Reject fake icons.
偽物を排除しよう。
Beware of fake gurus or thought leaders.
I don’t support a personality cult. I try to read as many books as possible so that I can get inspired and make myself more resourceful, but I no longer blindly follow the authors. It is because I used to do that, lost money, and almost killed myself.
On the other day, I got an email from one of my acquaintances. She invited us to a 2-hour seminar of the famous author she fanatically supports. I deleted the email immediately and put her email address on the spam filter. Because the author is one of the two-faced people who I used to blindly follow.
Fake gurus or thought leaders are never responsible for our life. They can’t be. No matter what they tell us, they will never care about the outcome we have. They may say we need to take full responsibility for our actions and results — so why do we need to pay them and listen to them in the first place? And when we fail, they may say we need to take more actions. And the word “more actions” often means that we need to pay them more. It is the same mechanism that religious cults make money and run their “business.”
Even fake gurus or thought leaders can inspire us — they are good at referring to the quotes of great predecessors. But that doesn’t mean that we have to be a believer or follower of them. It doesn’t mean that we have to pay them more either.
We want to believe that something external would help us achieve something meaningful to us. That’s an illusion. It is always something INTERNAL that helps us achieve something valuable to us. And such internal energy is often created from our own failure.
Failure itself is not a problem. The problem is the fear of failing and accepting failure. It prevents us from taking actions and learning from our actions and mistakes. And fake gurus or thought leaders always focus on producing the fear in our mind. Do whatever we can to avoid the trap, and live our own life.