Privilege Pitfalls: Tim Ferriss & Steven Bartlett's Advice Won't Help Your Business

Tim Ferriss won't help you build your business. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. And welcome to the weeniecast.

Hopes and dreams die following the advice of privileged white men. And if you're a privileged white man listening to this podcast, know that I'm not disparaging your accomplishments, but I am calling out that the things that you were able to do to reach success are not available to most other people. Like many business owners, I have a bookshelf that is full of books written by Napoleon Hill, Tim Ferriss, biographies of people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, which I haven't read.

To be fair, I bought them thinking they'd be interesting. And then I got like a chapter and I was like, this is not relevant to me because their experience is not my experience. I don't know that I can blame these books for. For making my business take longer to build. Maybe reading these books was actually a delay tactic on the part of my subconscious who was afraid of starting a business. But what I do know is that the vast majority of the advice given in these books were not possible for me.

There's this one story in Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill where he talks about a man whose sole goal in life was to become a business partner of Edison. And so this man, this white man who had not a penny to his name, stowed away on a train and made it to wherever Edison was. I forget the geography of the time. And showed up and basically, you know, said to Edison, I would like to be your partner. What can I do? And he just started working for Edison.

He took any job that was available, and over time, he learned the business and he saw an opportunity to sell something that Edison was developing, and he did really well, and he became a business partner of Edison. And that story sounds so motivating. It sounds so inspirational, right? Like you can go from absolute nothing to being a business partner of one of the most renowned inventors of that age, someone who we still know and talk about to this day. But what if he were a single parent?

What if he had an ailing father that he had to take care of? What if he'd been black? Would he have gotten that meeting with Edison? And even if he had gotten that meeting with Edison, when he identified the opportunity to become the business partner of Edison, do you think he would have been given it? Unfortunately. I mean, I can't say for sure, but unfortunately, knowing the history of the United States and the history of racism in the United States.

I'd hazard a guess, and I'm pretty sure I'm right, that the answer is no. I saw a post on the social medias the other day that the whole belief system around making good choices assumes that everyone has good choices to make, that they have good options to choose from.

The creator of the Diary of a CEO Part podcast, Stephen Bartlett, he actually had a baby. Well, he didn't personally. His girlfriend had a baby when they were teenagers and he went on to be massively successful. But in his story he talks about moving to New York and living in an apartment with a ridiculous amount of other people and doing things that were absolutely impossible if he were the primary caregiver of a child.

This man had the privilege of having the mother of his child who did the vast majority of the child rearing and who could not have done what he did. Because what would society say of a woman, even if they're still a child, who abandoned their baby to go work in New York City and share an apartment with a ridiculous amount of people and to work an insane amount of hours and pursue your dreams?

There's a double standard and the difference in opinion that she would have gotten about her lifestyle, about her choices, would have limited the choices that she was offered. If a man abandons his responsibilities as a father to go and pursue his business dreams, it's seen as admirable, it's seen as a sacrifice. If a woman does that, it's seen as neglectful, selfish, like she's lacking in morals. And people who are lacking in morals do not get offered the same opportunities as men.

And people who are seen to be lacking morals do not get the same type of opportunities offered to them. Everyone loves to talk about how Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his parents garage, which of course, like that sounds like such a rough and tumble kind of way to start out. But what if your parents don't own a house? What if your parents don't have a garage or even a spare corner of their kitchen for you to set up shop and start your business?

The mere fact that he had access to a garage to use for free to start Amazon is a massive privilege. Not to mention that I believe his parents lent him $300,000 to start Amazon along with a bunch of their rich friends. It's an incredible privilege to have access to people who have that kind of capital to invest in you. Most people do not have that. I could go on and on with more examples of this, but you're going to get bored. I'm going to get Bored talking about it.

But really we have to talk about. The root of the problem here is that we're listening to people who don't give us the full fucking story. They want to be seen as someone who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, who are scrappy and intelligent and blessed with that little thing called luck, when really what we need to listen to is what they're not saying. They're not talking about who's picking up the kids from school. They're not talking about who is doing the laundry in the house.

They're not talking about needing to work so that they can still have health insurance, so that they can afford their very expensive medication for their chronic illness. Because oftentimes the folks who write these books don't have any of that going on.

And yet they want you, who might have children, who might need to take care of elderly relatives, who has housework to do, who has a job that you need to keep to keep health insurance, who has a myriad of other things going on in your life that you cannot neglect to go after your dream. They want you to believe that you just need to follow exactly what they did and you'll be successful just like them.

