Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep157: Should you still trust finance YouTubers?

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

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Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. If you are someone who is very interested in growing your income and growing your wealth, I am sure that you have heard this latest news that FTX, the world's second largest crypto exchange, has gone bankrupt with a lot of top news in the past couple of days.

Now, I am currently focused on career coaching, but for those of you who have been following me for some time, you would all know that I am a chartered accountant, a CPA, and an FCCA. So what that means is that I have basically grown up and spent most of my career in accounting, auditing, risk management, banking, financial services, and and at one point I was the head of governance of FinTech at Standard Chartered Bank. So given my career background there were a lot of my followers and my community came to me asking me hey Mei Ping what do you think about

this whole FTX collapse situation and what do you recommend if I want to not only just grow my career but I also want to grow my income? So what do I need to do and what kind of some of the lessons that I can learn from this whole FTX collapse? So this is a very special podcast episode and I'll share with you my raw thoughts on what you can do to protect yourself given that I don't think anybody actually expected that a product, I guess, a product or service or like a big brand that is being promoted by some of the most famous finance YouTubers out there to basically come up in spokes, right? So what can you do? Let's say you are listening to an

influencer out there, someone who is really popular. What are some of the steps that you can also take to protect yourself and to also do research to make sure that you're not just listening and drawing a quick conclusion based on someone's popularity or like a quote-unquote guru and also basically what you can do to protect yourself, protect your income, protect your family and protect your wealth as well. So diving right into it, I think first things first that's really a big red flag is I think nowadays a lot of people make their investment decisions based on a popular TikTok video, a popular YouTube video, a popular YouTuber and so forth. So just the idea of listening to whatever someone else is saying and expecting that, okay, I don't need to do any more research. I don't need to do any more reading. I don't need to do any more digging. And I can just listen and just put all

my hard-earned money, all my hard-earned money from my 95 job into this like magic coin. So if you're someone like that, I will highly encourage you to really think about the age-old cliche advice and that's called stranger danger. So just because you watch a very famous person on YouTube or you watch a very famous person on TV or TikTok does not necessarily mean that the advice is right. So if let's say, you know, you want to buy something that's really valuable, like wouldn't you think to maybe do a little bit of research, a bit of digging and making sure that you actually understand the foundations of something that you're investing in or the person, whether if the person is even qualified to be teaching you all this information. Like for example,

with the case of EFTX, so what I've been watching, what I've been reading up on and what's actually really interesting is happening on YouTube right now is a lot of these financial YouTubers are now coming up saying that they don't actually understand what they have been receiving tons and thousands of dollars to promote. So I think at the end of the day, yes, I think as a user, as a consumer, you know, I think we all have responsibilities to do research for sure. But I also sometimes think that the person who is, that you have trusted to recommend the best product for you, I think that person probably needs to take a little bit of responsibility as well to do their research rather than just accepting the money and hoping that all the followers will not get into trouble, for of better word so of course you know my channel is a very small channel my podcast is a very small podcast and you may not necessarily need to listen to me but I can say that not just in a situation of the whole FTX collapse and how all these

YouTube financial experts quote-unquote experts are getting caught up into it but this is also a similar situation that I see in my own area, which is in career coaching. So for example, I know one of the best ways that you may be looking for career advice or I don't know, income or like wealth advice on platforms such as TikTok and multiple social media. But the one big tip that I can share with you is you really need to think about who is the person who is teaching you all these things. Because a person can be really good at making videos. They can make like very highly edited videos.

It's very entertaining. It's all these skits that, yeah, entertaining, right? But what is that person's knowledge and what is that person's past success, past background, past experience that qualifies this person to actually be teaching you what they are telling you. So think about it. If you are someone who is trying to learn how to maybe run a marathon or you're trying to learn how to run really quickly, would you not want to learn from a former runner who has achievements in the field or maybe won a couple of medals and with proven skills and expertise. Would you not want to learn from this person versus person

B who may or may not actually have the practical achievements and skills of running, but it's really good at making videos to entertain you. Now, that is something that I encourage you to think about. And like I i said it kind of applies across any single industry so the example i just shared with you is for example if you want to be a runner but it's the same thing in the case of crypto in the case of ftx if you really want to invest the question is you really need to ask yourself is how much do you understand about crypto how much do you understand about exchanges how much do you understand about crypto? How much do you understand about exchanges? How much do you understand about the financial services environment? How much do you understand about the regulatory environment? And how much do you truly know about this founder? Now, the second tip I'll share with

you is one of the platforms that I spend a lot of time on is on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that most professionals or business owners will hang out and most of the information there is probably one of those places online that I find that you can really get to know the thought process of a founder of a business that you may be interested to learn from or a corporate leader in an organization that you would like to learn from as well. So I think, you know, in the process of doing your research, I think LinkedIn is one of those really good platforms that for you, I think at a minimum, you should go to this famous person's LinkedIn profile, really have a look at what is their background, right? So this is probably one

