Top Investing Mistake #3: Listening to People who are Totally Unqualified
In this country, and perhaps throughout the world, there are people who love to give advice. Unfortunately it seems that most of the people who give out a lot of advice have no experience in what they are talking about. Why? Because it is very easy to appear knowledgeable about a subject by repeating the same things that everyone else says. I suppose it’s part of being human. Being “right” is often the same thing as repeating commonly held beliefs.
Investing advice is no exception. Many people love to give out investing advice, and often they have zero investing experience. I was at a family dinner and mentioned purchasing rental property. A family member said, “Oh, don’t do that. You’ll get calls in the middle of the night about a stopped up toilet!”
And I thought, why would I give out my phone number? Why can’t the tenant just call a property manager or a plumbing company? That is such an easy problem to solve, but it was enough to convince my relative that real estate was too much trouble. It didn’t matter that real estate is one of the best investments we can make. It didn’t matter that millions of real estate investors have gotten rich, and solved the problem of “middle of the night stopped up toilets”. Donald Trump doesn’t get calls about stopped up toilets in the middle of the night, does he?
When we hear about the reasons why investing won’t work, it is very easy to become discouraged. It takes massive drive and commitment to do all the work necessary to succeed at investing (and just about anything else). It takes constant positive reinforcement to overcome all the reasons why investing won’t work. It’s so much easier to just sit down on the sofa, turn on the TV (with the remote), have a drink, and relax.
The problem is that if we want to achieve financial freedom, we need to ignore (and avoid) all the people who tell us that it won’t work and are totally unqualified to give advice. These people have never achieved anything in the area that they are talking about. They are more interested in being “right”, appearing smart, and repeating the same low-value advice that they hear from others. This useless advice will prevent us from achieving as well, but only if we listen to it. Therefore, it is important to be very careful to choose who we take advice from.
Related posts:
- Top Investing Mistake #8: Not Getting Buy-In from Important People
- Top Investing Mistake #10: Not Finding Your Groove
- Top Investing Mistake #5: Not Managing Risk
- Top Investing Mistake #1: Not Having the Right Mindset
- Open Source Investing: What Can We Learn from Other People?
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is one of my favorite financial books of all time. It's an allegory about a guy who has a terrible job, and how he overcomes challenges to achieve his dreams.
