I should have studied the movie The Sting a little more carefully. It has some tell-tale stories of people who are not who they appear to be, and you need to always be on guard that the person you are meeting is not who they say they are; specifically in Miami.
This strange phenomenon seems to be so commonly happening to me where I go into a meeting expecting one thing and within a few minutes it appears that this person is not what I expected.
Recently I set my wife up with a meeting with someone in Miami who said they were interested in being a sponsor, which means paying her for traffic and visibility, but within a few minutes of the meeting, they were trying to sell her TikTok videos. They were pretty nice videos, but she was not expecting to be pitched. She quite honestly was turned off by this. It’s not what most of us expect.
Do you have the expectation that everybody is not what they say they are, when you go into every meeting, especially with investors?
You go in thinking they will be investing in you and it turns out they want to either 1) sell you some service, 2) they want to raise money from you, or 3) have some altogether different objective that was never what you expected.
It’s just common in Miami to be duped, cajoled, or talked into something you were not expecting. Is this common in other places in the US or it a Miami thing?
Am I just naive this is the business world that I just never understood, and I am trusting of people no matter what?
Am I just the fool’s fool?
And some of this can be the telephone game. That’s when a person tells a person, who tells a person, who tells you something, and by the time it gets to you, the original message stated that they were investors, but by the time you meet, they were undertakers. How did this happen?
It could be my ADHD.
I am not a great listener.
I sometimes miss the fine details.
ADHD people like me tend to congregate together. I am working with, entertaining, working for, or hiring many like myself. We just miss the forest through the trees. We are a group ready to be convinced of anything. I was once convinced I was a travel agent (it’s a long story).
We are like a group of vulnerable and accepting blowing tall grass about to be mowed down by tigers; people who are looking for a mark for a big score.
People also are not totally transparent. Upon the first meeting, they said we can raise your team money! But later they say, we “could” raise your team money, but we really sell services where you pay us to create your deck and get you ready for money. That’s not exactly the same thing.
Eventually, you develop flexibility after being beaten down by rogue fellows, con artists, on the spectrum like characters as well as smooth talkers, to know that what is a hard truth can slide easily to something not so true.
Life gives you lemons, so you make some lemonade and don’t take this stuff seriously anymore!
We have to do a lot of vetting in Miami because people tend to take the truth and stretch it every which way. Everything real has some little white lies. That’s when you manipulate the language describing what you do or what you want into something much more positive than what it really is.
Don’t get me wrong, I am 25 years into my South Florida/Miami migration and still talking about it, like a NY/NJ person. Was NY/NJ not like this? In some ways yes, others no. The fact is we knew who people were because it was a small world in the end in NY/NJ, and if we did not know them, we could easily figure them out.
But there is something about a place where 75% of the people moved here.
Most everybody is from somewhere else.
Miami is a place you can reinvent yourself.
I am always pitching something on Medium. I am still looking for digital agencies to resell SEO Turbo Booster, https://www.seoturbobooster.com, and I am running a holiday networking event on Dec 22nd, 2022 if you are near Miami at the Eglavator. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/eglavator-incubator-holiday-get-together-tickets-481712062747
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