 15 gigs per month, but I don’t use that many.
He’s like three or so. So I sent it for the five gigs per month. And the thing is, if you go over, cause sometimes when I travel, I end up going over or come close to using five gigs, you could just buy a block of, you know, one more gig or three more gigs or whatever the plan has, and then you’re able to pay just, you know, A few bucks more to cover you.
If you happen to go over for some reason, maybe you’re in a place where they don’t have wifi and you end up using like your mobile data a little bit more than you expect. Anyway, check out mint mobile, virtually no risk. I love it. I switched, uh, just about a year ago and I pay annually. It’s so much cheaper than the big guys and they don’t, uh, you know, they don’t jerk you around and raise the prices and all that stuff.
So thanks to mint mobile, check out the, uh, express, uh, Bike, if you’re interested in e bikes or anything like that. And I mean, there’s so much content out there on YouTube. I was just watching video after video, trying to check out like all this stuff that they have. And last little plug, if you’re not sending it for the email list, you can head out there and sign up for the email list or should be a link.
I usually email like once or twice a week. I’ve experimented with sending like more frequent, shorter emails. And the thing is, I’m not. Really trying to sell anything. I’m not trying to, I’m just telling you, like, here’s what I’m thinking about. I just published an episode on this topic and it’s more like, uh, like we’re pen pals or something like that.
So anyway, check that out. Definitely worth, um, signing up for the email list. I let you know some stuff that’s going on and, uh, in my life, some pictures, some time, you know, that kind of thing, it’s pretty fun. That’s a good list. Is there anything else? Is there anything else? Oh yeah, one more thing. One more thing.
If you have a second. Leave a review out there on Apple podcast or over on Spotify, wherever you listen. If you’re able to, if you’ve left one in the past, I don’t know if you can leave another one, but it’s good to have a handful more reviews. You can leave honest feedback. It doesn’t have to be five stars.
I would love it if it was five stars, but. If you just have a second as a favor to me, you can hop over there and leave a review. And you know, you could ask a question in there. You could talk about things that you like that I covered. You could say, Hey, like his personality, hate his personality, whatever.
I mean, it’s good to have reviews regardless. And I mean, I appreciate the feedback. Yeah. I mean, I hope it’s not too negative, but anyway, leave a review out there. It’s good to see. I’ll send it to the, uh, the episode now and thanks a lot. We’ll catch you on the next episode.
Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington and this is one of those bonus episodes. I got an email from Jay and basically he needed some help and I’m going to read out the email that he sent originally. I’m going to give a little advice. We had a little bit of back and forth.
I just wanted to confirm some of my assumptions based on the question and you probably know from the title, it’s. generally dealing with people don’t believe in you. And I hopefully can motivate some folks, although you may have heard me mention before, I’m not a cheerleader. I’m not good at specifically motivating people or getting them to You know, do something that they’re not really into.
It’s not really my style. I am fortunate that I’m generally self motivated, which is, you know, a blessing and a curse in some ways. And it’s fine. Like, I just generally am not highly motivating. If you want to do something for yourself, then I’m not here to convince you. I figure, hey, go do something you want to do.
Where you don’t have to push yourself too much because you want to do it. So anyway, we’ll go over those couple things and then I will highlight one little piece on the back end on how Jay sent this email to me, which it didn’t come off very well initially, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t quite sure what was going on.
So I, I didn’t automatically. Judge J for what was in the email, and we moved forward and everything was fine. I’ll tell you about that later. Here’s the meat of the original email. The reason for reaching out is that I’m struggling. I really am. I believe in myself and believe I have so much talent to offer inside of me that is highly underutilized that it tears me up inside.
I really want to change that. My biggest problem is that no one takes me seriously. How when you first begin to get people to take you seriously about your goals and ambitions? Thanks for your advice. So my initial reaction was, you know, fuck the other people really cares if they believe in you. or not.
They don’t really need to take you seriously, but what you can do is the work and execute on the talent that you have inside of you. And I actually hate the cliche, but it is useful here. Be so good that they can’t ignore you. And that’s been, I think there’s a book. I think maybe by Cal Newport, but he, he took it from other, other places too.
And it’s probably an idea that’s been passed along several times. There will be people that will want to help you. But really that’s only after you start working. They will show up as mentors and teachers and maybe their peers, but they’re more advanced in certain areas and they’ll be able to help you.
They’ll help you out. They will believe in you. They’ll be your cheerleaders and they’ll motivate you when you are not motivated. I thought that maybe it was Jay’s family and friends that aren’t taking him seriously. And I’ll come back to that in a second, but that was my hunch. I kind of read between the lines and I thought, Hey, maybe he’s telling people he wants to do these things.
