Warning – This episode is a bit of a run-on rant/sentence about my realization that people sometimes WANT to be lied to about what online business is like.

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Full Transcript:

Hey everyone. This is Julie. I’m honestly not really sure where this podcast is going to go. Normally I have a pretty clear idea of what I’m going to talk about, but today all I have is like this half rant, half revelation, so I hope you guys can follow along. I realized the other day that people just love to be lied to. Now, I am not a very good liar. In fact, I think I’m the world’s worst liar I’ve ever met. I just, I, I can’t hold it in my face very well. I tried lying as a kid and failed miserably. My whole life, you know, I would just blurt out the truth. In fact, you guys are gonna Laugh so hard, but, and this is not suitable for children. When I was younger, when I was like 13, 14 years old, I was in a pretty conservative youth group, right?

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And we were having a discussion about sex. and in my faith, for you don’t have sex until you get married. But not only do you not have sex to get married, you also, there’s a lot of other things that you don’t do either. Of course, you know, playing around with your boyfriend and girlfriend, watching porn and masturbation. So sitting around a room with a bunch of 13, 14-year-old kids. It’s safe to say there’s a lot of curiosity and hormones going on. I remember the first time I ever discovered the fine art of masturbation. I felt so guilty. I went and walked to my youth leader’s house to confess in front of her that I had done this. Now that is how bad of a liar I am. What 14-year-old would do that? Well me. So this is all to say that I can’t stand lying in marketing and I hate doing it to people and yet people love to be lied to.

They want to be sold a dream and they don’t really want to know how hard it’s going to be to get there. So this was kind of a revelation to me is because sometimes in my marketing I don’t do a good enough job of selling the dream because I, as my personality as I am, I like to know all the steps that are going to get there. I want to know where the potholes. I want to know where things are. Gonna like go wonky talk. I want to know when I’m going to be afraid when it’s going to be hard, why? So that I can be prepared for it. So I can be prepared for the journey. But I’m having this Aha moment that not everybody is like that, that some people when shown the journey are just like they stick their hands in their ears and they’re just like La, la, la, la, la.

They don’t want to know. They just want the dream. They just want the dream and they’re mad at you if you give them the process. So you can see in marketing, in online business, there are marketers who are really, really good at selling the dream and some of those people are so good at selling a dream that they border on lying to their customers because people don’t realize how much work it is to get there. And then they feel disillusioned.

And that’s honestly why Internet marketing has gotten such a bad rap and online business because it’s all just dream selling. And then people try to actually go do it. And then they realize that, that there were a lot of missing pieces there. Right? And so you’ve got that end of the spectrum and then you got me and the other side. And there are other marketers like me who are so in your face, truth-telling about what the process is that sometimes we don’t make as much money as the dream sellers because we’re because we’re not selling as well because people just want to be lied to.

So I was like, I was annoyed by this because I was like, well, I’m never going to be a quad zillionaire because I refuse to just sell dreams all day long. And so I was like, all right, well that’s okay. Like, that’s okay because you know what? My people, the people that follow me, the people that love me love me because they’re probably like me in that they want to know the journey. They’re not just titillated by the dream and the end. And then I realized that probably either extreme, the dream tellers and the, you know, the worst case scenario, people over here on the left, you know, the sky is falling. It’s probably, you know, there’s probably something in the middle. And then I remembered a story in the Bible. Basically, the point of the story was that without vision people perish, right? So when you’re talking about like the Israelites and they were leaving Egypt, they were in slavery in Egypt, right?

And God had Moses take them out of Egypt to go to the promise land. Had God and Moses not sold the dream, right? The dream of the promised land. So maybe in your world, the dream is, you know, financial freedom, insecurity. Had he not sold that dream, they never would have left Egypt, right? Because I don’t know if you guys remember that story, but leaving Egypt was freaking difficult. There was a lot of plagues, there was a lot of chasing. There was starvation. There was like fire and brimstone and plagues of death. I mean leaving Egypt was not easy. And so the reality is had Moses gone in and been like, hey listen, this is what’s going to happen. This is how it’s going to go and not sold the vision of the promised land, the people wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have done it. And you also see multiple times in that whole story that even with the dream, they wanted to go back into slavery.

