Want To Be Rich? Don’t Watch Online Gurus.

Want to be rich? Follow your passion, and you’ll never work a day in your life. This is terrible advice.

So is “manifest your success,” “slow down,” “follow the rules,” and “learn to compromise.” In fact, this advice is the complete opposite of what actually leads to real success. It’s almost like these well-known sayings are designed to make you feel good, but ultimately, keep you poor.

I’m going to upset a lot of online gurus here with this article, but if you’re serious about becoming rich, then the people spouting this nonsense are completely wasting your time. Most of these people have never actually made millions, or even worse, they have, but by pretending to be rich.

Look, I’ve been there and done it and made a lot of money in the process. So here’s my five-step anti-guru formula, which will actually help you become rich.

Step 1: Don’t Follow Your Passion

The Problem with Passion

Right, let’s clear something up right away. Often when I say “don’t follow your passion,” lots of people jump to the conclusion I’m telling people to just focus on the money. This is not the case. I just fundamentally disagree with the “follow your passion” advice. It’s very unclear, it’s highly self-centered, and very impractical for many people.

Let’s break down the issues one by one.

Passion is Unclear and Unreliable

Firstly, the actual meaning of the word “passion” is unclear. It’s just one of those fluffy words that has no real universal definition. I suppose the best place to start is the Oxford Dictionary, which says passion is “a strong and barely controllable emotion.” See what I mean? It’s extremely open for interpretation. This makes it hard to tell the difference between an impulsive, short-lived interest and a possible route to success.

The other interesting thing about passion is that it fades, especially if you turn it into a job. This is because once you get paid for something that you used to do for fun, it becomes an obligation rather than a choice. Once it fades, another passion will probably pop up. Now, say you follow that new passion and abandon the old one, you’ve got to start again from ground zero. Now that’s fine once or twice, and I’ve got friends that have done it, but to become rich, you need to get really good at something, and the only way to do this is through hours of dedication.

Passion vs. Market Demand

Secondly, following your passion is all about you and not others. The true secret to becoming rich is to provide what the market wants, not what you want. Say you were extremely passionate about paper airplanes. It’s going to be really hard getting rich doing this as a full-time job because the market is so small. That’s why you have to make sure there’s an actual demand for what you do; otherwise, you can follow your passion all you want, but it won’t make you wealthy. The only person that cares about your feelings is you and maybe your family.

The Reality of Finding a Passion

Thirdly, the most important issue of them all: most people don’t have a passion. Look, I’m sick of all this stereotypical advice: just do something for long enough, this will lead to you becoming better, and ultimately, you’ll start to love it. I know people that have worked in an office job for 30 years, and while good at it, they absolutely hate it.

The Alternative: Follow Your Effort

So with that said, I’m going to amend “follow your passion” to what Mark Cuban once suggested: follow your effort.

Emotions are unreliable; cold hard facts aren’t. So if you really want to become rich, then closely track where you freely choose to apply your time and pursue that. Time is your most valuable asset. You can’t make any more of it, you don’t know how much you have left, and you can never buy it back. This means that tracking what you do in your free time is a fantastic way of identifying what you actually care about.

But this is where you can fall for the next bit of bad advice.

Step 2: Don’t Manifest Success

The Dangers of Manifestation

I’m sick and tired of these people talking about how manifestation changed their life. When you’ve followed your effort, the most dangerous thing you can do is stop taking action and start manifesting. I now have everything I ever wanted, but I’ll let you into a secret: I didn’t manifest once.

Before you jump to the conclusion that I’m saying self-belief is useless, hear me out. My main problem with manifestation are fake gurus, survivor bias, and false expectations.

False Hope and Scams

It’s no secret that fake gurus talk about manifestation non-stop. Why do you think that is? It’s because it sells false hope, which is a very profitable product. They suck people in with the promise that if they think hard enough, then everything will be given to them on a silver platter. It’s also very easy for them to blame their customers when their poorly made online course doesn’t deliver the promised results. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen people complain after buying one of these courses. When they say something like, “This didn’t work for me,” instead of receiving a refund, they normally get an answer like, “It’s because you didn’t manifest hard enough.” This is exactly how most scams work: they blame the customer.

