Imitation Is Rampant 🤨 (Eric Hoffer Quote)

Posted on July 10, 2022July 10, 2022 by brianjpombo

Discussing from a quote by Eric Hoffer.

Transcription

Imitation is rampant.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo.

Welcome back to Brian J Pombo. Live.

Today I want to show you this quote, by Eric Hoffer.

If you’re not familiar with Eric offers work, I mean, this guy’s been gone for quite a while but he has had some amazing pieces of work out there where he discusses human nature. It as a whole in terms of especially people in crowd how they affect one another.

Here’s the quote, he says, When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

So what’s this have to do with business?

Well, for one thing, you have to recognize the truth of this quote,

All right, it’s just the plain fact of the matter. But if you take it in, and you look at you look at business, how it works for one thing, well. I’ll get into that in a second, look at look at businesses, I can tell you an experience that I have going into the doctor’s office, and you will find it very similar.

Even if you live on the complete opposite end of the country and in some cases, you can live in a completely different country and have the same experience.

So let me tell you the experience, the experience is, I need an appointment, to see a doctor, guaranteed, I need an appointment to see a doctor.

That’s not unusual for most people, I have to call in, I have to schedule an appointment, I’m not talking to the doctor directly, I’m talking to an assistant, the assistant is the one that does the scheduling, it’s usually pretty far out into the future, I can’t get it at the same day.

When it does happen, I show up early, I’m expected to show up early, I go to the front, I go to a waiting room and then go up to the front desk.

Oftentimes it’s it’s through an area where they’re cut off from everybody else, and they have to open a little window, they oftentimes will hand you something to fill out.

Or they’ll run you through the system and make sure that it all works out, they’ll let you know whether the doctor is actually on time or not. And then you are you’re expected to wait.

Now just that one process is almost typical across the board, no matter where it is that you’re seeing a doctor and then you could say, well, that’s because of regulations and everything else will take take something that’s that’s highly unregulated, like a car mechanic.

Why do all car mechanics work?

Almost, I mean, almost all of them work identically the same, you have the same situation, no matter where you go.

Now, sometimes you obviously have higher quality or lower quality, you will pay higher price or lower price.

But in general, if I went through the same scenario of what I go through with a car mechanic, you’d see something very similar.

Why is that?

Because when people get into a certain industry, it’s just natural for them to imitate everyone else in that industry.

It’s easier to do that than try to come up with something new, especially if you’ve never been in business before. If you’re coming straight out of college or you have no or or you learned as a as a situation as a car mechanic.

Oftentimes you’d learn working in another garage and another mechanic shop. And you do what you were taught because it worked for them.

Why won’t it work for you type of deal and the cycle goes on and on very few people break the mold and try something different. It’s unusual to try something different.

But the people who stand out in the industry are the ones that do things differently.

The ones that try something, maybe it’s just doing nothing else but imitating a different industry. I heard I heard mentioned one time where the drive throughs came from when it came from direct drive thru fast food.

It originated with banks banks were the first ones to put drive-throughs in and then they started doing it with fast food.

They took something from a different industry transferred it over as is always one of my favorite comparisons.

I don’t remember who who I originally heard that from but I thought that was great invitation that let me talk about the part that isn’t you can take invitation to its most sinister limits, which I think it was probably what Eric Hoffer was referring to because they’ll oftentimes talk about mass movements. And they just take it in general.

We’re all raised by somebody, in most cases by parents. But even if you’re not raised by parents, you’re being raised by someone you’re being raised by foster parents are being raised in an orphanage.

European raised on the street, you’re being raised by somebody, you’re learning how to speak, how to do things through somebody else.

That integration, that imitation, it’s built into our nature.

We’re taught at school that if you go through any type of regular schooling, you’re taught to imitate, you’re taught to do what the teacher tells you to do.

To do your best and follow along with the person that got the better best grades, you’re meant to look up to that those people.

I mean, look at the shirt, I’ve got a Mickey Mouse shirt on pure imitation, all the things behind me, imitation, life is about a whole bunch of life is about an invitation.

But if you can somehow break the mold in certain places in your life, and you can’t do it all the way, I mean, obviously, there’s laws that have to be followed and everything else.

If you break any of those, there’s consequences.

So you got to you got to pick and choose, but there’s places in life that you can switch it to where you can, you don’t necessarily have to imitate them, the majority, even if you just imitate the minority, that’ll that’ll put you on, on a on a different track.

But if you can try doing things that never get questioned, where whatever you’re doing, however you’re doing it, especially if you take a look at your business model, and look at what am I doing that’s identical to everyone else in my industry.

Take one of those things and turn it on its head, switch it around, what happens then you’ll stand out, I got a whole book all about it, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

The whole concept is how to stand out within your industry, when I’m discussing content marketing, and what we’ll be doing with that in the future.

All of that is all about standing out in your industry, standing out beyond and making yourself completely different from everybody else to where you aren’t even considered the same industry as those other people.

That’s that there’s a huge key there that you got to pay attention to and you got to think about when you’re when you’re revolutionising your business and how you’re being perceived in the outside world.

