Why You Can't Hear It From the People Who Love You
Why You Can't Hear It From the People Who Love You
Somebody who loves you has been telling you the same thing for years.
You're good at this. You should be doing more of it. You could build something with this.
And it goes right through you. Not because you doubt them. Because you know them, and some part of your brain has already filed their opinion under of course they'd say that.
Then a stranger says the same sentence one time, and it lands like a struck bell.
I watched this happen to my wife in a conference room in 2019, and it changed the direction of our lives. I want to tell you what happened, and then I want to tell you the mechanism underneath it, because once you see the mechanism you can stop being surprised by it and start using it.
The room
Jana didn't want to be there.
I'd bought a ticket from some people handing out flyers on a sales call, and the ticket came with a companion pass, which my brain immediately processed as getting mine half off even though we share a bank account. She came because otherwise I'd be gone all weekend.
She brought her markers. She sat in the front row and colored in her journal instead of paying attention, which is a thing she does, and on September 16, 2019 she wrote this on the page:
Teacher, come teach me.
Then she listed what she wanted in one. Dynamic. Polished. Well spoken. It factor. Wise. Educated. Successful financially. Fit. Funny. Spiritual.
About ten minutes after she finished coloring that page, a short curly-haired man in a glittering sequined jacket came strutting down the center aisle.
Kane Minkus. Every attribute on her list, arriving in a package neither of us would have drawn.
She was picturing a polished woman. I'd have sketched something closer to Clark Kent. What showed up looked like one of the Pips, opened with a joke so bad we gave it a courtesy laugh, and then earned a real laugh from us for having the audacity to tell it to three hundred people.
The money on the stage
Early on he pulled out a bill and asked who wanted extra money in their pocket right now.
Everyone raised a hand. That's why they were in the room.
He held it out. Come get it.
Nobody moved. Three hundred people who had paid to be in a room about making money, and not one of them stood up. We were in the front row and we sat there running the analysis. Is this a demonstration? Is this a trick? Am I supposed to go?
He put it back in his pocket and said that was the whole problem. Opportunity was in front of us and we were busy deciding whether it counted.
I still think about that, and not because of the money.
Then he put a microphone in her face
He had the room write down the value we each bring to the world. What do you put on the table.
Jana's mind went blank. She was in a transition, between things, and what she was actually thinking was that she had no business being in that room because she had no business and nothing to offer.
He noticed she wasn't writing. You, in the front row. What's your name. What's your story.
So she told it.
Three hundred people, and you could hear a pin drop.
When she finished he asked her why she wasn't speaking to millions of people, and where her book was.
I had been telling her exactly that for years.
Why the stranger landed and I didn't
Here's the mechanism, and it's the most useful thing in this whole article.
Praise and criticism don't travel the same way, and distance changes both of them in opposite directions.
Something negative from someone close to you lands at full volume. It goes deep, it resonates, and it can echo for decades. They don't even have to mean it that way. Proximity amplifies it.
Something positive from that same person arrives soft. They can say it daily, at volume, for years, and it slides off. Your mind has an explanation ready: they love me, they're supposed to say that, they're being kind.
Now flip the distance. Something positive from someone far away, someone with nothing to gain, hits hard. A stranger tells you that you look wonderful today and you carry it around for a week, because there is no motive to discount.
That's why encouragement from your spouse bounces and the same sentence from a mentor rearranges your afternoon.
| Who is saying it | Something negative | Something positive |
|---|---|---|
| Someone close to you | Lands at full volume. Goes deep. Can echo for decades, even when they did not mean it that way. | Arrives soft. Discounted as love or obligation. They can say it daily for years and it slides off. |
| Someone at a distance | Easier to dismiss. They do not know you, and you know it. | Lands hard. No motive to discount, so it reads as objective and you carry it around. |
This is worth knowing in both directions. If you're on the receiving end, you can recognize what's happening and choose to take the praise from home more seriously. And if you're the one who loves somebody who won't hear you, it isn't your delivery. It's the physics of the position you occupy.
Skin in the game
At the end of those two days we hired him. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
I'll tell you the number because the number is the point.
We'd spent about ten thousand before that on coaching certifications and courses, and we had learned real things. But we had never had a mentor. We weren't entirely sure what one was. What we knew was that Kane was living in the direction we wanted to move, and that every attribute on Jana's list had walked down that aisle.
Writing that check scared me.
And it changed how we showed up, immediately and permanently. Not because the material was different. Because we were.
Here's the small version of the same principle, in case twenty-five thousand dollars sounds like a strange thing to learn from. Jana had a piano instructor coming to the house for lessons she was paying for. The instructor offered to show me some guitar chords, free, right there in our living room. I wasn't interested. Not because I don't want to play guitar. Because it cost me nothing and there was no return to earn.
Same instructor. Same chords. Put money on it and a completely different version of me sits down in that chair.
That's not a flattering thing to know about yourself. It's still true, and it's true of most people.
The refund we didn't take
Kane's promise was that we'd make the investment back and then some, or we could have a full refund.
We didn't make it back.
That sentence says something about our year and nothing about his program. I have no idea what other people in that room did with it. Plenty of them may have made it back several times over, and I would not be surprised. What I can tell you is what happened at our house, in that particular twelve months, given what we brought to it.
We thought about the refund. Seriously, not casually. Twenty-five thousand dollars is a real number in our house and the offer was on the table.
Then we asked a different question. Not did we get the money back. What did we actually get.
We got a year of showing up differently. We got hard truths from someone with no reason to spare our feelings. We got Jana's story told to three hundred people and a question about her book that neither of us has stopped thinking about since. We got the trajectory of our lives pointed somewhere else, at a different altitude, with a different attitude behind it.
