 I often talk about building a true fan audience, a community of readers or viewers who just love your presence and your work and who follow your content consistently, right? But there's a difference between having a true fan audience and being a guru. And I feel like it's important to talk about that difference and why it's a danger to go towards becoming a guru. So the way that a guru, well, let me just first explain the origin of the word guru. It's from certain ancient spiritual traditions, notably I think Hinduism and Eastern traditions where a guru is like a revered spiritual guide for the students. And some students almost give their entire life over to their guru. Like anything the guru says asks the student will give, right? And you know, I believe in freedom of religion. So however someone wants to practice a religion, follow some guru, that's fine. I mean, that's if it works for them, you know, it's not my part to say. But when it comes to business, when it comes to building our own audience, I think we should be very careful when we are going in that direction. And I'm certainly in danger of being a guru for some of you. And I'll tell you why I don't want to become one and what the dangers are, okay? So being a guru means that, you know, I know I'm going in that direction when I hate to get disagreements from my students and clients. I don't like their critical feedback. I don't, you know, when I'm not open to it. When I expect that my audience will do everything that I say. And so I am baffled when I sell something and they don't buy it. They're like, Oh my gosh, no, I should have control over their will. You know, this is why it's so dangerous. I mean, there are people in my industry who essentially this is part of the danger of learning marketing, right? Because learning marketing and persuasion, which I don't teach persuasion. But if you, you know, marketing always has some elements of persuasion. And when you learn it and when you start to do it, you start creating a dangerous level of control over your audience. People start to, because they like your presence, your energy signature, there's a match there. What you say can sometimes sound to them like universal truth. And that's dangerous because every person has their own authentic path toward growth, toward their higher self. And to say that you have the exact step-by-step strategy for all your students is a lie. It's just not true because you don't know what that student, that that person in your audience, what their life path is supposed to be. So how can you have a step-by-step path? Which is why I am always in the mode, in the mindset of experimentation and exploration. And everything I share with you, I hope you know, is from my own experimentations and that you should take it as an idea for experimentation rather than the absolute truth. It's interesting, one of my students recently, you know, in one of my classes, in my most popular class, my Facebook ads course, I recently shared a significant experimentation I was making. I said, you know, there was one significant teaching in the class that I want to revise, possibly want to revise because I've noticed this happening over time. And I'm going to try to experiment with something differently now. And this was a potential change to a significant pillar of my Facebook ads teaching. And to me, I want to tell you what I'm experimenting with because you might want to experiment with it too because nobody has the absolute truth, not even to something like Facebook ads or marketing or anything. And one of my students said something interesting to me. They said, you know, in the feedback form, which I'm very open to feedback, but this part I wanted to share with you, they said, you know, you are essentially saying that one of your core teachings was wrong. You never told us to come experiment with me. You know, meaning that the suggestion was that I was supposed to teach the absolute truth about how to use Facebook ads correctly. And I'm sorry if you think that I have the absolute truth to anything, including marketing or business or productivity or how to make money authentically or anything that comes out of my mouth. I don't have the absolute truth for your life, for your path, for what you're supposed to do. All I can tell you is things that have worked for me, things that have worked for some of my clients, things that I'm observing that seem to be right to me. It is all experimentation and exploration. When you start to say, well, George, you know, you're supposed to know the truth, then you're starting to see me as your guru. And I should not be your guru. You should only have one guru. Your guru should be the God of your understanding or your higher self. If you don't believe in God or your higher self, your highest self, that should be your guru. You should always follow your conscience, the best that you know how in connection to the God of your understanding or in connection to your highest self. And take everything from any teacher that you follow to be a suggested experiment. Does that make sense? When we aspire and the reason why so many people, influencers, messengers, creators aspire to be gurus, of course, we hopefully you understand because it feels so good to have the adoration of many people. It feels so good to be able to say something and watch people do it. You know, follow your instructions exactly as you teach them to not stray from your will, right? Not my will be done. Dying will be done. The God of your understandings will be done in your life, not my will, right? Now, I hope that I'm connected to some higher wisdom in a way that some of my suggestions to you are good experimentations