 Thank you guys for tuning in and having you know, supporting us throughout the globe. A financial literacy show on live air. It's pretty crazy, right? But thank you guys. Today, I don't have an awesome guest, it's just going to be me sharing my personal situations I have going through. As you guys can see in the description box, and for the people that hear this on the podcast or YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, I want to give you guys the top five mistakes I've made in business and lessons that I learned and the personal lessons that go with them. So, I hope that be very useful to you guys. It'll be a very personal show, but you guys, I'm pretty sure I got a thousand more mistakes to make and I probably made, I'm pretty sure I made hundreds of other ones, but I'm just going to be highlighting this one because I'm going to be highlighting this one. That's the ones I picked out, I just picked up the top five that I figured that if I can share my shortcomings and mistakes that you may pick up something, you may learn something on it too. All right? So, what do I further do? I don't have a lot of time and I definitely, you guys don't have a lot of time, so we're going to jump straight into it. So, the first one I'm going to get to is, it's a class of mistake that I see people make all the time. One I made myself, right? So you create a product or you create a project and when you create this product or project, the first thing you have a tendency to do is to be able to ask people around you what they think about a particular product or project. When you sit back and you ask people to say, hey guys, I want to, hey guys, I want to test out this new product, you're going to ask your friends and family. Now let's say this product is for children and kids. For example, you like me, your children's book author, you write this children's book or whatnot. So you go ask your 45-year-old brother, your 60-year-old mother, grandparents or whatever the case may be because they're the closest people around you for their advice on this particular product. Now, granted, if you got some good, a good circle, they may be able to give you great advice and may give you some pointers. But a lot of times the people that you're asking are not in your target market. What I mean by that is you are probably asking someone who's not really interested in your product. Let's say for example, I'm not a huge NASCAR fan. I really don't watch NASCAR. But one of my good friends writes a NASCAR, he makes a NASCAR book or NASCAR show anything to do with NASCAR. And since I'm a good friend, he decides to ask me, hey, Prince, what you think of this NASCAR? You think it's cool or whatnot? I may look at it and may not give him the best advice because I'm not in his target market because I don't watch NASCAR. So the thing about it is people always, well, usually you will go around your circle and you ask people in your circle to say, hey, what do you think about this particular product? And they're not looking at the product itself, they're looking at you and they're looking at you as their brother, cousin, friends, co-worker. Whatever the case may be and their critique may be a little strew, but sometimes what people do, they say, hey, what do you think of this? Oh, it sucks. And the person that throws it away, they think it's a bad idea. So they're trying to appease the people that are around them instead of the people that are in their target market. But prime example, if you created a product for a 12-year-old girl, maybe you want to ask some 12-year-old girls or their parents to say, hey, what do you think of this product? You niche it down to that particular product, not go out and ask your circle of people who don't care about your product, who are not interested in your product and who's in your circle. Now, sometimes we have great circles where people can think outside of the box and say, hey, I'm going to ship this and try to think in a different light or whatnot. Because and on top of that, sometimes when people see you, when you very first starting out, they compare your product to the best product on the market. What's just nothing wrong with that? But sometimes when you're very starting, when you're very, very starting, let's say you started a blog, your blog is not going to be compared to the top blog in the world because you're just starting out. You will learn and develop to that in most cases. But the thing about it, some people look at you and they look at the best in the world and they'll be like, well, yours look like crap. When actually Ali is someone who's starting out, you're not doing that bad. So that's one thing I want you guys to think about as well when you're looking at testing your products or you create something, go to the market itself. Ask the kid if you're making something for children. Ask the parent if you're making something for parents. Ask your friends if you feel like they're in your target market, but be aware of that. Don't just throw away your ideas or product just because your close circle did not like the product because they may not be in your target market. And personal story of that is when I started making particular videos, I started with Facebook and YouTube and stuff like that. As I put out the videos, I will send them to friends and family and co-workers or whatnot. I'll say, hey, will you watch this? They will forget to watch it. It may not like it, whether the case may be. It was nothing personal. They was just not into finance. But when I say, hey, screw their opinion, I'm just gonna put this out anyway and guess what? I have people like you that tuned in and said, man, I love your videos. I like your videos. And I'm like, wow, the people that I asked, my little thing team didn't like the videos. Why do these people like the videos? It's pretty simple. These people was not in your target market where these people are. So that's something I want you to be aware of. And that was like my first one. I went at my number one, but it's one of the biggest mistakes I made in business was not seeking out the particular target market and getting their feedback because they may love it. Your friends may hate it, but they may love it. Your friends may love it and they may love it as well. All your friends may love it and your market may hate it anyway. But anyway, look at your target market, ask them because we so make the kind of mistake of asking friends and family who's close around us who can care less about the particular product. All right. So now we're gonna roll into number