If You Think Education is Expensive, Try Ignorance

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” ~ Derek Bok

When I started over 30 years ago, like many of you I didn’t have any extra money to pay a mentor or buy an investing course. I decided I would learn the real estate investing business by just doing it. I thought I could shorten my learning curve by going to real estate meetings. I went to a popular real estate meeting in my area for several months. Then I got the bright idea that if going to one meeting was a good idea it would have to be better to go to more meetings. So I decided I would go to four meetings in my area every week. I thought that the real estate meetings I went to were where the seasoned investors with all the knowledge of how the business worked went and if I could meet them I could pick their brains and learn the secrets of investing that would catapult me to success.

After a few months of what seemed to be endless meetings I realized that going to meetings was not giving me what I wanted. I wasn’t getting the details, the investor’s secrets I needed to be able to buy real estate profitably. I saw other investors who were constantly doing profitable deals but none of them would give me their secrets or the details I needed to be able to do the same. At the time I thought I was saving money by trying to learn the business the inexpensive way but I was just fooling myself because after all of the months of attending those meetings I still didn’t have the information to be able to generate the money I needed. I found out it wasn’t the inexpensive way to learn at all; it was the extremely expensive way to learn the business. I continued to learn the real estate investing business without spending any money for training until one day I decided it was time I needed to make a change. I decided I would take a quality training. The key word in that sentence is “Quality” training.

That first “quality” training cost me $3,000 to attend. At that training I learned several easy-to-use ideas that I immediately applied upon arriving home after the training. One of the techniques I learned that day allowed me to make $10,000 in just over 30 days after the training and I still continue to use that technique to this day. Over the years I’ve learned dozens of techniques that have made me thousands of dollars and I continue to make even more money right up to today. As I look back, that was the best $3,000 I’ve ever spent in my life. Since then I have attended many quality trainings and will continue to attend quality trainings as long as I am in the real estate investing business.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the cost of that training was a mere pittance of the cost of a college education. The cost of a four-year college education would be many thousands of dollars. I don’t believe college would have helped me make the kind of money I’ve made from real estate. I have heard that there are PhDs working at McDonald’s. I knew back then that I didn’t need general knowledge. I needed specific knowledge.

If general knowledge is what it takes to be wealthy, then college professors would be the wealthiest people on the planet, and we know that’s not the case. Specific knowledge of how to do a task that will generate money is what it takes to create wealth.

Today, you have choices! You can spend 5-10-15 years learning how to be a real estate investor by doing it the hard way, by making mistakes simply because you don’t want to spend the money to learn from someone who has already made the mistakes you need to avoid. If you try to do it on your own you will quickly discover that you don’t really know what you’re doing.

You can learn the real estate investing business by reading as many books about real estate investing as you can find. You can go to as many meetings as you have the time to attend, but until you understand the business you will find it very difficult to make any money at all.