Why you need to invest in continuing education

Live in two locations. We're live on YouTube on this side. And we're where we continue to invest in your education. Continuing education, yes. And. Hey, Eric, good to see you over there on Facebook. We just got back from something happened yesterday in Vegas. Tell us about that.

Yeah, we went up to a mastermind. We drove up four hours in the morning, did the mastermind for five hours straight and then drove back four hours. The only stuff we did was a photo shoot.

We did. Yeah, yeah.

But you know, we, we got there for a reason. People go, well, what'd you go all that way for for one day? Education, education, connection, networking. But it's super important. And we're speaking about this. We're talking about this. Yeah, the ability to continue to grow, whether it's personal development, spiritual, business wise. And it's something that I do a lot. I know you do a lot. And we thought we'd just have a bit of a chat about continuing education. What is it? What is it like for you? Do you do it? Do you not do it? Do you hate it?

Yeah, you know, I don't know exactly the statistics, but it's like you love to read. I love to read and I'm constantly doing that. And there's some kind of statistic that after we get out of formal education that we read an average of one or two books a year, but yet the successful people average between 35 and 50. And I'm probably in that. I'm probably in that 25 books a year kind of thing. So I'm working to get into that 30, 35. And to me, that is always, you know, continuing education. How about with yourself, Andrew? What are some of the things that you do for continuing education?

Yeah, I do a lot of courses. I like to do online courses, but I also like to do live courses as well. I'll read and if I don't read a full book, I'll do the cheat thing. I've got an app on my phone called Blinkist and Blinkist basically does a summary of the book. And I had an aim last year to do a thousand books. I didn't get there, but I did get 350.

Wow, that's amazing.

So what I do is it's an audio version of the book and it's their summary of a book. So it's not the real book. But what it does is it gives me the ability to understand what the book's about and then make a decision if I want to go and read further. But what I would do is I Would get home and I would write. I usually listen to three books on a walk. And I get home and I'd write three main bullet points I took from each of those books. So I could. In a diary over there. I've got all the summaries of these books numbered. So I know that I think I've read that book. I can go back, look at my summary and go, hey, that's a pretty cool book. I do want to read and dig into that more, you know, because let's face it, we read a book and we get a couple of key points out of it. If we get a couple of key points, that's a great book. I. I get three points out of the summary. And if I want to go and dig in more, I read the book.

Well, you know, yesterday we went to Vegas. You know, I can't tell you, I've been to probably hundreds of seminars in my lifetime. And I used to, when I was early on going to the seminar, I'd walk out and go, you know, that was a waste of whatever, three days. And then I realized, hey, if I could get one thing out of that, just one, like, you're talking about three out of those books, right? Three. Three key points. It was very valuable. Yesterday when we were driving back, I mean, there were things that we took away because I'd ask you, like, hey, what was the one thing you took away from that? And then we talked about that. It was incredibly valuable, that one.

Sorry, I'm gonna bring this because Mark saying that audio is going in and out. Thanks, Mark. Sorry.

So I think when you read a book or you go to a live seminar, or you go to an education online, whatever, you know, it may not those things where you are going to say, hey, 100% of it, it was incredibly valuable.

Right.

One or two key points. I know when I was doing real estate, I would go to real estate seminars all the time. And if I get one thing out of there, that one thing literally could make me between 10 and $100,000. And that worked out. The other 90% of it, you could chunk it.

Yeah, I think that's a problem with a lot of people reading a book, going to a seminar. They expect 100% of everything in that book or seminar be valuable.

Yeah.

And you may not need to have all of the book to get some good results from it. You may not need to be at the seminar all of the time. You know, we were at this mastermind yesterday and we had a good aha. Before lunchtime. We'd only been there an hour.

Yeah.

We could have gone home and still been in front.

Totally.

Right. And you said you're doing some online training right now in another mastermind group. And you say, first day of joining this, you've already got enough for the value that it cost you or the price that cost you to join whole year. Absolutely.

The one thing. And maybe that's all I needed to understand, and it's incredibly valuable.

Mike says the one thing. That's right, Mike. Exactly. The one thing.

The Keller Williams program. Right, Mark.

So how important is it then to. Because we're talking about continuing education right now. We've been talking about extracting information and saying, hey, only that one piece. But like, I remember a long time ago, when I first started in sales, I adopted something of Zig Ziglar. He said every year I'd go in for a check the neck up. And so I. I got that point where every year I was fortunate. I went to Zig Ziglar several years in a row before he was like, massively huge and whatnot. And it was one of those things, like every year I went and somebody was saying, God, why do you keep going that you've been to it every year.

Yep.

So that's why I'm still, you know, in that case, not bragging. But I was top of our sales because I kept my mind fresh. Because both in our head and for me, Andrew, that's why. If I said, why is it so important? Is because we are bombarded every day with so much crap that can be negative. And let's face it, we're in sales. You know, we're talking market. We're in sales. Brain damage and getting. No. Can be very. Can be very harmful.

