We’re heading into a “life preserver” time. Here’s what that means...

Think of the Titanic. It is the biggest ship that's ever built. It is light years ahead of anything that was ever created prior. That's to me, that's like the economy over the last few years. But then after the Titanic hit the iceberg, would anybody care about the fancy meals or how fast it was or how beautiful it was? What would people care about once it hit right? All they would care about is a lifeboat or a life preserver safely. I believe we are heading into a life preserver time, right? If you think about, if we just look at history, I'm not an economist and I'm not predicting the future, but I think everybody's aware of this. We just have to face it. Because I get to talk to people, especially if you're under 35, you really don't know what it looks like for an economy to shift. As Jim Rohn said and Tony Robbins says, heading into winter, heading into a recession. If we just look at history, we say we have 45 year high inflation, right? You see it in gas and prices and food and milk and everything possible. We have interest rates that have gone up three times now just in the past month. And it's predicted that interest rates will go up six more times by the end of the year, right? If you look at the stock market today on your phone, if you have an Apple phone, it pops up. What is the stock market done every day for the last, I don't know, month or so, it's creeping down. Usually when you're in a place like this, it's, people are going, oh, it's temporary, it could be a hiccup. If you look over time, it has all the ingredients and people smarter than me sharing that we're heading towards a recession, we're heading towards some sort of winter. And the other thing I want you guys to think about, and what does that mean for you is if you push down a trampoline a little bit, right, what happens to bounces back around the same height, right? We've just had a 15 year run where like you couldn't mess up interest rates, got cheaper, they printed more money. If you look at the last 15 years of the stock market, it's like this, with a couple little dips. That's like pushing the trampoline way down. And what a lot of these experts predict is since we had such a solid run for that long, what's the opposite of pushing something really far down? It's the opposite and equal reaction to the action. I hope I'm completely wrong. It's a tiny hiccup and there's another 15 years of a great market. I hope that, I hope it for you, everybody. But I wouldn't be a good friend, leader, teammate if I didn't share what could possibly potentially be happening. So with that said, here's the cool part. In 07, when the world shifted the last time, when there was the savings and loan and, and banking issues and the crash and every other house and if you're here in America and your neighborhood was for sale or in foreclosure when that happened, my education, self education business exponentially grew. 2007, 2008 were some of the best years of my life up until that point. And the same with Tony. So one cool thing in the self education industry, or even whatever industry you're in, if you're prepared, if you plan, if you know it's coming, especially this industry, it'll exponentially grow because more people will be home, more people will want help. More people want to learn from people who've already been it, whether been through it. Whether that's helping your relationship through a shifting time or selling or living or loving or coaching or mindset. When the world shifts, people reach out for help. And in today's world, they're not reaching out for help in their local college, they're reaching out to people like you. That's just the way it is. This industry will not, in my opinion because I've been through 1999 and I was through 2007, both times. This industry, the self education industry exponentially grew. So that's a cool thing. But here's the cool part. People's industries that aren't growing or if they're going through a tough time, they, they need us and we get to serve them at the highest level while fueling our business. I hope I'm not, I'm not here to scare you. I think Jim Rohn and Tony both said, and maybe it was just Tony, that when winter comes, some people freeze and are hungry and other people snowboard and ski during winter. And it's those that know it's coming, those that can prepare can ski and snowboard and we can help others. So if I say it, please, please know, I think, you know, especially those who've been with me for so many years, I hope you know, in my heart I am not the guy that says it's going to hell in a hand basket. Good luck. It's like I would just rather be prepared. Last night I stayed up, I could not shut my brain off of Saying, what can I do to personally prepare more? And what can I do to help prepare the people who have faith in me and want to learn? I'm going to tell a little story today that you may have heard before, but I'm going to share because this is what helped me in 2007 when I. When the world shifted. Now, not everybody is in something that would help people financially, but if in a shifting world, do you want to be healthier? If you're stressed, do you skip workouts? Do you eat a little crappier? I know I do because I was up at 1. I skipped my workout this morning. First time I think I've missed in about three months. And I'm pissed. But I got to get it done. I'll go do it tonight. But it happens, right? Like, can relationships suffer? Do you eat wrong? Right? Do you want to have a better mindset? Do you lose your purpose? Like, mostly all the niches, I can't imagine hardly any niche. Even if you teach art, piano, guitar, like, when things go, you want that, something different, you want that alternative, you want to find something. And I think that's why the tide rises. It lifts all boats. When things shift, this industry lifts. So I think it affects everybody. But I want to, I want to give you a high level picture of the, the message, the, the visuals I had in 07 when the world shifted. The last time. I was teaching people how to invest in real estate and I saw what was coming. It didn't take a rocket science scientist to see, like, kind of like where we are now. And I was teaching people and I was watching all the other competitors. Back then it was Carlton Sheets was my biggest competitor and he had been on forever. And it was his infomercials because there was no Internet. That's why we had infomercials were very aspirational. Get in real estate and get the second house and buy the extra car and go on more vacations and wow, that's great for an aspirational market. But the world was shifting and I was thinking less speedboat, more