Survivor Bias and False Expectations

It’s not just these fake gurus pushing this bad advice, it’s also the people that it happened to work for. One of the most famous examples is Jim Carrey, who famously wrote himself a $10 million check before he achieved success. Sometime later, he found out he was cast in the movie Dumb and Dumber for, you guessed it, $10 million. A lot of people point to this as an example of manifestation working. However, this is far more likely due to the hundreds of other things Jim Carrey was doing. There are probably thousands of other stories just like this one that didn’t have a happy ending, but we’ll never get to hear about those. It just sets people up for unrealistic expectations and promotes the idea that you can do nothing and get results.

Develop Grit

So once you’ve followed your effort, instead of spending your time manifesting, you need to get your head down and develop grit. This means instead of giving up when something goes wrong, you see it as an opportunity to learn and stay committed to the long-term pursuit of your goals. By developing grit, you can build the resilience and perseverance necessary to achieve lasting success. Once you do this, you’ll have results that will boost your confidence and self-belief, which is ten times more powerful than standing in front of the mirror and repeating that you’re going to be rich one day.

When you manage to get to this stage, you’ll probably notice people starting to pull you back, which leads me to:

Step 3: Don’t Slow Down

The Need for Urgency

Whoever tells you to slow down is trying to stop you becoming successful. Moving swiftly led me to quicker solutions, which resulted in me making a lot more money. But before you say it, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be patient; there is a huge difference. Let me explain.

You need to have a sense of urgency in your life. After all, we’re only getting older, and your brain is only getting slower, so it’s best to push yourself now while you have the energy to do it. Small actions lead to big outcomes, and the small things that you do each day build on each other and compound over time. That’s why you should take action now.

Don’t Wait for Success

Phrases like “if you build it, they will come” are really misguided, as they suggest that if you wait, then things will work out. I get it. Who doesn’t want to believe that when you build a great product or offer a fantastic service, as long as you wait long enough, you’ll become rich? The truth is, the world doesn’t work like that. If you sit back and wait for the money to start flowing in, then it probably never will. Taking your time will lead to you missing your golden opportunity.

So don’t listen to the people that are holding you back. If something needs to be done, do it. There’s no point waiting. You need to move swiftly with your actions, but be patient with the results.

However, if you always do everything the way other people expect, then you will never reach your true potential, which leads me onto:

Step 4: Don’t Follow the Rules

Disruption Leads to Success

On my school report, it would always say the same thing: “Mark has potential but is highly disruptive.” I used to get told off for that. However, if the same thing was written on Time’s magazine with a big picture of me plastered on the front, then I’d be celebrated for it. The truth is, if you do everything the same as everyone else, then you’ll end up with the same results.

I like to think of it as being a fisherman, and instead of fishing where everyone else does, you decide to go off the beaten track and find a hidden lake. That’s why when I opened my first shop, I went back to my disruptive tendencies and wracked my brains for whatever I could to do a bit differently from my competitors. That’s when I came up with this genius marketing strategy to establish myself in the area. In the dead of night, I went around the neighborhood with hundreds of signs and cable ties. I stuck these signs up, directing people towards my shop from all directions. It worked wonders.

About three months later, I got a visit from the authorities who asked me to remove the signs. However, by that point, they’d done their intended job, and now word of mouth was already spreading about my shop. You’re competing against a lot more people. By breaking the rules, you can quite often find a lot of new opportunities.

Now you’ve followed your effort, developed grit, and broken the rules, there is one more advice trap you can fall into.

Step 5: Don’t Learn to Compromise

Compromise is Mediocrity

People say, “Compromising is great. You need to be able to find common ground and negotiate with people in life so that you can all get along and come to the best solutions.” No, it’s not. That’s not what compromising is.

Compromise is about reaching a settlement that is often lower than the standards you would expect, whether or not it feels the right thing to do. I see compromise as another word for mediocrity.

I get it, you may be thinking, if you go through life not listening to others, then you’re going to come across as a bit of a dick, and I completely agree. Other people may have ideas and perspectives that you haven’t considered. Learning from them is vital, but that doesn’t mean you have to compromise. There’s a huge difference between someone that doesn’t listen to others because of their huge ego, and someone that listens and weighs up their options.

Be Open to Ideas, Closed to Compromise

As the author of Narnia, C.S. Lewis, once wrote, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one.” To me, this compromising might seem like the easy way at first, but it will end up being a nightmare later when you’re too far down the road to turn back. You need to be open to ideas, but closed to compromises.

Ask yourself, how do you want to be remembered? As a person who compromised on their goals and dreams, doing things to make others happy and avoid arguments, or the person who stood up for what they believed in, had a clear vision, and lived their life on their terms?