GI said it, GI here on GI said it where I break down my perspective on different topics. And I’m going to tell you right out the gate that for this one in particular, people are going to be mad. But that’s okay because that’s what I’m here for. I’m here to be real about it. I’m here to give you my perspective and you take it how you take it. So what we’re talking about today, honestly most thought leaders’ advice is bs. Yep, I said it. The reason why I want to talk about this is because there’s a difference between a thought leader and an expert. And also people do not understand what thought leaders do behind the scenes or what their job is to do. Their job is to produce thoughts or perspectives in which case you find either enlightening, insightful, and therefore you follow them and by their products.

The reason why that is problematic is because the best answer or the thing that is the answer that you need may not be the answer that everyone’s going to be into. And what I mean by that is they’re going to be talking about topics that other people will either agree with or be touched by. It doesn’t have to center around the truth, it has to center around, do people like it? And then that’s where the problem comes in because in my experience, most of the thought leaders that I’ve interacted with, not very good at what they do. They’re not terrible, but a lot of them are not very good at what they do. A lot of them are very good at marketing, they’re very good at understanding how to inspire people, how to move people, how to rally up people. And that is an important skill to have.

However, if you are going to be like an industry, a leader for a particular thing, I would expect you to be damn good at that particular thing. It blows my mind on this. So let me go ahead and give you guys the lay of land in terms of how it works for thought leadership. Essentially, someone’s going to be working in their field, they may achieve some slight success or some achievements and they say, Hey, you know what? I need to boost my personal brand. I need to get out there a bit more. This will open up opportunities for me, job opportunities, maybe money, maybe some passive income. Essentially it’s a business decision and a branding decision. So from there they go ahead and they begin creating content first. They’ll go ahead and put together either a book maybe or some courses or they’ll put together a blog and they’ll also chop that up and put it into social media, begin doing posts, and they’ll just keep doing that as they build up a following.

And people who support what they say, again all the way through this, that doesn’t mean that it is the truth or it is actually useful in that particular field. So they essentially go ahead and chop up all this content. But there’s a problem happens once they reach a certain point. There’s too much work to be doing. You got to have blog, you got to have videos, you got to have social media posts, you got to go interact here, you got to do a webinar. There’s a lot of things you need to do. So what did they do? Automate it with a I. So now AI is pumping out the actual social media posts, which by the way, if you guys don’t know that most of the thought leaders, a lot of ’em will have either someone else posting their stuff like someone else will write it, they hire someone or they have someone in-house.

They’ll have either chat, GBT or some other type of generative AI for writing. Go ahead and pump those out. Schedule ’em. A lot of it is automated to the point where you’re not even getting their own perspective. Yeah, you’re getting an idea of it, but not actually their words because it’s no longer about giving you actual real actionable advice or strategies or something that would work in that point in time in that particular industry. It’s about how do I build my brand? And anyone who has a focus of mainly that rather than actually going out and helping people with that, I don’t trust you, point blank. I don’t. Because your first and foremost focus is how do I make money? Let’s be real. That’s what it comes down to. They’re not just getting the following of people for the heck of it. How do I make money?

That’s really what it goes back to. And it’s the same thing within businesses. They’ll join on this social justice thing and now we’re about this cause and about this cause and at the end of the day, they’re really about money. And the easy way to spot that is when those cultural perceptions or perspectives change, do they change too? Or were they really about it from the get go? Most of the time they change all of a sudden. No, no, no, that’s not the thing. We’re not about that anymore. You see right now with everyone rolling back some of their programs that they have, all of a sudden we’re not about that. No, you were never about that. What you were about was money. So to bring it back to thought leaders, I’m not going to call out anyone in particular, but there was a particular thought leader, in which case he was the number one thought leader within that industry.