life preservers. And I'm going to give you this analogy. Take it, adjust it, change the framework any way you want. But back then, and I really want you to hear this, this is what helped me be a really good marketer. I did not have the luxury of targeting my ideal client. It didn't exist. I couldn't go on Facebook and said, I want single moms who do yoga and like peanut butter and jelly. Like, that's the target market. I Want to go after and, you know, do Pilates after five. Like, we can fine tune and narrow our niche so much. We could speak on Instagram just about our niche. We could create a Facebook group just about our niche. That didn't happen for Tony. And when I started, we couldn't narrow down our niche. We had to go on an infomercial and just broadcast to everybody who watched CNN or Fox News or was on the Discovery Channel or ABC in the morning. Like it was just a wide net. Does that make sense? So if you can't with that, I had to be intuitive or learn to be intuitive on what people were feeling. I really want you to hear this. I know this. I promise I'll bring this all back around. I had to be intuitive to what people are feeling. So here's the analogy I came up with. Think of the Titanic. It's in the harbor in leave London. It was England somewhere, right? It's in the harbor. It is the biggest ship that that's ever built. It is the fastest big ship ever built. It is the maiden voyage. It is gorgeous. It is light years ahead of anything that was ever created prior. That's. To me, that's like the economy over the last few years. It's aspirational. This is amazing, right? And if I was selling a seat on that, imagine you'd be like, everything I said, it's the fastest, it's the biggest, it's the most beautiful. It's got marble, it's got fancy for food, it's got music. Aspirational. It's perfect, right? That's how I'd sell it. If it was like the way I looked at it, if it was 2005 or 2006 before things turned, that's how I would sell that. But then after the Titanic hit the iceberg, would anybody care about the fancy meals or how fast it was or how beautiful it was? What would people care about once it hit, right? All they would care about is a lifeboat or a life preserver. Safety, right? Look at every survival. Survival, safety, the lifeboats, right? So what happens is in 2007, the economy hit an iceberg. And here's what I noticed. I want you to hear this. All of my competitors were still selling aspirational. They were still selling faster boats and bigger dreams. And in my head, I'm like, I drove down the street the other day. Every other house, every third house in this neighborhood's got a foreclosure sign on it. I don't think anybody's thinking about the vacation home or the Lamborghini. I think they're thinking about your words. Lifeboats. Safety. Survival. Survival. Life preservers. Right. So what did I do? I shifted. I wrote a book called Be a Real Estate Millionaire, but I shifted the contents. I was in the middle of writing the book and I just wrote a book, how to do one deal every month or one deal every couple of months. It wasn't about getting rich overnight. It was called a wholesale process where you found really good deals either through foreclosure or other ways, and you sold them to investors. Do you remember, was anybody buying a house in 08? No. Everybody was like, I'm not buying crap. I don't want to see where things are going. So everybody's like, how can you sell real estate? Guess who was still buying real estate in 08 and 09? Investors. I bought like 500 houses in 08. 09. 2010. Right. So what I did was I taught people, this is not a time you're going to get rich for doing nothing and buy a house like you did six months ago and hold it for six months and it's worth more because appreciation wasn't going up, but investors were buying. So I taught people how to go find cheap deals cheaper than everybody else and just make a little bit of money in between. 3, 5, 10 grand most, and hand it off to an investor. And guess what I did? I sold life preservers. And in my ads I was like, guys, this is a shifting world. I know you're thinking, you know, I remember saying, you know, Obama was the president at the time. I said, I think he did everything he thought was the best thing he approved. Back then it seemed like a lot of money. $750 billion. Now that's like, huh? That's all you're giving us? Let's go for the trillions, right? But I remember saying, the government just issued $750 billion. Has any of that gone into your bank account? I don't know anybody. They were saying back then it went to Wall street, not Main Street. That was the headlines. Donna Kennedy, it seems like you remember. And I said, if that's not positively affecting you, I don't have a way for you to get rich overnight and make millions. But I have a way to preserve yourself in this shifting world. And in that year, most of my competitors went out of business. They stayed aspirational. I turned to life preservers. And over that three year period, I went from being one of the guys in that space to I owned the entire space. When the dust settled, there Was no one else in the industry but me. I became the biggest real estate educator in the world. Be a real estate millionaire. Went on to sell over a million copies. I don't think there's another real estate book. I don't know one. We can't find one that has sold over a million copies. And we changed lives all over the country and a time where people were struggling. There was nobody using my book. I shouldn't say that we had some really successful like took it to a whole nother level. But we helped so many people survive and thrive in winter rather than showing them how to get rich for doing nothing. Now, I know not everybody's showing people how to flip houses or make money, but the mindset. I had to read that mindset on a big level because I couldn't target market my ideal client. My intuition was, hey, people are scared. We must always enter conversations that are going on in the mind of our prospect. I'm going to add something to it this very moment. Right. That's our new. That's. That's the slogan for today. We must enter conversations already going on in the mind of our prospect today at this moment. Because over the next three to six months, I believe the internal conversation like the one in my head all last night is changing. Yes, we went through Covid. That was a shift and definite uncertainty. Yes. It's so sad that there's a war going on in the world right now. And I send prayers every single day. I wish I could do more. There is a lot of craziness going on in the world. But I think we're going to add winter on top of it. And when that happens, conversations definitely change.