And they’re like, sure, whatever. Sure you’re going to do that. So. Further, I think probably his family and friends were in a spot where they stick to the general narrative. Maybe they don’t want to see other people try things that are different. I’m pretty much retired. I don’t use that word because I work, and I work on, you know, Fun projects, but if I told people about retiring under 40 from my old job, especially early in our careers Most people would have laughed and they would have told me all the reasons why it won’t work out there would be no shortage of Excuses and reasons why I couldn’t do it now I never even mentioned retiring early or anything like that to my co workers, but after working on it for a few years Shit, I didn’t even need validation from them.
They could tell me why it’s not working. And I’m like, well, fuck, I already stopped working a corporate job and I don’t have to worry about it anymore. So you tell me who’s right, which, you know, I don’t have to have those conversations. Further, me personally, I developed a pretty thick skin as a kid and generally, I don’t need much external validation.
I don’t know why that is exactly, but I don’t I just don’t. Other people are different. And if you need more validation, that is obviously a hundred percent fine. Everyone’s a little bit different and I’m sure our backgrounds and how we were raised in the environments we were in and the support that we got when we were trying to do different things, uh, and maybe just the chemicals in our brain too, but people are different.
I don’t need much external validation. It’s nice occasionally, but in my sort of maybe more cynical outside, I’m not sure what sort of philosophy. I definitely more towards the realistic side, the cynical area, maybe a little nihilistic occasionally. But, but generally, generally, I don’t need too much external validation in further.
I know if I get positive validation or negative validation, I don’t, I try not to let it affect me too much because it’s just this, this different sides of the same coin, really. So I recommend that Jay find other people that can support him, maybe a mastermind group or. A group of entrepreneurs and mastermind groups were great for me because we all were kind of working on the same thing I like groups of like two to four or five people and these are non paid when I say a mastermind group It is a self managed group where you get together and you talk about the stuff that you’re working on They might be working on the same exact kinds of things that you are but it could be different, right?
So I have I’m very interested in podcasting right now, but actually could be in a mastermind group with someone who works on YouTube full time. We’re content creators. We face the same kinds of challenges just in different environments, but mastermind groups are great for the support and you can learn and help help each other out.
I mean, really that’s what it is. You could potentially go to forums or Facebook groups, but those are Well, I don’t spend time there, so take it with a grain of salt. But I think those are kind of bullshit overall. Yeah, you got a lot of people who are noisy, very active in the forums, and they sound so fucking convincing, but they may not know what they’re talking about.
That’s kind of what I see. Of course, there are good forums and there are good Facebook groups, but generally that is the kind of stuff. That I see where the noisiest people, the most convincing people are the ones who have the least amount of experience. That’s just my observation though. So Jay wrote back and said, I want to thank you for replying back.
It means a lot. It says he loves the fuck it mentality. And as a general rule, he applies it to everyday life. But over time, it weighs on him. I did ask how old he was. He says he’s 32 and he’s been trying to be an entrepreneur for a while. Like, uh, apparently like 14 years or so. And he also mentions he’s helped eat, uh, eat, uh, let me try that again.
He’s helped other people create startups while his was left to the side and even copied. And he says he would love to hear my approach on selecting the right mentors, avoid costly mistakes, not just monetary, but emotional as well. And he says that’s something that’s, that stunted his goals and ambitions.
And it wasn’t a give and take relationship. Yep. He also said, Hey, the family stuff, it’s a long story. So I think I was probably right. Family and friends weren’t, um, very supportive, didn’t really help them out. So that’s, that’s not great, but a lot of people face that. And sometimes, you know, that chip on their shoulder helps motivate them even more.
Further, Jay says a mastermind group sounds great, but it’s been difficult for me to find people that have similar ambitions. And while I have friends, they’re not in the same level of desire for entrepreneurship. And in the groups that he is in, everyone’s focused on their goals rather than working on goals as a collective.
He struggles with that. So, yeah, for selecting mentors, I’m not really sure. I know I found it extremely helpful for me to take, expensive courses and then go to the office hours and you would get direct coaching from someone who has gone through exactly what I’m trying to figure out. And then further, they’ve also talked to a bunch of different students.
So they not only have their experience, they’ve seen other people. Do it that are in the same level as me or a little ahead or a little behind. So that is one good way. Of course, I just said expensive courses. One great thing with the expensive courses is all the other students in there. They also paid a lot of money, so it automatically filters out the people that aren’t serious.
And I’ve formed mastermind groups with people in courses or expensive membership groups just to have access to network with people that take it as seriously as me. You don’t have to do that. Another approach would be just to go to, you know, a bunch of meetups. It’s great to meet in person and actually see who you connect with.