two. Number two is it goes into network. I always tell people the number one thing that you can have in business besides your education, besides your money, besides your skills or anything else. I will say is your network. Networking and getting to know people and people knowing you. But this is the trick. It's never about who you know, but always about who knows you. It's never about who you know, but it's about who knows you. There's a big difference. Some people think, hey, I know you can go to a meeting or a conference or whatnot, and you may think that you met someone and you're like, hey, well, for example, we all know Oprah, right? We all know Michael Jordan. We all know these different celebrities. And you may have met them once or twice. You may have taken a picture with them and they said some cool things. But if you can't get them to do anything for you, then they probably don't know you. Because it's great when you know someone, you may know a coworker or you may know someone in a great position of networking, that's great. But do they really know you? And one of the major ways you can find out is what someone knows you is if they would do something, they will go out of their way, take time out of their day to help your particular brand cause our situation. So what do I mean by that? How can I relate that to my personal life? Let's take me, for example, right? I go out to a meeting and I run into, let's say you seen on the show here, Metal World Peace, right? Meet Metal World Peace, hey, he said some great things. He said, hey, I think what you're doing is great. I think what you're doing is awesome and whatever the case may be, right? We exchange information or whatever the case may be. So now you go out and you write the particular person and say, hey, well, I would like to maybe do a partnership. I would like to do a business deal. I would like to do anything. And the person never responds. The person doesn't come on your show. The person doesn't help you out in any type of way. You may start to feel a little type of way like, wow, I thought I know this person and this person's not doing anything for me. Because that person probably didn't know you. Yes, you know them, but dude, they know you. So when you're networking, yes, you may meet a lot of cool people. You'll take a lot of cool pictures and people will say some cool stuff. But the thing about it is who knows you and you figure out who knows you. When you open up the doors of your business and you ask for favors and situations, you will start to figure out very soon. So that's the way you know you figure out stuff. The next thing is, so figure out, when you're networking, just be mindful of that. That's number two. Now we're gonna roll into number three. Number three, we were just talking about this here in the studio, is the bigger you become or the more success you have in the field or whatever you're doing. Whether it's fashion, whether it's radio, television, author, philanthropy, finance, whatever the case is, the bigger you become, you move up a corporate ladder or anything, is the bigger you become, the more issues you will have. And you may say, Prince, what do you mean by issues? Well, when you are by yourself, let's take me for example, but I wanna shoot a podcast, it's pretty easy for me to do. I can just go into my room, I can just turn on my equipment, hit the record button, record a podcast, right? Edit the podcast, sub-art can go live. I'm gonna go live on Facebook, if you wanna go live on YouTube, you can do it. Just hit the live button, boom, you're live, right? But as you started to gather a following and stuff like that, now let's say if you're doing television, if you're doing radio, now if you're doing television and radio, now you have to be relied upon the station to handle your, will the station be able to do this? It's the station gonna be open. Do the station remember that you have a particular show or episode or whatever the case may be? Now let's say, now that you're at the station, you're in the station on the same page, now let's say if you are, you want to have a guess, you're supposed to have a guess. Now, your guess, you're relied upon them to make everything go right. Now you have you, you have the station, you have the guess, now you gotta worry about the equipment, you gotta make sure all these things line in line just so you can pull off one episode, right? Versus when you was in your room doing podcasts with just you by yourself, all you had to do was hit the upload button. You know, so as you become bigger, you build a team. You have a team now. Versus used to be you doing everything, so if everything was a success or failure, it was based on you. But when you get into business and stuff like that, now you have partners, you have partners, you have a staff, and then that's that, you have a staff, you have other people, you have a this, whatever, all these other pieces that have to move on, that have to move in line for you to do something correct. So my biggest thing with you is to, one of the things I learned, keep your situation as small as possible. And also live by your word. That's the biggest thing that you have in this business is that your word. If you say you're gonna do something, you do it. I'm granted, things does happen, but if things happen, you let them know. You let the person know immediately, I can do this. So that's one of the things you need to make available right away. So the bigger you become, the more issues you will have. That's something that I want you guys to think about because, and I won't say that was one of my mistakes, but that was a lesson learned. One of the biggest lessons I had learned was that, hey, as you start to go on and do things like this, then you have to worry about stuff. Now, how does that really, let me give you another story, how this relates. When someone tells you, hey, I'm going to bring you on my show, right? Right? So you go off and you tell all your friends and your family, hey, I'm going to be on the Ellen DeGeneres show, right? If I'm pronouncing that correctly, I'm going to be on the Steve Harvey show, or whatever the case may be. Now, let's say if something happens with the Steve Harvey show, the producer calls you and say, oh yeah, by the way, we're not going to be able to make this happen. Now you have to go back and tell all your friends and your family. Now you look at the boy who cried wolf to say, hey, I want to get this person on my show. I'm not on the show now, whatever the case may be. So you have to rely on other people the bigger