Lessons - Don’t Get Scammed By Gurus | David Greene - Host of Bigger Pockets Podcast

In this lessons episode, discover the myths surrounding real estate success, the pitfalls of passive income promises, and the truth about building lasting wealth. Learn actionable insights on developing skills, embracing the pursuit of excellence, and avoiding the traps of misleading courses. And by the way, when you look at, let's let's talk about what's sort of peddled online in terms of real estate courses. This is probably one of the biggest pain in your asses and you deal with every single day when you speak to people, but when you look at the people, there's a couple different things. You look at people that have figured it out one way, and maybe they've gone through a lot of shit and a lot of failures that they're not speaking about publicly. Maybe they actually haven't even figured it out to the degree that they're alluding to online and they're making a lot of money selling courses. That's another issue, but the point is you still will not respect the process compared to if you're putting your own money in, which is why I love sort of just the framework that you teach over to people. But what are some of the, you know, the false stories, false narratives of what real estate success looks like? Well, everybody, my friend Brandon Turner has a really good statement. He says, nobody buys a drill. They, nobody wants a drill. They want a hole. You buy the drill to get the hole. Nobody wants to learn how to put the work into investment real estate. They want financial freedom. They want to be rich. They want to not have a job. They want to, they're sitting in commute traffic and they're pissed and they hate it and they want a way out of it. Okay, my experience in life is that the only way you get out of a situation you don't like is that you rise to the top and you earn the right to get in a better one. It, in everything in life, if your spouse isn't happy with you, you don't have a good relationship. The only way to fix that is to change the things in you that make it hard to be a good partner, bad a thousand, and now your spouse usually starts to feel guilty. I'm not married, but I see this in marriage all the time. Like, man, they're showing up every day and I'm not. It puts pressure on them to do the same thing. If you get into the, I'm going to make threats like, well, all be a better husband when you're a better wife. It never works. It becomes a race to the bottom. Work is like that. You can't as a basketball player tell the coach, I'll play harder when you give me more playing time. You have to be showing a lot of effort and practice and improving to earn. That is the order of the world. Okay. Like, it is naturally meritocracy. Even though we live in a society that sort of does a misdirection to try to make you believe that's not the case, it's still a meritocracy. When I decide where I'm going to go for dinner, I don't ask what the most mediocre tacos are. I say, what is the best taco stand in town? That is how I make my choices. You buy a Rolex because you think it's the best. You buy a Lamborghini because you think it's the best. That's how we all make decisions. So it's just ingenuous to tell people, hey, somewhere, someone out there is going to like your tacos just the way they are. It doesn't matter if they're not the best or they're stale or it takes a long time to make them. They are unique and special snowflake taco and someone's going to love it. It's ridiculous to think that way. And so getting back to your original question of like, what can you do to, sorry, we'll take this part out. What would I remind me what you would ask me the real estate? I don't know what I would say. And so you went down as a really good rabbit hole and there's the things I'll pull out of every single thing you mentioned. And most of it is in the pursuit of excellence. I want to give you that in the pursuit of math. There you go. I was saying the false stories around real estate success. Thank you. What are they? What are they? So what I talk about in my book, there's three pillars. There's there's chapters on defense, literally the mark of tracking your money, budgeting your money, knowing where it's going, reading a profit and loss statement, having a personal budget and having a plan for every dollar. Then there's a pillar on offense. And this is the skills that you need to develop, the things that people who make money do. It is not, it doesn't just happen. Like people that are really good with with women or women that get a lot of of email attention. It doesn't just happen. There are things they are doing that you could identify and say, this is why they do so well. So there's chapters on extreme ownership and being a leader taken on responsibility. There's chapters on the process of skill development, the literal process you go through to build skills. I did a TED talk on that topic that if you want to be good at things, here's the path you follow. Like Du Boleyn Dynamite said, you got to have skills. There's the pursuit of excellence. You have to fall in love with the process of being great because I'm going to go spend my money for the best tacos. I'm looking for the best partner. My friends are going to be the best friends that I think I can get. The pursuit of excellence is how you earn the right to get more money. Now in our space, the real estate investing space, there are a lot of people that are going to sell you on the opposite of that. You don't have to do anything. It should just happen. If you know, it's sort of like a mixed martial