A mastermind group might only last for six weeks. Maybe you design it that way. Hey, we’re doing six weeks. We’re going to meet every week and we’re going to get together, um, and talk for an hour and a half and it’ll be sort of like a quick accelerator type deal, or you can space it out a little bit more and meet an hour every two weeks and just keep meeting sort of indefinitely.
It’s totally up to you. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. And, you know, mentors and the mastermind group, it’s something you will have to figure out on your own. For me, I typically formed my own groups and sort of facilitated things a little bit. I kept notes. I sent out the meeting invites. I kind of organized things and ran the meeting because that’s where my background.
I ran meetings as a project manager, so it’s fairly straightforward for me to do the admin bullshit that most people don’t want to get into. So I was able to form groups with people who were maybe a little bit ahead of me. Maybe they were a little better than me. Just, I mean, like objectively they were ahead of me and I was organizing stuff.
So I was able to pull together a group that was, I was the dumbest one in there and that’s how you can learn the most, but I was doing the legwork, right? So I, I pulled it together, pitched the idea and people were into it knowing that I was at the level that I was at, but it’s a great way to do it. And honestly, running a meeting is not that hard.
Sometimes you have to jump in and interrupt people, keep the schedule going so no one takes too much time, or you end up having an hour and a half long meeting when it was supposed to be an hour, you know, you gotta, you gotta manage a couple of things like that. But again, that is where a lot of my skills lie.
So overall, hopefully Jay, this has been helpful, but I think my, my advice ends up being, Hey, you just got to get to the, get to it and get to the work. And then, you know, hopefully you’ll find your people that can support you. But. You know, no one’s going to, no one’s going to feel sorry for you. No one, I mean, this, this is the truth.
Most of the time, no one gives a shit about you. They don’t care about your projects. They don’t care about what you’re working on. No one cares. It’s just like people are in their own head. So if you need the external validation. Again, which is fine. I do not look down upon that at all, but if you need more external validation and you need more support than a mastermind group with some peers is probably the best way to go because they will get exactly what you’re going through and they can help motivate you as well.
So the last little part, and I’ll, I’ll finish this up quick here, actually, before, before I get into that, I got another podcast called mile high five. We talk about personal finance, financial independence. I’ll put a link in the description here, so you can check it out. If you haven’t already, and we interviewed some pretty awesome people, people that have retired early, people that are just, on a different path than many others.
So check that out. Mile high five. Okay. Jay sent this first email to me and the subject line was your baby’s ugly and opened up. Hey, Doug, your baby’s not ugly. At least I don’t think it is. I heard this is the, one of the most open subject lines in the world. in the world or subject lines and emails did it work and the problem with this approach is I get a lot of marketing emails and I thought this was spam automatically and I I have a big dislike for insincere bullshit subject lines that are purely there to just get you to open it.
And you may notice most of my subject lines are as about as they are as straightforward as you can get. I’m not trying to trick people. I have, you know, when I was learning, I experimented and maybe I tried one of these and you know, it gets the curiosity. But the problem is it, I mean, I don’t, I don’t have a baby.
Um, it’s slightly offensive. It’s just the dick move. Right. But I could tell. By the way that Jay asked the question, Hey, I’m struggling. I really need help, blah, blah, blah. So I was like, is this bullshit or is it a real email? So I replied back and I was like, is I’ll read a verbatim. Is this a real email or is it spam?
If it’s real, why don’t you try again with a non clickbait headline? I read all my emails, so it’s not necessary to be cute or use some trick. And that was the. nicer version of what I initially thought about writing back, because again, I mean, I don’t want to get emails that are insincere, especially where someone tried to trick me to open the email.
I don’t need that, right? I get a bunch of other emails. I have other things to tend to, so I don’t want, I don’t want anyone to be insincere like that. If you have sent me an email and it didn’t write back for some reason, It probably got lost in the shuffle. I do get quite a lot of emails. I do try to reply back to anyone that acts, asks me, that asks a legit question.
Sometimes it’s not possible. Sometimes I get behind and then, you know, it’s like three months and then I reply back that happens occasionally, but anyway, be cool on your emails. You don’t be sincere. I read them all. You don’t have to use clickbait and I suspect most people do not want to get Those kind of subject lines either I could be wrong.
I’m wrong about a lot of things But that is that is my that’s one of the tips, you know Just be sincere and you’ll probably be much better off people will receive your message in a more genuine way That’s all for today. I hope you dig these short episodes. Let me know feedback at doug. show Please let me know if you like these I like doing these short ones occasionally It’s kind of fun.
So we’ll catch you later on the next episode.