of the best ways that you can learn whether that person is even qualified to be teaching you or this person is purely an entertainer who does really funny videos because this is one of the problems that I see where in the context of career, for example, I'm a career coach and formerly I was a corporate leader and I have managed teams and people, thousands of people from over 43 countries where the business operates. Now, I may not make the most exciting videos, but you can rest assured whatever I'm telling you is based on the things that I've done, given my past career achievements and up the career ladder. Now, comparatively, there could be another person who makes way more exciting videos. And if you're watching me on YouTube right now, you would know that this is like not the most entertaining video ever. Or if you're listening to a podcast, you know that it's like barely an edited version and so forth

because I don't see myself as a YouTuber. I don't see myself as a podcaster. I see myself as a former corporate leader who is now helping corporate professionals to survive and grow their careers in the corporate world. So I think on LinkedIn, like I said, you know, back to what I was talking about on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is probably a really good platform where you can learn a little bit more about the person's background and whether the person has the level of experience or has the kind of success that they have already achieved because that's really what you are trying to get to. So this is probably a better idea rather than just binging on like a thousand TikTok videos or like a thousand YouTube videos and just trusting every

single person that you see. Because one of the quotes that I always tell my students and my clients is that the more people you listen to, the more confused you will get, right? So just like if everybody's saying that this thing is a good thing, it does not necessarily mean it's a good thing. And I think this is one of the really unfortunate things that happened with FTX where because it is so big, it is so famous and it is so popular, I think a lot of people kind of took it for granted and just say, oh yeah, you know, it must be so good. It probably will not fail. And I'm just going to blindly trust because all my friends are doing it and all these other financial YouTubers or these financial experts, quote unquote, are recommending it. But as you can see, what's actually missing here is

you really thinking about your own situation, you really doing the research and you're going to platforms such as LinkedIn, maybe talking to people and making an effort to truly understand what is the business model. Because if you don't understand the business model, what unfortunately is going to happen is that when you dive into the finance space and finance space to be honest i think 99.9 percent of people do think it's kind of complicated so if you go in you know putting in your hard-earned money not

exactly understanding what this platform is supposed to do and i don't want that for you because i know as someone who has worked in the 9 to 5 corporate world and many of you are working in the 9 to 5 corporate world you know my followers my corporate world, and many of you are working in the 9-5 corporate world, my followers, my clients, my community, and many of you who have invested in the stock market, invested in exchanges, invested in crypto, where you got that money initially was from your hard work,

let's be honest, from your hard work. So I think putting in that extra bit of step to validate, to verify, to review, if you can, based on information that you get, I think that extra bit of effort will probably save you a lot in the long run. And, you know, my final message is, you know, I think it's good, right? I'm not saying like, you know, courses are bad. I'm not saying that, you know, advertising sponsorship recommendations are bad. And, you know, to be honest, I don't really do sponsorships.

Like I said, you know, this is a very small channel. This is a very small podcast. But I do think that, you know, if a person is promoting something to you and you're very excited about it, I think that's fine. But I do think that the person who is promoting it to you should have the appropriate information

that you will need. And you should feel free to ask questions if you need to, right? So do your part because, you know, if you go online, this big word called due diligence, like you may feel like, okay, you know, what the heck is due diligence? But due diligence just means that asking questions to better understand the details, not just taking it at face value and expecting all these quote-unquote experts to always protect

your interests. Because at the end of the day, you are the most important person to manage your career, to manage your wealth, to manage your life. So don't give that power away to someone else. Always remember that it's in your hands and be careful. And while a video is very entertaining, while a personality is very entertaining, does not necessarily mean that the person is an expert. And so if there's one key lesson and one key message that you can take away from this entire episode and this really craziness in the market right now, the job market, the financial market,

economic and so forth, I hope is that you realize that you are the most important person in your career and you want to be able to make the best decisions for yourself. So my advice is if you don't know where to invest, then invest in yourself, right? That's really the only thing that you can control, even though, you know, it may not sound so exciting, but I think a lot of people don't realize that you have the opportunity and rather you have the potential to make a lot more income in the future

right versus stressing out following all these crazy trends and just losing out in the end because you don't know what you're investing in and I think that's really unfortunate so with that I hope that there are some interesting takeaways from this episode I just really wanted to release an episode because many of my followers and community have been asking me about it. And like I said, I think as a CPA, a chartered accountant, and with prior experience in consulting,

auditing, risk management, payments, banking, and so forth, I think I'm in a position to just share an extra bit of insight to hopefully you learn something that you can take on for many, many years on in your career. So with that, good luck and I'll see you in the next episode.

Bye.