that will shorten your learning curve in business and marketing and anything that I might teach you. But when we aspire to be a guru, what happens is that if you believe in such things, we create karmic attachments for many lifetimes and can create burdens for many lifetimes. But let's talk about on a practical or earth-based or day-to-day level is that, well, there's dangers for both the student and the guru, right? The danger for the student is that their free will gets increasingly stripped from them. If you follow everything I tell you and think that what George says must be the way and I must follow him step by step and it must work for me. You're stripping away your free will and you are increasingly reliant upon me for your problem-solving skills. I would rather you figure things out on your own. Now, like I said, I can help you maybe shorten the learning curve a lot by saying, well, I've tried a bunch of things. This might be a better experimentation for you to start out with and hopefully you get good results sooner rather than later, right? But your free will and your personal agency and your ability to solve problems and be creative on your own is of paramount importance to you and to me as well. So that's a danger of being following a teacher wholeheartedly, you know, you're stripping away your personal agency and your creative problem-solving abilities, which is one of the most important things you have in life, right? Maybe the most important. The second thing is that you stop learning truly when you only follow one teacher is that you don't realize all the things that you're missing out on, your worldview becomes very, very narrow. So that's a danger to you, the student, following a teacher like a guru. Okay, now again, I'm not talking about spiritual traditions, religion. That's a separate thing and I honor your practice of religion. The danger for the guru in business is that if I become a guru, I stop learning because I'm in an echo chamber. I only say what feels good to me, what comes to me and then I have my students pair it back to me, what I say and nobody disagrees with me. I don't allow any disagreements or I ignore critical feedback. Then I stop growing and I also create karmic attachments, like I said, and I become egoistic and hubristic and yeah, it's not a good thing. So that's why I've always been very obsessive about getting feedback from my students and I tell them, please be honest with me. If there's something that rubs you the wrong way, something that you disagree with, something that worked for you differently, maybe you found a different way, that's better for you. That's better for you and maybe for others too. Then I want to know about that and I want to experiment with it and maybe share that with others so that more people can find a better experiment. So anyway, I think I can end this video by now, just by saying, be aware of your own aspirations to be a guru. You can still passionately teach what you believe, of course. Passionately teach what you believe. Passionately help others with what step by step you know. But the key is to be open to the fact that they might know better than you. The student might know better, and I should say this, hopefully the student knows better than the teacher for what's best for the student's own life. Now, the student looks to the teacher for, okay, you've spent a lot of years experimenting and give me some good experiments. But just be aware that it's all experimentation, explorations that you're giving to your students. And they might find better ways than what you know for them, okay? And you should study what they bring to you and be very open to their feedback, not that you shouldn't be confident. See, I'm very confident. But this is really about how do we balance confidence and humility? And that's, anyway, that's the message for today. I hope this is helpful. I'm always open to your comments and your questions. I'm so grateful for your willingness to experiment with me and get some ideas for me and then find your own way. So I look forward to your comments below. I'm just going to give you a moment to make any comments while you give me a moment to see any comments from the live attendees of this video. Let's see here. Yes. Thank you for joining me for this video. Carissa, Tim, Shweta, Gregory, Alexandra, Donna, Melanie, Prem. So, yeah, a couple of comments here. And Donna says, thank you for sharing this. So many coaches do not want to acknowledge this. Yeah, it's human nature to want adoration and to want to be right. Because from our human evolution, when we are rejected from the tribe, right? When we don't have a tribe or we're rejected from the tribe, we had a very real danger of dying in the wilderness. So we have this ancient drive to be adored, to be part of a tribe, not just to be part of a tribe, to be one of the adored members of a tribe. Because then the opposite of dying in the wilderness is being a king or being a queen and having followers give you gifts and money and food. And all the things that we all evolved thousands of years to understand, though, to want in a very visceral way, right? So yeah, let's see. Shweta says, oh, and the comments are disappearing from the lot. But anyway, you can see the comments if you go to the Facebook post. But thank you for your comments, Shweta and Miriam and Melanie and Prem and everybody who's joining me. Okay, all right, I'm gonna let you go. And just remember that you have truly, I was gonna say you have all the answers within you. But maybe a better way of saying is that you have the power within you to discover the best answers for yourself. All right, I wish you well. Take care.