Earl Nightingale

The dangers of being a contrarian

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Earl Nightingale once said, “Watch what everyone else does—do the opposite. The majority is always wrong.”

Dan Kennedy once said, "Everybody who makes a lot of money defies industry norms. Everybody who makes average money conforms to them."

Someone, somewhere, once said, “In a world of beauty, the ugly stands out”.

At least two out of three quotes are made by highly successful people. Many of the most successful people I’ve come across frequently repeat all three.

More.

They’ve all personally made me a lot of money as well.

And above all, they share an important theme—that of doing things differently.

There’s a lot of value in being a contrarian.

All of this, however, needs an important disclaimer—there’s a lot of danger involved in blindly being a contrarian.

See, becoming a contrarian just for the sake of it won’t bring you much success. In fact, it’ll make you look stupid, and dumb, and quite ironically, you’ll become no more than a conformist chasing whatever is popular at the current time.

No, you’ve got to have some reasoning behind the madness.

You have to be deliberate about how and why you’re doing things differently. You first have to understand the basics. You’ve got to learn and master the foundations and principles some of the brightest minds who came before you bled for to discover and share with future generations.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, you need to know the rules before you can break them.

Everything has an order, everything has a reason.

Yet not every reason is as sound as they often appear to be.

That’s where the contrarian approach comes in—to put everything you’ve been taught so far to the test, and see how far you can push the boundaries established in your industry.

The difference between a true contrarian successfully thriving where no man has gone before and a dunce nobody even pays attention to is that of experience and mastery of the foundational principles his domain is built upon.

Rules are made to be broken, but only after you understand why they existed in the first place.

Don’t rush to the finish goal, skipping your fundamentals in the process.

Speaking of fundamentals.

Check out Email Valhalla today to improve your email writing fundamentals so you can write entertaining emails your readers love to read and buy from.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla


What are you doing with your time?

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A few days ago my dad looked at the bookshelf I’ve got in my room and started browsing through my collection of the 70-something books I’ve collected and (mostly) read over the past 1–2 years.

Some titles caught his attention—either as interesting titles he’d someday wanted to read or simply as titles he recognized and might or might not previously have read himself.

Either way, he then muttered the following in a way that made it seem he was more so talking to himself than he was to me, “I should really start reading more often”.

The thing is, he’s juggling a lot of stuff currently.

Some examples (purposefully kept vague for privacy reasons):

He recently started a new IT consulting job for which he’s taking a lot of additional training, both at home by experimenting with this new (at least to him) technology to learn how to best serve his customers, as Earl Nightingale would tell you are your real bosses, as well as following different trainings through his employer to collect some new certificates.

At the same time, he’s also working on getting his online business gig up and running, regularly working out (6 times a week right now—he’s actually doing better in terms of fitness than I am right now (and I introduced him to it)) which also includes heavily counting his calories and making sure his macros are correct, reading my emails and almost everything else I write (sorry not sorry for giving you extra work to do throughout the day), as well as being a father and a husband and keeping time for family and leisure.

So that made me realize something.

We all have so much stuff we want do, stuff we don’t want to do, and stuff we simply need to do no matter whether we want it or not. A lot of stuff, yet not a lot of time to do everything. Let alone all the stuff we spend our time on that we neither actually want nor need to do (these are the real time-wasters).

You’d be surprised how much time of our day we spent on that last type of activity (I know I waste a ton of time every single day).

Anyway.

I won’t claim to know the solution to fixing your time schedule and being able to doing everything you want to do—I don’t know.

What I do know is the importance of recognizing the problems in your daily schedule and actively sitting down trying to come up with 1) your current schedule (including the time you waste) 2) your ideal schedule and 3) a better, improved, and realistic schedule you could start working towards to make your life and the world you live in a better place.

That said.

Another thing I know, when it comes to working on improving your business AND saving time, is that you can do both of these by applying the tips and principles I teach in Email Valhalla to write faster while also writing more persuasively so you can build a bigger list, make more sales, and build a bigger, better, more thriving business, all while spending less time selling.

Don’t believe my biased ass?

Check it out for yourself here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla