If you want to be a millionaire entrepreneur, then you need to make sure you don’t fall for the Expert Trap.
It cost me thousands of dollars and years of my time to be able to write this article, because those are the prices I paid when I fell for this trap myself.
I’m going to tell you exactly how you can escape this trap, so you can join the ranks of the world’s most elite entrepreneurs.
So I started my adventure as an entrepreneur like many do - with a string of multiple failed attempts. The reason this happened in my case was because I was falling for the Expert Trap.
What that means is that I put my blind trust in the Experts. I thought that as long as I followed them, my business would be successful and make millions of dollars.
I was wrong. And of course, I couldn’t really blame the experts - I could only blame myself. That’s an interesting thing as well, because when you listen to the experts enough, you start to think of yourself as an expert too...
So in fact, the Expert Trap had two parts. The external experts, out there in the world, and the internal expert, myself. I shouldn’t have trusted any of them, especially not the last one!
My first try at being an entrepreneur was with an online retail business, centred around Amazon. It was Amazon FBA in fact, for those who know what that is.
Basically, I would source a load of products, ship them in bulk to Amazon warehouses, and Amazon would then sell them and handle the shipping to the customers.
Everything about the business model sounds great on the surface, right? It sounds like an easy way to make money, provided that you can source the products successfully.
The reason I went into this in the first place was because I found a number of experts, on Youtube and elsewhere, that promised me that this business model was easy and profitable.
And being a detail-oriented person, I studied every article, video and course that I could get my hands on, to ensure that I had every single piece of information I could possibly need to make this business successful.
In fact, I amassed so much data on the topic of Amazon FBA that I basically became an expert myself. If there was a test or exam on it, I would have passed it with flying colours.
Believe me, I didn’t miss anything. There was only one thing left that I wasn’t aware of. I didn’t know that I had fallen into the Expert Trap.
With the combined knowledge of all the Experts I had read, watched and listened to, which had of course led to my becoming an expert myself too, I was convinced that I knew everything I needed to know, and that I couldn’t fail.
But despite all of that, or actually because of that, this Amazon business of mine ended in failure.
The practical reasons it failed are too detailed for this article, but to sum it up very quickly, I was competing in a market with other sellers who were all doing the same thing as me.
They were all following the same expert advice, and they were all replicating the same strategies. We were all competing with each other, trying to undercut each other, trying to win every sale in a collective race to the bottom.
We had all fallen victim to the Expert Trap, and the ending wasn’t pretty.
The business failing wasn’t the worst part though - the worst thing about this experience was that I didn’t even take away the right lesson.
I made what I thought was a rational conclusion, that Amazon FBA just wasn’t a good business model. It was ‘over-saturated’, as they say.
Today I kick myself for making this conclusion, because it was completely wrong.
There are still plenty of millionaire entrepreneurs who are using that exact Amazon business model profitably today. They’re just doing something differently, or in a better way.
So anyway, with the false conclusion that the business model was the problem, I moved on to trying others, each with their own set of experts.
Again, I watched, listened to and read everything that each set of experts had to say. With each new business model I studied, I eventually became an expert in that too - just like before.
And again, when it came to executing on those businesses successfully, I ran into huge problems and ended up with multiple failures.
I had fallen into the Expert Trap multiple times. That was the reason for my failures, not because the business models were over-saturated or too competitive.
After several years of struggling, I was finally able to expose and avoid the Expert Trap, and make the changes I needed to be able to stop failing in business and start winning.
At this stage you might be wondering, what exactly is the Expert Trap, and how does it lead to entrepreneurs failing?
Well in a nutshell, every field has a set of experts who provide a body of knowledge on that particular subject.
For example, Amazon FBA experts possess the knowledge on that topic, and they teach it to their students, in many cases for big fees, so that those students can then use it to become experts themselves and create successful businesses.
Without the addition of innovation though, those new experts will all do the same thing, and the market becomes saturated with copy-paste businesses.
So whatever business model we are discussing, the problem is not saturation. The problem is lack of innovation, and that lack of innovation is caused by falling for the Expert Trap.
The Expert Trap is the assumption that existing knowledge, obtained from experts, is enough to make millions of dollars.
But the only way to escape the trap and actually make millions of dollars as an entrepreneur is if you can create a business that is truly innovative.
If there’s nothing innovative about your business, the best possible outcome is that you’ll just about manage to scrape by and survive. The most likely outcome is actually that your business will completely fail.
And anyway, you shouldn’t be just trying to survive. As an entrepreneur, your ambition should be to thrive! To do that, you need to make sure you avoid the Expert Trap.
Now, existing knowledge from experts, including yourself, is of course very important. Before we can start innovating, we first need to know what the current information tells us about where your business is positioned.
This is actually a type of thinking style, and in Effective Intelligence, we call this type of thinking ‘Red’.
When it comes to innovation though, which is crucial if you want to be a millionaire entrepreneur, you need to move into Green thinking. This type of thinking is creative, and it brings you brand new ideas that, if properly tested, can be worth millions.
The Expert Trap then, is a fatal error in the flexibility of your thinking. Your thinking spends too long in Red, and does not recognise when it’s time to transition into Green.
Failure to transition into Green thinking personally cost me thousands of dollars and years of wasted time, until I used Effective Intelligence to figure out what was going on.
This type of critical error usually happens because of a person’s preferences in how they think. We all have a certain thinking Colour that we prefer - Red, Blue or Green. People who fall into the Expert Trap often prefer Red, so you can probably guess what my preferred Colour is...
For myself, solving this problem by using Effective Intelligence transformed me from a failing entrepreneur to a successful one - it’s as simple as that. I no longer waste my time and money getting stuck in the Expert Trap, and it has changed everything for me.
I have a big warning here though. Green isn’t superior to Red. Each Colour of thinking is equally important. Just as a Red thinker can lose a million dollars for not transitioning into Green or Blue, a Green or a Blue thinker can lose a million dollars for not transitioning to Red.
Each stage and task in a business requires a different thinking Colour to lead the approach, and because the majority of people usually want to stay in their thinking comfort zone, that same majority of people will fail to become millionaire entrepreneurs.
The Expert Trap is actually one of many traps that await you on your entrepreneurial path.
It’s a risky road, and the only way to navigate it all the way to becoming a millionaire entrepreneur, is to get balanced control of your thinking Colours so you can move between them effectively.
Once you’ve done that, I guarantee that you’ll be an unstoppable entrepreneur.