It was for a client that I worked for and for them, man, he’d pump out great, either a webinar or article or whatever it was. And especially on LinkedIn, you’ll see tons of this on LinkedIn. Oh my goodness, especially on LinkedIn. And he would be posting these posts and people would be commenting and all this stuff. And so before I met him, I’m like, oh man, he must really know his stuff. Okay, maybe let’s go and talk to him. Go talk to him. I’m like, Bru, you don’t know anything of this. I’m new to this particular thing and I can tell that you don’t know anything about it because it was never about the actual information in the first place. It was about progressing that person’s brand and career. So most of the advice that I see coming out, I don’t trust you because I need to make sure that you know your stuff.

I know a lot of people hate experts right now. I don’t hate experts. I like experts. If you’ve spent your entire life or however many decades within a certain field and you’ve gotten really good at that and you can actually execute what you’re paid to do, I want to hear from you. I don’t care how many followers you have, are you good at what you do? And I feel like that’s where we lost the plot. Instead of focusing on are they actually good at what they do, we focus on how many followers they have, how many books they have coming out, who they’re working with, who their brand partnerships. It’s a popularity contest. It’s not about getting you the information that you need to do well in that particular thing. So most of the advice I see is built to make it sound good. That’s why I don’t like it.

I don’t like it because yeah, it sounds good, but if you have a particular skill in that or experience in that particular field or just some basic critical thinking skills, you’re like, that doesn’t make sense. It sounds fantastic. And yes, everyone’s agreeing with it, but I don’t follow everyone. I prefer to think for myself, does that make sense? Can I use this? Is this going to get me results? And a lot of times it will not. If their advice that’s being put out there of this is how you become successful and become rich, if it was all that good, everybody would be rich. Not because it’s there to sell a product, period. So I’m not completely hitting on thought leaders for the sake of they’re trying to do their thing, they’re trying to push, afford their career, they’re trying to feed their families. I get it, I understand that.

But when you put that before the information that people are trusting you to deliver, then we have a problem. This is all about you and not about the very people who are trusting you. So with the experts, I say bring back the experts, but for the love of God, please make sure that they’re experts like that killed the game for experts recently that so many people would pretend and say they’re an expert because now that you can go online, you can just say you’re an expert or act like an expert. Back in the day, you couldn’t really do that. People would check you so fast like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that. No, no, you’re not doing that. But now with the internet, anybody can be an expert. And that is why people don’t trust experts as much because the people that’re saying, oh, we don’t trust experts.

They’re wrong on this. Probably weren’t experts to begin with. That doesn’t mean the experts are perfect, they’re still human. But at the same time, if you have 25 years doing this thing and you have been killing it the whole time, I’m probably going to trust you on that unless I have more knowledge, which I do not. So I’m probably going to go ahead and trust you on that. I say bring back the experts. The world could use that right now for a lot of people going along with whatever ideology that they believe or whatever thing of the moment, it’s not based in fact, in reality, I care about reality. What can I do in reality? What result can I get out of this information? And if you’re a thought leader, just pitching stuff so that people like your posts and share it so that they buy your book and go and get on your course and hire you for your coaching, I don’t trust you.

Put it out there. Give ’em some information that they can use. Actually do your job. Well. Show people how to do that. Be a real leader by setting an example. So guys, I’m probably going to have to come back to this again another time. As you can tell, it got a little heated just a little bit. But I really wanted to touch on that because it is just such a big problem. And when you’re watering down the information sources of people and their expertise, you’re now making distrust and creating distrust within that actual field. It’s hard for people to get the actual guidance that they need because they no longer trust it. You’re breaking down trust and that’s a problem. So GI here on GI said it where I break down my perspective on different topics. Make sure you guys head on over to the website and say hello, subscribe gi said it.com. Also gi griffin.com. And if you got some comments and some thoughts on this, let me know if you think otherwise are like no thought leaders are the absolute thing. Let’s fault and let’s talk about it. Let’s discuss. I’m all about that GI here. I’m out. And now a word from our sponsors, GI said, that is my favorite. GI said it.