Coffee With Mike- The Hands Off Investor

Q: We talk a lot about having all the information and understanding exactly why we're doing what we're doing, but maybe I'm the type of person that just doesn't care. I don't want to know everything that you're doing because that's not my lane, and I'm going to stay in my lane and you can stay in yours. How do you navigate that type of investor that type of relationship? Is that the right way to go about things?

A: You know it's really not about you being in a lane and me being a lane, I get what you're trying to say, it’s you know, “you do what you do best and I do what I know best, and let's just let it be like that and I'll just do whatever you want me to do,” right? But I think that at some point you're going to run across somebody who's going to look at what you have and they're going to say to you, “Why are you doing that?” You’ll say, “Well, because Mike told me to do that.” He's like, “Well he's an idiot really. Yeah, he's an idiot, I wouldn't have 
 done that at all.” OK now you put it into some type of situation where you have to figure out whether or not I'm an idiot, whether he's smart, whether he's an idiot and I'm smart, whether there's something going on that doesn't really have anything to do with our intelligence or AI capabilities, but it's just a way to get you distracted and put you on a different track than you're already on. You know you’re still making progress towards the same goal, so the question is, do you understand why someone would try to distract you? 

That's really important for you because if you keep getting distracted, and people keep telling you are on the wrong track, and you're going to keep stopping what you're doing, you're going to delay your progress. Then you're going to change and that's going to delay your progress. Then you have to start over and that means that your progress is even more delayed. You keep going a little bit up and a little bit back, a little bit up in a little bit back. It's like climbing that grease pole you never can get to the top because someone keeps telling you to climb back down and climb it differently, and that's what we're trying to avoid.

You know we're not trying to get you to blindly trust us because everyone already asked you to do that. What we're trying to do is help you open your eyes to why you would trust us. Not only why you would trust us, but why you should keep trusting us, because we're teaching you how to evaluate work. We're teaching you how to evaluate the services you receive. We're teaching you how to evaluate what you already have. 

If you can evaluate, if you could at least get to the point where you're saying, “OK, I understand this enough where I know whether someone is actually doing a good job for me; that they're working for me; they're not just using me to do their own work; they're not just using me to reach their own goals they're working for me…” then you're going to be in a much better spot, I think you're going to be in a safer spot. I think it would be a more secure spot, then I think you'll make more progress. That's why it's important.