and the more you become because now you have to rely on your plane ticket, you got to rely on your car, you got to rely on the promoter, you have to rely on your staff, you have to rely on so much stuff, the bigger you become to make things go right, right? Versus when it was just you doing everything, or you and one buddy was doing everything, everything was just between you guys. Hey, I'm going to do this, he's going to do that and that's it. But when you have all of these moving pieces, that's when a lot of issues come. So I would tell people one of the biggest lessons I learned stay small and compact as possible. One of the biggest lessons I learned out of Berkshire Hathaway. And by that, I mean by Berkshire Hathaway was learning that from him down, it was like 20 people there or something like that. So, you know, this company is making hundreds of billions of dollars. So, small and compact. When something's small and compact, it's easy to move. It's very easy, quick and to move to put something out to do something. When you're bigger you become, you start doing things with other people, other people are doing things with you, stuff like that. I can go so many times of how people say it's going to do something and something happened. And I mean by what I mean by something happened meaning that the person fell out of something, you know, there was just not a good person or a bad person, you know? So, that's one of the things I want you to think of. The bigger you become, the more situations and problems you may have. But before I get into lessons number four and five, I want to take a quick break. So, when I take this quick break, we're going to break into, we're going to come back and we're going to get into lessons four and five. Don't forget about it. You know, the top ones about networking, it's not about who you know and who you met, it's about who knows you. Also keep in mind, try to move small and compact as possible because the bigger you become, the more situations and problems arise. Arise or happens because you rely upon so many other things to move in order for you to move. So, stay tuned and listen for lessons four and five. This is Stink Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah, this is the starting line. Posh, you're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock, I present Think Tech, Hawaii's Research in Manoa where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest, both to Hawaii and around the world. So hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech, Hawaii's Research in Manoa. Guys, a year of back live here with the Prince of Investment right here live in Howell, Hawaii with your host, Prince Dags. And before we went into the break, I was speaking about the top things that you learn in business, not the top things, but the top three. I did the top three and I got two more in this show. But the top three things that I went through before the break, if you missed it, if you wasn't paying attention to doing the break or you just tuned in, was number one, it's not about networking, it's not about who you know, but it's about who knows you. And what I mean by that is sometimes when you're networking, yes, you meet a lot of great people and other stuff like that, but sometimes you may get your feelings hurt when they won't do something for you. And you be like, wow, I thought we had such a great situation, but it's not about who you know, it's about who knows you. Because great, we all know people, but you'll find out who really knows you is when you start to ask for something, or you need something. So that's one of the things I wanted you guys to think about, that was one. The second thing was the wrong test market. A lot of times when you're small, you make a product or you create something, the first people you tested with are people you know. People you know, you may turn around and say, hey, mom, dad, can you help me out with something? Or what other case may be? And what other, you know, a mom, dad, what do you think about this product I created? Hey, mom and dad may not give you feedback. They may give you good feedback or what other case may be. But your mom and dad is like 60, 65 years old. You're trying to target a market that's 25 to 30 that may not be a good representation. So sometimes your friends and network is not a good representation of testing your product with. So that's one of the things you need to think of. Find someone who's in your target market. The third thing is try to keep yourself as small and compact as possible as you're moving around. Because the bigger you become, the more problems and situations you may have. And I broke that down by saying, hey, when you, as you become bigger, when you're doing something on your own, that's one thing, but you become bigger. Now you have a staff, and then you go from a staff to now you have a studio, then now you have a studio to now you have partners. And now with partners you have guests and your partners have partners. And now it takes all of these things to have to come together and line up perfectly in order for you to do this one thing perfectly. So the bigger you become, the more pieces you get to move in, the harder things become because you have to make sure all these things are gears and tack. So keep yourself as small as possible, right? The, now we're gonna get into the fourth and fifth thing. Number four, you probably heard this before, you probably heard people talk about it, all the other great stuff. And number four is based upon emotions. How does song go? Emotions make you cry sometimes? You have to remove emotions from business. Yes, it's hard to do because naturally we're emotional people. We think what our emotions, we feel our emotions, that's just who we are and what we are. But when you think about emotions, you have to be very mindful of that because sometimes things happen. For example, it's people that are gonna straight lie to you, right? It's gonna be some people that you may not like that much or it may do something, but you have to remove the emotions from business. So for a prime example, let's say if someone tells you they're gonna do something, let's say, hey, I'm gonna place you on my website and I'm gonna feature you in this great article that's gonna bring you so much exposure. You're so happy to be featured on this particular product, you don't know what to do with yourself. At the last minute, person says, we're not gonna be able to feature on this product anymore because we have someone that's bigger and better or whatever the case than you