Why working with an expert makes all the difference

Dateline: Phnom Penh, Cambodia Like a lot of people who travel, I like to get a massage occasionally and you can find cheap places all across Southeast Asia where you can get treatment for as little as $10, $15, or $20. So, for years I’ve been dropping in on these places, but I’ve never experienced any kind of great affinity with the whole process. I’d stop by and book an hour, asking the masseuse to focus on my legs or my shoulders, whatever felt in need of a little attention. I’d pay my $20, lie back, and relax. Sure, they’ve been nice and relaxing and it gives me an hour to myself and my thoughts, but I always had that feeling that I must be missing some point.

In expert hands

So, a few years ago, when I was staying at this hotel, I’d been working a couple of late nights and my back and shoulders were tense and sore, so I figured I’d get myself a massage. For the area, it was a pretty expensive deal, but I bit the bullet and paid my couple of hundred bucks to get a massage at the resort. I started by trying to explain to the spa masseuse what I wanted; just my shoulders and my upper back. She listened patiently, sort of nodded and said, “Listen, I’ve been doing this for over twenty years, let me just give you the full body massage and let’s see what happens.”As she started massaging me, she began explaining how different areas of the body are all connected; that the left shoulder connects with the right leg for instance or how an ache in the upper back could be a referred pain located in the lower back. As she talked, it started making more sense that if you don’t treat the whole body then you can’t expect to receive all the benefits of a massage. Let me tell you, that experience was the best massage I’d ever had and. Not only did it ease the ache in my back, but it also opened my eyes. However, it wasn’t just an epiphany about massage but also something else that relates to what we so often come back to here on Nomad Capitalist. All this time, in my ignorance, I’d been telling masseuses how to massage me. Some of these therapists, like the one in the hotel resort, had twenty years’ experience or more, and I, as a complete amateur, had been telling them what to do, leading them, rather than trusting in their expertise.

A pivotal shift

This happened a couple of years ago and was around the same time that I’d made a pivotal shift in my life from trying to figure everything out on my own to delegating stuff to the experts. Since I’ve done that, my businesses have grown so much faster and I have so much more free time. It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my professional life. It’s pretty simple when you think about it. Find the right experts, delegate and trust them. And I find that this really applies to the things that we talk about here. Whether it’s setting up an offshore bank account, getting a second passport, investing overseas, or whatever. On the face of it, these things can look straightforward, and it can be all too easy to think that you have more knowledge than you actually have. Maybe you want to invest in Nicaragua, you’ve done your research and you think that you’ve got an idea about what works and what doesn’t. The chances are that there are a lot of people in Nicaragua that have been there for a long time, know all the pitfalls and the shortcuts to success and can probably help you achieve what you are aiming for far faster (and maybe more cheaply) than you could without them. In short, you find the right expert, delegate the task, and then trust them to get on with it. In my experience – both personally and with helping so many other people achieve their goals – you’ll save a lot of time and money in the process. I rarely consider anything a failure, but the biggest learning experiences I’ve had in the offshore world have been when I got information from someone via a “friend of a friend” or a self-proclaimed “expert” that I didn’t fully check out. That’s when I’ve made those mistakes that I’ve been able to learn from and put to good use with Nomad Capitalist.

Boots on the ground

When it comes to getting a second passport or knowing where to invest, I head to the country I need to research, put my boots on the ground, and find an expert that I can trust to do what I need them to do. Yeah, sure, I may know the basics of how a Panama residency works or what you need to put in place to start up a business in Hong Kong, but I don’t know each individual clause or sub-section, or whatever. What I need to know is that the expert that I’ve got doing this for me can deal with it and that I can trust them to let me know of any issues that arise. So, in recent years it’s been much smoother sailing because I can trust the experts that I’ve put in place. This approach has worked well for me in my business, whether its finding the best offshore banks or getting a second residency to pay lower taxes, I’d much rather hand over the details to someone who knows how to get things done more effectively and save my valuable time, and probably money, in the long run. Call me when the company’s set up, call me when the passport’s ready, call me when the tax work is done. And because I’ve found the best people for the job and I can trust them, I have no need to tell them how to do their job. I can sit back and let them do the work for me So, for me, the big lesson — whether it’s in getting an effective massage or in the offshore activities of the Nomad capitalist realm — is knowing when to trust the experts and how to find these folks. The fact I learned this lesson as a result of a $200 massage is just an indication of how important it’s been to me and just might prove to be for you, too.