The Real Cost of Trying to Be Perfect

Have you ever made a mistake so big it felt like a bullet to the brain? Well, I’ve made my fair share, and I’m here to tell you that mistakes aren’t fatal, they’re lessons. Let’s explore some of my biggest blunders and the valuable lessons they taught me.

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I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And Now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle. 

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There’s a few things to be said about mistakes in general, like, I’ve always been open about discussing mine, because I’ve never claimed to be the perfect, you know, list builder or the perfect marketer. And I’d even go as far as saying that the more mistakes I make, the better I become. One of my mentors always said that he always tried to make as many mistakes as fast as possible, because that’s how you become really good. And this is such a contradictory thing to learn after going through the school system or just growing up in the normal society, because in school, we don’t get to be rewarded for mistakes. And you know, as much as I try to instill this even with my kids, you know my daughter, she gets extremely upset about making a mistake, like, she can go as like, even go cry about it, be like, Oh, mistake this, and it becomes a big deal. But the reality is, the best entrepreneurs are not the smartest and are not the most brilliant. They don’t have the Necessarily, the Midas touch, they break so many things.

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Some of my entrepreneur friends, some of the friends in the industry here, you know, people in the internet marketing space. I don’t want to say they’re idiots. They’re not idiots, but like I wouldn’t let them run like a serious operation, they’re irresponsible. They have poor attention to detail. They have poor discipline. They’re not diligent. And like, if I was their boss, I would be upset, like they’d be getting fired really, really fast. And yet, they run million dollar businesses, and things go wrong every day for them. And I know, because when I GV with them, like, there’s always links broken, things don’t happen on time. This and that I’m a very meticulous guy, you know, I think, you know, being in the military really kind of drilled that into me, as well as having my father, who was in the military, and my mom, who was a teacher, and her dad was a teacher as well, and my dad’s mother was a school principal, so like discipline, attention to detail, getting things done right, getting them done on time. That has always been a part of my personality because of my upbringing, but I still make so many mistakes, even to this day. 

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It’s just I learned not to take them as fatal. You know what I mean? Like, it’s not a bullet to the brain. A mistake is basically a lesson, and the cost of that mistake is the education cost, as simple as that. So mistakes, I mean, over the last decade, I’ve made lots of mistakes. It’d be very hard for me to remember most of them, but if I try to think of the biggest ones. So a mistake was to choose, you know, a product that just wasn’t a good fit for the market. Like I chose it because I kind of liked it, not because the market wanted it. Um, other mistakes included trying to fix the industry. For example, you know, I came into the industry, I spent some time in the industry, and I was like, Oh no. People aren’t supposed to be buying this. You know, they’re not supposed to be doing this. And I would try to sort of mold the marketplace to what I thought they should be instead of just looking at what the marketplace is actually buying and selling more to the marketplace. And I see people do it every day. 

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I remember one time in our solo ads agency, a guy reached out to us with an ebook offer, a $10 ebook on how the gurus are scamming you, basically like exposing all the dirty tricks that the gurus are using to steal your money. I didn’t even bother, like, taking his money to promote. I just said, look, it’s, you’re not gonna, you’re gonna make any money here. You might as well just, you know, change the offer. It’s like, you know, take my money, run my, I didn’t run it because nobody’s gonna pay $10 for a book. About how they’re being duped. Basically, nobody’s gonna pay $10 to be told how they are being made stupid or something. Also, there’s a reason people buy from the gurus, like everybody made a bad buying decision. Everybody has been scammed by a guru. Me, you and everyone, but we continue to go and look for gurus. Why do you think that what that other guy should have asked himself, like this question, why do people do that? People do it because they don’t like the sense of responsibility for having to decide how to solve a problem. People don’t like to be solely responsible for all the decisions. 

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There’s been a study about cancer patients where they measured the satisfaction of cancer patients about their treatment, and almost everyone ranked very low. And then, once they’ve done the study, immediately after they would ask them, Hey, would you like to be responsible for your treatment, meaning you have unlimited resources, and you’d get to tell us or the doctor what to do, and it’s almost unanimously that the answer was no. Nobody wanted to take the responsibility for a life and death decision making treatment. So the reason people complain about gurus, it’s like, oh, guru scammed me. This is a scam, that is a scammer, but continuing at the same time to fall for the guru, quote, and unquote tricks is because that is preferred to the fear and the crippling anxiety that’s associated with having to make your own decisions. 

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It is much better for many people to say, I’m gonna go with that person’s advice, even though I don’t know they’re telling the truth, even though I kind of know they’re not telling the truth. It’s like people can be weird when you try to analyze their behavior like that, but it’s how they make decisions. So a big mistake for me, which I think kept me broke for probably at least over two years, until I realized it was to try to change the market. Yeah, I was really trying. I was really trying to, sort of like open the market’s eyes, or re educate people, and that message was just not getting through. 

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Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content atlistbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com, it explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.