FBC – 366 – What you don’t know might kill you…Contrarily to popular belief

What you don't know might kill you…Contrarily to popular belief.

In this episode, I want to touch base on a very serious topic. A topic that plagued my life at some stage and that it probably plaguing your right now.

This stuff needs to be avoided at all cost and this podcast will show you how to do just that.

All the details and more inside.

If you are serious about finding a way to get a glimpse of true freedom and get as close as one can be, then click on the link below.

https://martinebongue.com/profit-machines

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What I wanted to talk to you about is my mind-set during my trials and challenges in life. And you'll see how that can be relevant even for some of you guys.

So if you if you've been following me for a while, you know that I've been through a situation where I got badly injured and then I ended up in a wheelchair and stuff. I had to learn how to walk and play basketball again. It took me years and years to do it. And it sucked.

I was living by myself on the first floor and then all of a sudden ended up in a wheelchair, which is the problem, as you can imagine. So I had to go back to France to stay with my parents. These were challenging times.

I was working support at the time and we were on call. So every week someone was going to be on call and get some calls after hours and had to fix the problems and stuff. And I knew that one of my colleagues was on call and the only number I knew by heart was the number of our support line. So I called the number.

I said, well, please call that number. One of my colleagues is going to pick up and please ask him to call Dominic, which was one of my mentors. I mean, the guy who taught me he taught me so much, this guy, and he really helped me like, you know, beyond what he can even imagine.

So this is how I actually get stuff, you know, like toothbrush and like change of clothes and stuff, calling this number of my job to get the to one of my colleagues to call this guy, you know.

They gave me a choice between an operation and realigning my bones and putting a cast and stuff, you know? So I was like, yeah, I'm scared. It's an operation. Then I'll have this and then. Yeah. And so I chose the cast to realign my bones without anaesthesia or anything.

Just imagine how painful it was. It was crazy. So the dude was manoeuvring my leg like, you know, pulling it up and down and looking into a screen sideways and stuff to see if it was a line or not.

What you don't know

I should have gone with the operation. I think my leg would have been fine. But you know what? I'm not the one who lives with regrets and stuff, just analysing the situation and what actually stopped me at the time. I think I was afraid of the result of an operation.

So this time when I ended up in that accident, I didn't even ask questions. I was like, dude, let me go to the hospital and I will do an MRI right now. I want to know exactly what happened. I wasn't like, what if my leg is broken and what if my ligaments are torn, blah, blah, blah? No, let's check.

So I didn't even recognize that until I started thinking about it and reflecting back at how my mind-set was before when I was dodging all these problems and stuff, you know, I was basically living in denial and dodging problems because problems make life harder.

No, they don't necessarily make life harder. They will open some options. You know, it might not be what you want, but at least you have options.

And I realized that I've changed a lot since that time. And I think I've become a lot stronger because maybe it could have been that I just couldn't handle the truth at the time. And I said, let's assume that everything is OK and chickening out of that operation.

So just like that, I've grown and, you know, bad situations like this, there is always a growth opportunity and there is always like a take away. And I'm actually very happy of how I handled this stuff. I've changed.

This is how you make progress.

Frequently Asked Questions

What blind spots can quietly kill your business and how do you find them?

Blind spots usually live in cash flow, customer churn, and competitor pricing. The fastest way to surface them is a quarterly review where you list every assumption your business runs on and stress test each one. I run a one hour Sunday audit checking last week numbers against my forecast, which catches creeping problems while they still cost cents.

Why is what you do not know more dangerous than what you know in business?

Known problems get budgets, deadlines, and tracked progress. Unknown problems compound silently until they hit your bank account or your reputation. The dangerous gap is not the question you cannot answer. It is the question you never thought to ask, like whether your one big client is about to switch suppliers because a competitor undercut you.

How do you identify the most dangerous knowledge gaps in your own business?

Audit three areas every quarter. Customer feedback you have not read yet. Financial trends like rising refund rates or longer payment cycles. Competitor moves like new pricing tiers or product launches. Most owners avoid these because they take six focused hours, but skipping the audit makes the popular saying about ignorance being expensive painfully accurate.

What practical habits help you keep learning the things you do not know yet?

I follow a forty five minute daily reading habit split between operator newsletters, customer support tickets, and one competitor product update. I also schedule one customer call monthly with no agenda except open ended questions. Both habits surface knowledge gaps you cannot detect from inside the business, where you are too close to spot what is missing.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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