🫢 Your Favorite Influencer is Lying to You 🫢

And how can you actually learn from them

Tanyo G
August 04, 2023

GM.

Now, into today’s topic.

Your Favorite Influencer is Lying to You

Source: The Gaming Portal

Learning from influencers is awesome.

They are charismatic, funny, witty, and have a ton of cool stories to share.

The challenges, the routines, and the habits that made them who they are now.

But if you have spent as much time as me in the personal development and business space (6 years now), you’ll quickly realize that your favorite influencers are lying to you in one form or another.

I mean, has someone really cold-plunged their way to success, or is there something more to it?

Most of the influencers I have seen fall into two camps:

Can’t identify the thing that made them successful because they’re too close to the fire, so they create a story in their heads of what made them succeed.
Build a BS narrative that makes it sound like everybody can achieve their level of success while missing vital details of that story that made all the difference.

Let’s break them down.

Successful People Can’t Identify What Makes Them Successful

Got introduced to Shaan Puri when I started watching the MFM podcast back in 2020.

I’m one of the OG listeners.

I enjoyed his style and insights so much that I even persuaded my then-employer to buy me the first edition of his Power Writing course.

The course was great and useful, especially when it came down to going viral and writing on Twitter.

The more I listened to Sam and Shaan, the more I got interested in the newsletter game, so I started this newsletter in September of 2022.

So without them, this newsletter wouldn’t exist.

If you’re reading this, thanks, guys!

In 2022, Shaan started his own crypto newsletter - the Milk Road.

In 10 months, it became the fastest-growing crypto newsletter and sold for millions of dollars.

An incredible achievement.

I’ve been a reader since day 1 and have referred countless subscribers to it from my newsletter and using their referral program.

However, the way Shaan tells the story of the Milk Road, I can’t help but think he attributes the success of the newsletter to the wrong things.

He believes it became successful because:

He learned from people who have been there and done that (aka learning from one of my heroes and his friend and podcast co-host, Sam.)
Didn’t overcomplicate the details (used a logo made in Canva for the brand.)
Turned his disadvantages into advantages (he lost $700k of his own money in crypto and turned it into a cool story.)

If you read articles on the acquisition, you’ll see even more things that “attributed” to the project’s success like:

A solid referral program.
Well-written content.

While all of these are good lessons, they’re simply the wrong takeaways because they aren’t the biggest contributors to the project’s success.

In the 10 months since its creation, Milk Road grew from 0 to 250k subs.

Since the acquisition happened (8 months ago), the newsletter has reached 265k total subs, according to their Twitter.

So it took them 10 months to reach 250k subs and another 8 to grow by just +15k new subscribers.

What changed in their approach that slowed down their growth?

Did the market change?

No, we still are in a bear market.

Did they stop producing awesome content?

No, they didn’t. The content is still good.

Did they stop the referral program?

They didn’t.

They even expanded it, adding more rewards.

So what explains the sudden dip in the growth?

They simply stopped running ads on Meta.

Yes, that’s it.

The secret behind Milk Road’s success wasn’t its content, referral program, or the “move fast and break things” mentality.

The secret was running Facebook and IG ads since day 1.

Doesn’t sound very epic, doesn’t it?

Yet, all of the people covering the story, including Shaan, focus on the wrong lessons without looking for the one thing that made a key difference.

Cuz you can take the same newsletter, execute it the same way, and it simply wouldn’t grow as fast and sell for 7 or 8 figures without Facebook ads.

Successful people can’t identify the right thing that made them successful because they lack a third-person POV.

If you’re learning from someone and trying to emulate them, make sure you get all the details of the story right and look for the one or two things that made all the difference.

Using the Perception of “Success” for Their Own Gain

I’m talking about Logan Paul and Andrew Tate.

Let’s start with Logan, a YouTuber everyone loves to hate, a WWE star, and apparently an artist (according to his Twitter bio.)

His scam was well-documented by Coffezilla in his YT series.

Logan even promised to refund his victims, got the likes and the love of his fans, and now, 7 months later, no one has been refunded.

He used his own name to give his crypto project credibility and attract buyers without delivering anything of substance.

Andrew Tate, on the other hand, posted photos and videos online dressed in nice clothes, next to expensive cars with tons of women around him, building his “online character.”

Then, he sends all of that traffic to his online course, where he teaches you different ways to become rich.

However, if you follow these guys’ blueprints, you won’t end up as successful as they are.

You can copy the exact things both of them did.

Create a following on social media by sharing viral content, and monetize that following in some way.

For Logan, it was his “crypto game,” and for Tate, it was a subscription business.

If you listen to both of these guys, they’ll tell you that to succeed, you have to be charismatic, hard-working, smart, and all the other cliches.

However, when you look at what made them “successful,” it wasn’t any of these things.

The biggest differentiator was that these guys were willing to do and say everything to create some controversy.

Logan’s “incidents” are well documented, while Tate’s entire viral playbook was:

Go on podcasts and say a lot of “controversial stuff” to sell his course (called the Hustler’s University back then) that will teach you different ways to make money.
Some of the subscribers would choose affiliate marketing as their way to earn money, where they were given instructions on which videos to post and how to edit them to go viral.
These folks would then post the videos on social media, sending Tate referrals to his course, making him richer.

This is the real reason why these guys became “successful.”

But both of them aren’t teaching you that.

Why?

Three possible reasons:

They don’t want to give out their edge.
They want to create a BS story that makes it sound like everyone can make it and then monetize their audience that way. (For me, this is the most likely scenario, given that both of their characters are questionable at best.)
They want to make themselves look cool, stroking their egos.

How to Avoid Getting Lied to By Your Favorite Influencer

Focus on the thing that made the biggest difference in their journey to success.

For every Shaan Puri, Andrew Tate, and Logan Paul, there are millions of people who are just, if not smarter, more charismatic, and harder working but haven’t reached their level.

Why is that?

Because these qualities weren’t the thing that got them over the edge.

It was something different that they were either not aware of or lied about to make themselves look cooler and monetize their audience with their products.

If you want to emulate a successful person, don’t fall for their charm and epic stories.

See what they do.

What have they done differently that made them successful compared to similar folks who possess the same qualities and are doing similar things?

Answer this question, and you’ll learn more about how you can achieve their level of success than by taking any of their courses.