And if you're not, the insinuation is that there's something wrong with you, there's something about you that's just not quite up to snuff, which in turn supports the mythology of them. There must be something preternaturally good or blessed or whatever about them in their life that allowed for them to be this successful. What we need more of is we need to hear the success stories, the real nitty gritty. Here's what I had to deal with in my life, and here are the sacrifices I had to make.

And here's how I leaned into help in a gazillion different ways. And here's how I had to work towards my goal little by little, because I couldn't go for the big juicy dream like these guys. We need these kinds of stories for from women. We need them from people of color. We need them from folks with disabilities. We need them from folks who might have a different sexual orientation or who are not the generic cisgendered folks.

Because the hopes and dreams of thousands, if not millions, die every single day trying to follow the advice of these privileged white guys. So instead of listening to them, people need to start listening to you. They need realistic advice. A great example of this is if you listen to any of Stacey Abrams books.

She's real about the shitty options she had growing up about the debt she had to dig herself into in order to give herself a leg up about the family challenges that she had to deal with and about the prejudice she faced. We need more thought leaders like her.

And if you're just starting out, if you have a hope or a dream or a goal that you're just not reaching because you're following the advice of these privileged white guys and it's not helping you, here's your permission to do things differently. Here's your permission to let go of the expectation that you should be able to follow their advice and get the same results. Because we all know that it's not true.

When I work with my clients, sometimes I get the advice that I should be turning byob, my build your own business group program into kind of a business in a box program. It's like 10 step plan to build the the business of your dreams. If you just follow my step by step program, my step by step process, I did it and you can too. I'm sure that's probably going to be easier for me to market and easier for me to sell.

I don't want to do it because I know it's not going to be as effective as how it is right now. One of the things that I love about that program, because I create the time and the space, is my ability to customize each plan, each strategy for each client based on who they are, their circumstances, the business type that they want to grow, and of course, the limitations and challenges that they are facing naturally in their day to day.

And I'm only able to do this by keeping the program relatively small. I'm only able to do this by not making a business in a box kind of thing. Because here's the truth of it. Very few people would be able to grow their business and be successful doing exactly what I did. I had an immense amount of privilege in my safety net to fail. I mean, to be fair, I don't have children to this day, but when I started, I didn't have kids.

I have a lot of clients who either have young children, they have kids who are about to go off to college, or they have infants, all of which require a different thing from them. A different amount of mental and emotional labor, a different level of presence, a different amount of financial support. I didn't have any of that when I started. And I hate saying this because it was an awful time for so many people and a lot of people didn't make it.

But I also had the privilege of growing my business during a pandemic when literally there was nothing outside the house that required anything of me. I was responsible for doing my laundry, for feeding myself, for checking in on friends and family. But I was able to give 8, 10, 12 hours a day to my business.

And because we were in a global lockdown, I was able to reach people online to a degree that is not possible today because everyone was cut off from their normal social lives, from the normal demands of day to day life, commuting, volunteer projects. So if I were to turn to my clients and tell them, well, you should be spending two hours a day on LinkedIn, it's not necessarily realistic for them.

As you start working on your business and setting your goals and really looking for the right people to support you, be it a business strategist, a business coach, an online business manager, whatever your needs are, one of the questions you absolutely should be asking is how were you successful and in what ways is that success attributed to your privilege?

And if they cannot answer that question, they can't tell you all the ways in which their life circumstances made it easier for them to be successful. If they can't own it, they're not the right coach or strategist for you because they're not going to be concerned about customizing your plan to you, to your limitations in your life because they won't be able to see the limitations if they don't have the ability to introspect about their own privilege. And it doesn't have to be big.

One of the most damaging relationships that I've had in supporting my business was a public speaking coach who was big on here's how I did it, do it the exact, exact same way. And it sounds silly, but one of the things that she assigned to me as homework was that every day for an hour, I'd have to reach out to different organizations and events to propose myself as a speaker.

And if you've listened to the Weeniecast at all and listened to the journey we've been on and know about how I work, doing things for an hour a day is not doable for me. I can sit down for five hours and bang through a ton of work and get into flow and get it all done. Carving out an hour a day, having to change gears into something that I only have an hour for and that I have to change gears out of, that's a lot more mental work for me.

And so when I brought this up to her and I was explaining, you know, I understand that that works for you, but unfortunately, like that way of doing Work just does not work for me. Instead of getting any empathy or understanding or flexibility in me doing this thing in my own way, I got shamed for not being able to do it her way. I got berated. And it was implied that I was just being lazy about it.

Which, of course, if you've ever built a business or done something that's outside your comfort zone, you know that those three things do not help you make greater progress. And in reading books by privileged folks who don't own their privilege, who don't talk about the different challenges that they're able to farm out to other people because of how they live their lives, we end up shaming ourselves.