So go check out my book, get a free copy over at AmazonProofBook.com.

And that’s all I got for tonight. We’ll be back here tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Success Is An Inside Job | Eric Hoffer & The True Believer

Posted on May 18, 2021May 18, 2021 by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Thoughts on the late Eric Hoffer and thoughts on success and failure.

Transcription

Success is an inside job.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Tonight, I wanted to discuss with you a little chapter out of this book. And if it looks like I have lipstick on, I don’t I’ve had to put some chapstick on my lips because they’re chapped from being out in the elements today. And so I hope it doesn’t distract too much from my presentation, my bright red chapped lips.

I also want to thank a lot of the people I got to hang out with today. I got to meet some viewers that view and listen to the show. Just love to say hi to David, and who’s a local person and also to Jack, old friend, and really happy you guys join me here.

This is one I think you guys will get a kick out of if you haven’t seen this book, or heard of Eric Hoffer before, this guy is very interesting to read.

For one thing he had an amazing life.

He was a blue collar worker, and then he would go home at night and write these incredible books and articles and things of this sort. Here’s about the author Eric Hoffer was self educated, he worked in restaurants and as a migrant field worker and gold prospector.

After Pearl Harbor, he worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco for 25 years, the author of more than 10 books, including, The Passionate State of Mind, The Ordeal of Change, and The Temper of Our Time.

Eric Hoffer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, Presidential Medal of Freedom 83, that would have been Reagan that gave it to him. So that’s pretty interesting. I never heard that.

I wanted to read a quote out of this because it plays back into business. And so often,most of the issues I’ve found that we really get caught up in for long periods of time as business owners, as executives as the people running the show, right?

We get caught up in this situation where we’re not thinking clearly on something, and it oftentimes comes back to this very same point over and over.

And that’s, we’re not realizing that the responsibility is right here it that the solution is going to come from up here, not from your thoughts and from your brain and from you calculating everything out. But that little inner voice that kind of shows you the right way ago, you know that that intuition that we all have, that leads us in the right direction, right. And this is what this is all about.

Oftentimes, you can always feel this way, when you’re feeling like it’s their fault, it’s their fault, it’s their fault that this isn’t happening, or that this horrible thing is happening, that it’s always somebody else’s fault.

Which very may right may be true. In a lot of cases, there could be a whole lot of blocks and obstacles in your way.

But you need to pull back from that and say, okay, that may be true, there may be all these obstacles and all these people may have these issues, but what am I going to do about it.

You got to have it come back onto you.

So I want to read you this this quick quote from the true believer. It says there’s a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state around us. Hence, it is that people with a sense of fulfillment, think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

And you can see a lot of this stuff plays back and forth. And politics was a lot a lot of what about what this guy talks about, but I want you to think about it more in terms of yourself in your business.

This is a this is a key point right here.

“The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists, even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health, and so on.

If anything, ale a man says the roe, so that he does not perform as functions if he has a pain in his bowels even he forthwith sets about reforming the world.

Right and know what’s wrong. We want to change the world instead of changing us instead of paying attention to what our issues are. Pay attention to what we did to create, the situation that we’re in good or bad, it is understandable.

But those who fail should inclined to blame the world for their failure.

The remarkable things that the successful two however much they pride themselves, on their foresight for to, to thrift and other sterling qualities are at bottom, convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances.

The self confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute, they are never sure that they know all the ingredients, which go into the making of their success, the outside world seems to think them a perk up the outside world seems to them a per curiously balanced mechanism.

And so long as it takes in their favor, they’re afraid to tinker with it.

Thus, the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it to spring from the same conviction. And the one can be as vehement as the other.”

So it doesn’t matter whether you’re stuck, and you just don’t want anything to change, or whether you need things to change, because things are so horrible. You are basing your concept of success on outside circumstances.

And what you have to do is be able to pull back away from the emotion and notice things for how they are and take things in a direction where you want it to be taken.

Damn the consequences, quite frankly, I mean, move forward in a in the proper right direction. And don’t worry about what how everyone else right reacts and how it how everything else falls apart around you. You got to do what you’ve got to do.

You do it for the right reasons, you don’t do it to hurt anybody. But you got to have enough inner knowing, in a sense, to know where you need to go next.

Hopefully that makes sense and isn’t too deep.

It’s a great little book, this guy talks in a way that doesn’t really say his opinion, he just kind of says this is how it seems people act. It’s a it’s kind of similar in modern day to maybe a Jordan Peterson or especially a lot of his early stuff, where it really didn’t take a side. It just kind of said, Well, this is how I see people doing things.

So it’s an interesting, very interesting take not saying I agree with everything, or disagree with any of it. But great thoughts on the nature of mass movements.

But when you’re talking mass movements, you’re also talking about individuals and how they react to things. So great book.

If you want another good book, go check out my book 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

We’re talking about these concepts all the time. So come on back.

Again, subscribe if you’re on YouTube. Subscribe if you’re listening on a podcast, and we’ll be back tomorrow night with another sterling example of either a principle a strategy or a tactic that you can use to explode your business.

You have a great night. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.