Against the honest alternative, which is that twenty-five thousand dollars would have gone to something we'd struggle to name today.
So we didn't ask. Not out of loyalty and not to be nice about it. Because when we ran the actual accounting instead of the promised accounting, we were ahead.
And the guarantee itself is worth noticing. He put his fee at risk on our results, in writing, to a room full of strangers. That is not a small thing to offer, and it is one of the reasons we trusted him with the year.
Your bank account already knows your values
When people say they don't know what their values are, Jana's answer is short.
Look at your bank account.
Not what you say you value. Where the money actually goes. That record is objective, it's complete, and it doesn't care what you believe about yourself. If growth is genuinely a priority, it shows up as a line item. If it isn't, that shows up too.
That's an uncomfortable audit and it takes about ten minutes.
Consider the source
The other half of this is who you're taking advice from, and most people are far less careful about that than they think.
You don't go to a hairstylist with bad hair. You don't take dental advice from someone with no teeth. And yet people routinely take financial advice from friends who are broke and relationship advice from people repeating the same pattern for the third time.
Those friends aren't bad people and they mean well. But advice is downstream of results, and if you take it from someone who hasn't got the result, you're borrowing their outcome along with their opinion.
A mentor is someone who has been where you're going, or is there now, and will show you the system rather than hand you a feeling about it.
How this goes wrong
You go looking for a guru. Search for one and you'll find people optimized to be found. The version that worked for us involved Jana writing down attributes and then recognizing them when they walked past. Clarity first, search second.
You wait for the packaging you imagined. Jana pictured a polished woman. She got a sequined jacket and a terrible joke. If she'd held out for her mental image she'd have dismissed the person who had every quality she'd asked for.
You spend money instead of doing the work. Skin in the game changes how you show up. It does not do the showing up. Paying for coaching and then treating the sessions as optional is an expensive way to feel like you're growing.
You measure the return only the way it was promised. We did not make our money back that year. If that had been the only ledger, we'd have taken the refund and walked away from the most useful relationship of that decade. Run the promised accounting, and then run the real one.
You use praise distance as a reason to stop listening at home. The point is not that the people close to you are unreliable. It's that their signal arrives quiet. Knowing that should make you turn the volume up on them, not go shopping for strangers.
You only count a mentor if they're famous. Kane Minkus was in a hotel ballroom, not on television. The person who compresses your timeline is more often two steps ahead of you than twenty.
What to expect
The right mentor does not tell you something you've never heard. Very often they tell you the exact thing your spouse has been saying for years, and the difference is entirely in who is saying it. That can sting a little if you're the spouse. It stung me for about an hour, and then I got over it, because she needed to hear it and it worked.
A mentor compresses time rather than removing effort. Jana would say by a factor of ten. What actually gets compressed is the trial and error, not the work.
The return may not show up on the schedule you were sold. Ours didn't. What we bought turned out to be a different thing than what was advertised, and worth more.
And it doesn't all arrive at once. Jana did write a book during that year with Kane. She never published it. Looking back at it now, it reads like the wrong book, written by someone who had not yet become the person who would write the right one. That's not a failure of the mentorship. That's what a compressed timeline looks like from the inside.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: write down the attributes of the person you want to learn from. Not their job title. What they're like. Jana's list ran to ten items and she wrote it in a journal she wasn't taking seriously at the time.
Reflection question: who has been telling me something true that I've been discounting because of how close they are?
Journal prompt: what does my bank account say I actually value, and does it match what I say out loud?
Action: open your account and find one line item that reflects a value you claim to hold. If you can't find one, that's the finding.
Frequently asked questions
Why does advice from a stranger land harder than the same advice from my spouse?
Because distance changes how feedback registers. Positive words from someone close arrive soft, since your mind can attribute them to love or obligation. The same words from someone with nothing to gain read as objective and land at full volume. Negative feedback works the opposite way and hits hardest from the people closest to you.
Does paying for a mentor actually make a difference, or is that just sales talk?
It changes how you show up. Free advice from a qualified person is still qualified advice, and most people treat it as optional. Having money committed removes the option, which is most of what accountability actually is.
How do I find the right mentor?
Get specific about the attributes you want before you go looking, then pay attention to who shows up. Searching for a guru surfaces people optimized to be found. Knowing what you're looking for lets you recognize the right person when they walk past, including when they arrive in packaging you didn't expect.
What's wrong with taking advice from my friends?
Nothing, if they have the result you want in the area you're asking about. The problem is asking for financial guidance from someone who is broke or relationship guidance from someone repeating a pattern. They mean well, and advice tends to come attached to the outcome that produced it.
How do I know what I actually value?
Look at where your money and time go. Stated values are aspirational. Spending is a record. The gap between the two is usually the most useful thing you'll learn all week.
Is journaling for a mentor the same as manifesting one?
The practical part is that writing down specific attributes makes them recognizable later. You notice what you've named. Whether you call that manifestation or attention is less important than the fact that Jana had the list on paper, which is why she could tell it had been matched exactly.
One more thing
Jana still has that journal. September 16, 2019, the colored page, the list of ten attributes, and a man in a sequined jacket who showed up ten minutes later carrying every one of them.
That's the argument for writing things down, more than any theory about how attention works. Without the page, her mind could have told her afterward that it was close, or that she was missing something, or that it wasn't really what she asked for.
The page doesn't allow that. It sits there in her handwriting with a date on it.
Get a mentor. Write down who you're looking for first.
We Create Our Luck®.
We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 23.