are. So we're gonna have to see, can we do something with you later? What you're gonna have to do is, if you become emotional and say, wow, no, you told me this and you get all emotion on emotion, you let your emotions rant and rave, right? You make your emotions rant and rave, now you may mess yourself up out of the situation. So that could have happened for you. Let's take my personal self for example, right? I had something I was supposed to be featured in, right? They said, hey, everything is great. We're gonna have you in there in March. You're gonna be featured in this particular article. I said, awesome, great. March rolled around. They said, you know, the article didn't come out. They told me we're not gonna be able to do it because this or that happened, right? And you know, I didn't get emotional. I didn't say, whoa, you know, you told me this. I just relate calm by me relaying calm. Two to three months later, I got featured in an even better situation because I didn't let my emotions rant and rave. Had I let my emotions rant and rave, that could have just threw gas on the bridge and messed up the situation. So that's one of the things that I wanted to tell you about. Removing emotions out of business. Yes, it's hard to do sometimes because we all are emotional people, but we have to be mindful that, hey, this is business. You're here to get the job done at the end of the day. So you gotta remove your emotions out of it. That's one of the things I tell you. The last thing is you have to be mindful of number five with, I won't say photo ops, but sometimes you're networking and people and dealing with people, having the right people, looking for me when I'm big on integrity, right? And the thing about integrity is tell the truth, tell it like it is. If it didn't happen, if it did happen, I learned that life is always smoother that way and people will respect you for telling the truth versus trying to fabricate something and make it look all glossy or what is not. Just tell it what it is and tell the truth because you can go into the healing process then. But if you pass something on, then things can happen. So my thing is with that is when you're dealing with people in your network, something I learned from Wiley Amons that he told me. He was like, when you're dealing with people in your network, bad people will always throw signs. It's just up to you to be able to catch those signs. So when you have snakes or bad people around you, you will find out eventually if you are paying attention. It's when you're not paying attention and you're like, la, la, la, la, that's when you get bit. So pay attention to what's around you because that person or these people will do something to let you know they're not the right people to have in your corner. Be mindful of that, be very, very mindful of that. I want you guys to, that's something I want you guys to think about. And the reason why I want you guys to think about that is because when you look at situations sometimes you have to pay attention to what people do instead of what they say. People say things all the time, hey, I'm gonna do this, I have this, I have that. You know, they take some photos with some people and you think, hey, oh, this is great, but always watch what a person do, never listen to what they say. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned. I watch people what they do and I rarely listen to what they say because when someone does something that's not sitting well with you, you might wanna get rid of them before they really bite you later on in the future. And if you're not careful, because sometimes you become, even sometimes it's celebrities. Sometimes people become shell shot because it's a celebrity. Oh my God, it's a celebrity. Celebrities are gonna do this or do that. So with that celebrity, they will start to think, wow, you know, you know, but when someone's a celebrity, you know, you kinda look over it and you're like, well, this person is just that. So I think they're a good person, but you have to be mindful that these people, this person could be bad for you as well. So pay attention to, unless number five, watch who you have around you. Very simple and easy, but things like that can happen because I've met some people that have been famous and on television and great stuff, and when you meet them, you think that that character that you've seen in the public is the real person. And nine times out of 10, no, that's not them. And the reason why that happens is because sometimes you look over things when they're doing something around you that's not too, you may not like, you're looking over because they're a celebrity. And by doing that, you can end up getting big, big time in the future. So when you see that regardless of if it's a celebrity, if it's a business deal, whatever it is, if it doesn't feel right, stay away from it. So those are the five lessons. I'm gonna go over them real quick. Watch your test market. When you create a product and you create something, I know you have a tendency to ask mom, dad, friends, family and stuff like that. But when you do that, sometimes your friends and family may give you a mis, not a misconstrued, they may give you a bad representation of what's going on because they're looking at you as their son or their brother or their cousin or their coworker and they're comparing you to the best in the market. So you need to go to your particular market. Number two, it's not about who you know, it's about who knows you. Be very careful of that. Three, the most small is possible because the bigger you become, the more pieces you get and the more pieces you get, the more people and things you have to rely on. Number four, emotions, you remove your emotions out of business. Number five, watch the people you keep around, watch the team. Sometimes regardless of what their money, their influence or their celebrity, whatever it is, if it doesn't feel right, I wouldn't spend too much time around them because you may end up getting bit in the future. All right? So those are the top five lessons that I've learned and those are probably like my big, you know, I have hundreds or more I can go through, but those are the top five things that I've learned and that maybe something you can take away from it as well. So I'm gonna get ready to go in and close out the show and I hope you guys loved it. Don't forget to hit the like, subscribe, comment, share button, all of the great stuff. Until the next video podcast, whatever you see me do, Google for around the world, peace, be safe, I'm out. Thank you.