How to Turn a Gold Nugget Into a Turd by Listening to a Self Proclaimed Guru
I’ve got a friend and student who I’ve been “working” with for over a year now. Trouble is, he can’t get “out of his own way”. Regardless of the “golden” advice he gets, he can’t seem to “pull it all together”. Don’t get me wrong, he’s done some good deals over the past year and made some money…just not as much as he would if he would follow one system instead of trying to follow several.
See, he tries to follow my system and then complicates it with what other trainers tell him, too. Unfortunately, this is the recipe for turning a golden nugget into a turd. The weird part is that he follows my system, makes money, then tries to reinvent it…loses money, comes back to my system, makes money, tries to reinvent the system, loses money again and then repeats the process.
Now, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I assume you can see that what this guy is doing fits the definition of insanity quite well.
Anyways, for over a year I’ve been telling him that time is money and he wastes far too much time. I’m constantly on him about wasting time driving around looking at houses that are never going to turn out to be deals. I almost never look at houses, yet I make more money than most investors. I have a system for screening deals without driving out to look at them.
So today the student calls me and I asked him what he’s doing. His response was “uh…I’m driving out to take a look at a house that I’m thinking about doing a short sale on”. I just chuckled because I’m used to this type of stupidity and asked him why. He said that “I listened to a short sale course that a friend of mine had the other day and the teacher said I should drive out and look at each prospective house”.
I can’t think of a bigger waste of time! Drive across town to look at a house that you don’t even know IF you want to work a short sale on. He had no clue if the owner would be interested in a short sale, no clue if the bank would, no clue about much of anything other than he heard a guru tell him he should drive out to the house and THEN negotiate with the seller!
It’s an incredible waste of time, yet many guru’s have their students driving around looking at houses just like this one on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of unqualified, self proclaimed real estate guru’s out there these days. Be VERY careful about who you take advice from.
I was casually looking over a forum post the other day and came across a post from a new investor who asked about a deal he was considering. Almost immediately, a self proclaimed “rental” guru answered the beginners post. He told the new investor, in a VERY authoritative tone, that he shouldn’t even be considering doing a deal until he has gone out and looked at least 100 houses in the area. What stupid advice!
And the best part is that the advice came from a guy who sells an e-book on a couple of the big real estate investing online communities. For giggles I decided to look at some of his other pieces of advice and most turned out to be about as dumb as the 100 houses one. I guess it’s true that in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king!
As a real estate student, you should know that just because someone sells an e-book or course on a subject, it doesn’t make them an expert. It just means that there is a hungry audience for a topic and that person has thrown something together to make himself some money. The online communities which sell those products get paid to sell them, so don’t think that they screen what the “gurus” are offering. If it sells, they will sell it…period.
So, as always, be very careful about where you get your real estate advice and who you get it from.
About the Author:
Sean Flanagan went from dead broke, living off Ramen Noodles and selling used pallets from the roadside for $20 a day, to a self made real estate multimillionaire in under 2 years time. He now shares his secrets with thousands of students across the country.
He has a FREE audio course titled 7 Secrets to Making Big Bucks in a Slow Real Estate Market which you can get right now by quickly visiting http://www.Yuckyhousetraining.com. He also gives away a coaching program for new real estate investors where he offers a risk free trial to prove to new real estate investors how much money they can make with his program at http://www.Yuckyhousetraining.com.
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