One of my favorite movie lines ever was from a movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. I think the movie was called “A few good men”.

They were in a courtroom and Tom yelled out: “I want the Truth”, and Nicholson replied with “You can’t handle the truth”. The reason I loved that line so much is because that’s how I feel in this world. People can’t handle hearing the truth about stuff unless it’s the truth that they want to hear. It’s unbelievable.

If someone says, “I want your honest opinion, do you think I am pretty?” and your honest opinion is “Actually no, you are one of the ugliest people I’ve seen in my life”, you can’t say that even if they beg you for the truth. Actually, I can kind of understand that one. People have feelings and that would be hard to hear. But in the business world, where people should be less sensitive, they are not. It is so fake.

Add and I were at a conference yesterday in Shanghai. We went there with a company we are consulting for. They are small and super cool. Anyway, the topic was about the internet and social media (Facebook, Twitter) etc. (We have a hilarious podcast coming out next about the real story there). We’ve been sharing more of our “real opinions” in the VIP room because it’s a private place where we don’t have to be shy. We can be free and say whatever we want in there without having to worry too much about weird comments.

Anyway, the conference sucked (The lunch was not bad at least). The speaker was from a large multinational PR company. He was basically saying a bunch of obvious things about the internet and making everyone believe that “viral marketing” is easy if you go through his company. It was a joke, but most of the audience actually thought it was pretty good. Many of the people there were from other large companies that had nothing to do with the internet. They “bought into” his long and stupid presentation and I’m guessing his company will get a lot of business from that.

There was a question and answer period at the end of the conference. Anyone could ask the speaker anything. I started getting nervous and my heart was racing. I wanted to say my honest opinions. I wanted everyone in the room to know they were being tricked.

There were probably about 150 people in the room. About 95% were wearing suits. I was wearing jeans, a golf shirt, and a pair of sunglasses to give you an idea of what was going on.

Everyone was polite, in a fake way, and it was so annoying. I get this feeling every time I’m in one of these situations. Time moves slowly. I hate it. I have so much to say but I end up saying nothing. I feel like I’m cheating the world or something. Even if people don’t agree with my opinion, I somehow feel it’s evil if I don’t at least share my true feelings.

One thing I hate about business is that so many businesses just try to sell their stuff to everyone. There is just so much lying involved. The truth is that most people should NOT buy most products. When I look around at the English learning market for example, I see a lot of businesses just trying to sell rather than teach. Of course they teach something, but they don’t care if a student pays $2000 USD at the beginning of a course and either learns nothing or doesn’t go to class. Actually, them paying and not going to class is the best situation for the school. They just get free money and can get another paying student to fill the classroom. It’s sick.

It’s really funny when it’s B2B (Business to Business sales). Huge companies pay so much money for the weirdest things. A friend of mine who works for a major market research company says that many of their business clients pay over 10 million USD every year for their market research. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad product, but he told me that they will sell it to any major company who wants it.

His job is to wear a suit and make the research sound a lot better than it is. A lot of the business is about creating an image that you think the other person will like to hear. It should be about making great products and services but it’s just not like that in the “real world”. Small companies can be different. It really depends on who is running them. Huge companies need to make sure they are making money for their investors though. They don’t care where the money is coming from. They just want more of it.

Of course we are “free” to say whatever we want, but the reality is that people don’t. Anyone else who felt the same way I did just kept silent. We knew that if we said what we wanted to then we would look like terrible people.

The honest question in my mind was, “Do you know that you are selling services to many companies who don’t need them or do you actually believe every word you are saying?” I really wanted to know but I couldn’t ask.

I’d love to hear your comments on this and about my last blog about a cool kind of high def video camera sunglasses.

The business world is so interesting. Most people are smart enough to realize that a TV commercial is trying to somehow “trick” us. We at least know that the whole point of a TV ad is to make people somehow want to buy whatever product they are trying to sell. We know the company is paying for the advertisement and this makes us very skeptical. We don’t even want to watch TV commercials because we can see the trick from a mile away. Maybe the product will help our lives, but we see so many bad advertisements about stuff we don’t want or care about that it makes us sick.

Commercials are usually seen as just an annoying interruption of what we are trying to watch. We use this commercial time to get something to eat, go to the bathroom, or at least see what else is on TV. If we are watching TV with a friend, we use this time for talking and not paying attention. Companies pay so much money for these commercials and many of them don’t work as well as they hope. They might work a little bit, but often not enough to justify the cost of the ad. Companies have been doing this kind of advertising for so long that they have become addicted to it. Smart companies are doing something else that you might not even be aware of. This is the best kind of advertising. Pay attention to it next time you are watching a TV show.

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Business English is an advanced topic in itself.  A lot of business English courses are unfortunately taught at the beginner level.  If you truly want to get a good job in business, you have to know a lot of vocabulary and ideas that are quite complicated.  Most students either know business or English, but not both.  Therefore it is not a huge market, even though it is such an important one.  I have attempted to teach advanced business English on a separate website.  If you learn 100 or so new business vocabulary, you will make a very obvious improvement which could easily translate into you getting an awesome job.  Here is an article I wrote which has a link to that new podcast site:  Advanced Business English

In international business it is critical to have an advanced understanding of business English.  Most business English programs try to make a bunch of money but do not seriously try to help people understand the necessary key concepts.  The reason for this is that it is difficult to find high quality native English teachers that can explain these terms.  The average person knows very little about economics and business and therefore cannot teach the high level vocabulary that is specific to business English.  If you want to get a really good understanding of advanced language and concepts, check out my website here:

Advanced Business English Vocabulary

The key to learning business English well lies in understanding major business concepts and vocabulary.  A lot of native English speakers don’t even know this vocabulary well because it is quite specialized.  We are currently working on a business English website that will explain in detail a lot of specialized vocabulary.  Even learning 100 or so major concepts will make a huge difference in how well you can talk about business.  The more you can use these terms the better chance you have of landing a decent job.  The podcasts on our new website will be free to all VIP members of this website.  People who find the other website will have to pay separately for it.

Here is an article I wrote about  some other cool methods for learning business English vocabulary