We end up gaslighting ourselves that like, well, if they're able to do it, I should be able to do it too. And that shame will not help you build your dream. It will not help you build a business. It will not help you build something that matters to you. What it'll do is it'll send you to the pantry in your house where you'll sit on the ground and eat a shit ton of chocolate to make yourself feel better because you're depressed.

My challenge for you this year is to become more discerning in who you're listening to. Absolutely. If you want to read Tim Ferriss the Four Hour Work Week and take what you can from it, the things that are realistic for your life right now, then go for it. But don't take it as gospel. Don't take everything that he says okay, and say, okay, well, now I have to rework my whole life to be exactly like Tim's. That's just not realistic.

One of the things that Tim does great is he explains step by step how he did things. One of the things he kind of sucks at is explaining how he was already set up to be successful in that way. I mean, the guy went to Princeton. He dropped out for a year for his mental health, and then he was able to go back. I don't know about you, but I didn't go to Princeton. And even if I had, if I had dropped out, I probably would not have had the resources or the ability to go back after a year.

And where you can seek out influencers and business owners and thought leaders who have either struggled in similar ways as you or in worse ways than you, or who at least own their privilege here, who own, kind of like I did, that they weren't wrapped up in childcare during the beginning stages of their business, who own that they had some support from mom and dad and don't try to make it sound like they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps where with absolutely nothing.

When you invest time in listening to someone listen for the parts that they're not talking about. If you know that they have children and yet there's no acknowledgement to who took care of the kids while they were working 12 hour days, take note of that. Notice that they're not mentioning health struggles or difficulties with their mental health. And notice the ease of which they got into the rooms with the people who gave them their biggest opportunities.

Did they have to fight and claw and argue for a seat at the table? Or did they have a buddy on the board who invited them to that happy hour where they met their first investor?

One of the most common fears that my clients have when they start working with me is that they don't naturally have this network of their ideal clients built into their life. They don't know the people that they're going to sell to. Which makes sense, you know, if you're a top sales executive and you want to be a sales coach for folks who are just starting out in their first closing role.

Like your social group is not going to be people early on in their career because you're not early on in your career as you started out 10 years ago. Yeah, your group of friends were all folks who were just starting out as well. But as you got each promotion as you got older, it's not like you cycled through friends as they became more successful. You're like, okay, peace out. I'm going to stay friends with the people who are just starting out now.

I'm going to make new friends with this next wave. Absolutely not. That's not how humans work. You all grew together, you all changed jobs together. You know, when we listen to these guys and we hear them talk about, well, I just went to my friend and got an investment. We think, well, it should be that easy, right? We should have people in our friend groups who have the money or are our ideal clients. But that's not naturally how it goes.

And just to let you know, you don't need to have a network full of your ideal clients before you start your business to be successful. It's one of the things that I train all of my clients on in the build your own business group program and in my one on one how to establish a network in the group of people that you want to sell to. You know, when I work with clients on their relationship with money, one of the things that we work on is their Money, hygiene.

And I don't mean exfoliating yourself with dollar bills while you're in the shower. I mean, what is the type of information that you're allowing to enter your subconscious? What are the TV shows that you're watching that glorify being broke? What news channels are you watching that catastrophize the state of the economy? What friends and family members are you talking about on a regular basis? And how much do they bitch about the cost of things?

Much like I have my clients get intentional about their money hygiene and cleaning out the things that are bad influences you, my friend, I want you to get super intentional about your thought leader hygiene. Who are the voices that you're listening to and are they actually helpful in you going after your dreams? Or do they blanket you in shame and gaslight you to think that this should be easier, that there's something wrong with you, that this is this hard.

And I apologize if I just ruined your favorite book or your go to podcast, but I promise you it's for the better. And if you're in the midst of starting your business and you've been trying to follow all the advice, the ten step system to build your business just like that successful person did and it's not working for you, let yourself off the hook.

And if you want help that is customized to you, to your limitations, to how you work, to your strengths and your weaknesses, and to the big juicy goal that you have at the end of this, then I invite you to book a generate income strategy.

Call with me and we will sit down and talk about that big dream and look at all the areas in which you're facing obstacles and if it makes sense and we can talk about the different ways we can work, work together or I can point you in the direction of some resources that'll help you get there on your own. And if you want to book that call, go to weenacast.com strategycall and hopefully soon you will be that person.

Hopefully soon you'll have the driver and the personal chef and the nanny if you have children. Or maybe you could have a nanny for your pets. Who knows? It would probably make more sense to have a nanny for a dog than say, a goldfish. I mean, unless. Unless you really, really care about the goldfish and think it needs a lot of attention.