artist who trains every day versus a person who says, well, I went to this kung fu place and they taught me the secret ancient art of the five finger death punch. And so I don't have to practice. I know this special technique, right? Well, we know that doesn't exist because there's nobody in the UFC that's doing five finger death punches. That is something that hacks the Hughes to get you to sign up for their gym and they're praying on the fact that there are a lot of people that want the result without having to put in the work in the real estate investing space. You will frequently see people that are bragging about they quit their job because they made enough money from real estate and they they have this amazing car because they got it from real estate. But the reality is when I talk to these people, their real estate is not doing much. They're making these money from the courses that they're selling. They're really just really good marketers, which is oftentimes a good synonyms with the sewers. And they're using the money you pay on their courses to fund the lifestyle that they're now selling you. And so the book was written almost as an antidote to that. I don't know any wealthy people who approached things like that. And I do know that it is possible to deceive people and separate them from their money but not for the long term. Eventually, you get exposed. Eventually, people figure it out. You also have to live with yourself that it kind of makes your my opinion a POS that you're selling a dream to people that's that's not real. Well, you know what you're doing. You're you're selling the dream of what you're that person was experiencing and they're commute to work the not having to work anymore. The I don't want to I don't want to have a W2 income. I want to have passive income. My most hated word in the world. Oh, that's a very bad because it doesn't it doesn't exist like everything. So it's a massive fit. Well, sir, how would it work really hard to get a great body and then never have to work again. My six pack will refer on how it works. That's just never how it works. And then once people start into real estate, listening to people that actually don't know what they're talking about and don't know what the precinct because again, they're making a lot of their money off course sales. Then you have an overreliance on whatever that person is teaching you and you're not looking elsewhere because you're so bought into it and you're now not just financially invested, you're emotionally invested in whatever this person is teaching, which I think is a whole other issue because like religion, like fitness, you you attach yourself to this dogma and you refuse to look at anything else because you're so invested in it. And I think this is a very toxic place to be because now you have spent 10, 20, 30, 40, $50, $100,000 on courses. You have to make it work. Yeah. So now you're not even going to allow yourself to look elsewhere for other opportunities because you feel like you're failing. That's and you feel as what I you invested in the wrong thing. And now you're low to let it go. It sort of supports that they were talking about earlier that when you're invested in something, you'll hang on to it, but it can work against you when you invest in the wrong thing. I spent $50,000 learning how to do this technique, but there's not opportunities in the space for that technique anymore. Or I don't have the skills that are needed. Like in our in our world, that's often wholesaling. Hey, you got no money. That's okay. Put $15,000 charge on your credit card. Buy my course. I'll teach you how to make money in real estate without any capital. And they teach you wholesaling, which is basically going and finding an incredible deal, putting under contract, and selling the right to buy that property at an incredible price to someone else, and you get like a middleman fee. It's the hardest way that I know of to make money in real estate. You got to relentlessly go out there and look for people that are trying to sell a home. A lot of the time, not every time, but a lot of the time you're buying from grandma who doesn't know what her house is worth and still thinks $100,000 is a lot of money. Or you're finding a person in serious financial jeopardy that you're you're taking advantage of in a sense. But you got to have a great mouthpiece. You got to be really good salesperson. You got to talk people into something. You got to make them think they're winning even if they're not. There is a lot of skills that a whole seller needs much more than a average Joe that just does a good job being a plumber and slowly puts their money into real estate. Let's it grow over 30 years. That's a you don't need very many skills to make that work at all, but you got to have some money. So all of these courses that will teach you how to do real estate without money. They end up needing you to have the highest talent level that most people won't have. So then they'll fail at it. But like you said, they'll think, well, I have to keep going because I've already spent the money. And then they get what I call course shame. They sign up for a course. They sign up for a group. It didn't work out and they internalize it. And there's something wrong with me. I'm the problem. I suck at life. Their confidence takes a hit. They're less likely to go work hard at what they're doing. Meanwhile, the person who left them feeling that way is driving around in the Ferrari that they got from the money that that person sped on their course. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.