Even with the promise. at the end they were like, you know what, I know, I know we had to like slug bricks on our back for 10 hours a day and get one meal and like, our daughters get raped, but you know what? Let’s just go back there because it’s more comfortable than what is over here.

The reality is that in your business, whether you are selling to other people or whether you’re just needing to be sold, you need vision, right? You need the dream in front of you. You have to have it in your marketing. At the same time, all along the journey, if you do not provide yourself or your customers with a way to keep going, even when it’s tough, they will turn back. They will be disillusioned. And I think that was my big Aha. I was like, it’s not either or. It’s both, right?

You don’t have to be mad at Julie at the people that sell the dream. Because selling the dream isn’t the problem. It’s when you sell the dream and you don’t create the path. You don’t create the accountability. You don’t create the process the way for them to stay the course when the inevitable shit hits the fan, and so it’s not either or. So I was just like, oh, that’s so cool. So people do love to be lied to. So know that in your marketing they want to be sold a dream. They don’t really want to know how hard it’s going to be to get there. And I’m saying people want to be lied to. That’s not really lying. It’s more casting vision. I’m just. It just sounds better. It sounds funnier that way. But at the same time, if you’re one of those people that cast vision and cast vision and cast vision but don’t actually create that path for them to get there, they are going to get disillusioned.

And so I think I probably err on the side of creating paths and I forget sometimes to cast vision and, and I think there are other marketers, quite frankly, that cast all the vision in the world and they don’t even care about the path and that’s really a shame. So how does this relate to your online business? If you are currently building your online business and you are struggling, you are considering quitting. Probably you either don’t have vision, right? You’re not in a situation where you really see the promised land at the end, right of this whole thing. Or you were sold the promise land, but you were not in a position where you were given the tools and the path to continue to walk even when it got hard. Right? So it’s really just one or the other.

And so that’s Kinda my, my encouragement to you guys is figure out like what are you missing? Are you missing vision? Are you missing the path and how do you deal with that? And if you are building a business and you have customers and you have customers who aren’t buying from you, you might not be casting a vision for them enough. If they are buying from you and then they’re pissed at you because you’re not helping them along the path, then maybe it’s the path needs to grow. I would say take that with a huge grain of salt and listen to episode eight, which is the episode before this one because I do talk about personal responsibility because you do have to be careful. I have been known to care so much about the path that sometimes I take responsibility for things that are not my responsibility. Right? So there’s always a balance, but for your customers and your clients, you need to do both, right?

You need to sell them the vision. You need to stop. And I have to tell myself that sometimes it’s really important not to get them bogged down in the details and the journey and all the pain and suffering that’s going to hit them along the way because you know, it’s coming. It’s like parenting, right? You know, you see a neighbor, your neighbor says, oh, we’re having a baby. And what do you say? You don’t go, well, I guess it depends on your personality. Some people will be like, oh, now you went and did it. Right? Oh my God, labor’s going to suck. You’re not going to sleep for three years. Your boobs are going to hang down to your knees, you’re going to bleed for 10 weeks, but you know what? Awesome, I’m so glad you’re pregnant.

Or maybe you’re the type of person who’s like, oh my God, that’s so cool, and you just like secretly know that you would just die a thousand deaths if you ever got pregnant again because you’ve had four kids and you’re just like, I’m never doing that again. So right? Like in one case it’s like selling the dream. It’s like living the dream and the other one is really much like worst case scenario. So I think there is a happy middle there. I think there is really a necessity for both and I would aim to do both in your business and I would aim for you if you’re struggling to figure out which one of those things that you really lack. So I hope you guys have an awesome day. Appreciate you. Talk soon.

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