Yeah, yeah. But when you look at it, you say, why. Why do a few. Why do you go there a few times? You don't go to the gym once come over busted muscles.

Yeah, you might.

You might. No, seriously, you don't. You don't go to the gym and, you know, get, get, get muscled for life. You go to the gym every day because you need to do it on a consistent basis. Same with education. That's your brain work. That's your brain gym. Getting educated. Whether you go to the same person. If you keep going the same person and don't get anything out of it, then it's time to probably change. But if you keep going and you keep getting something new from that point, keep going, keep going there, keep going back there, you. And sometimes it's not the person from the stage. Right. Who's actually said anything. Sometimes it's a conversation you're having in the lunch break with somebody or a brag or maybe it's a book that you've read. You're not getting something but you've told somebody else, I'm reading this book, what I got out of it. And they say, well, here's what I got out of it. And all of a sudden it's like, wow, I never saw that. It may not be the person you go to, it may not be the book you're reading, but it may be other people are associated with that. That's going to give you some information. Craig, good to see you burning it.

Up in the real estate industry. Hey Craig, good to have you on here. Thank you. You know, behind us, I want to mention this. Behind us you see all these sticky notes and what this basically is. This is our book. You know, the book is, is. Would you say the book is done? The heavy lifting part is done.

The heavy lifting is done. We're just editing, we're editing phase now. Hopefully it's going to go live in the next two weeks.

Yep, two weeks.

Two weeks. That's our plan. What do we mention the book I.

Just brought up because this was, this was part of that. Hey, from what we've learned, we said we want to do that too. Like that was continuing education, somebody that we follow. And I'll mention here, Matt Platt, you know, he has this book and.

Just grab it little plug for Mark or excuse me, Matt. I'm sorry, I got Mark over there is, you know, he talked about how important it was for really opening doors and it was kind of like his business card. So why don't we do the same thing? So Andrew has done this before, I've done this before. This is what we'll do. We'll put these sticky notes out there. But we did this because of the exposure of the education valuable. This is because now when Andrew walks in, like we just. Here's the thing, how quickly we executed on something we learned from continuing education yesterday. Your aha. If you'll explain to them just a little bit high level view of what we, what your aha was and how quickly today we already set it in motion and it didn't just get one result, but it yields several.

Yeah, I guess one of our things is going in and finding new clients and we've spent a lot of time doing videos. We do a lot of content, we create a lot of content. But I guess big level picture was we were Creating content for the wrong people. We were creating it for people and liking it, but at the end of the day, they weren't our customer. Right. So we just. We had a shift yesterday to say, hey, let's focus on the right one. That may sound simple, but when you head deep in it, it wasn't that simple. And we're like, hey, that's a very good point. Let's twist it and shake it to show the content of the people. And it was something big. So today we said, let's just try something. Bang. Within.

Five minutes. Yeah, Bang. We got some results. So, you know, that's pretty cool. So, Ryan. Hey, Jeff, like Mike says, your audio keeps coming in and out, brother. Sorry.

Crippling.

Check us out on YouTube. We've got it on YouTube as well. We got a mic on that baby. It should be. Should be good. I'm gonna do one little adjustment on that real quick, Andrew. Maybe that'll help.

Could be the. Could be the bandwidth we've got sucking out everybody bandwidth. Got two cameras going. We're going live to two places. It may be a little crazy. Hopefully that audio is a little bit better now. Thanks, Ryan, and thanks, Mark, for telling us that.

Appreciate that.

You know, one of the things that I think that was so valuable you said something. You said, sometimes it's not the event you go to, but it's the people that you meet.

Yes.

I mean, you could probably. You probably fill up a notebook because you. Not only have you been to so many live events, but you've run live events, but you could probably fill up a notebook of how many people you've met at those events have somehow made a difference in your business or your personal career.

I sure can. I've done a lot of events. I've probably done over. I've actually been involved with over about 700 live events.

So Ryan's day still messed up. Sorry, Ryan.

I'll try to do, like, hand signals. No, I don't know. I don't know any of that, Ryan. Sorry. We'll try to speak up a little louder.

You know what?

I'll do this. I'll do this. Keep going.

So, yeah, so, yeah, you're right. We've spoken. All right, Ryan, get ready for your ears. You might have to do it right down the bottom. No. Oh, you got it.

Is it this connection?

Yeah, could be the one. So as Jeff said, we've got lots of. You meet people. You meet people who change your life. And that's just part of what. What learning and educating education is all about. All right, how's that Ryan? Is that Ryan? Is that any better? We've got the mic on.

Not sure if it's still messed up, if he's laughing out loud because it's still messed up or it's actually fixed.

Okay. Yes, I'm back.

Good, good, good.

So better. Cool.

You didn't change it. So we got a little bit. There we go. This is, you know, here's what we decided. Hey, we're going to take imperfect action. So one of the things were, was what Andrew talked about is we learned something yesterday. It was an aha. It was actually, we didn't learn it. Andrew had an aha because of being in that environment. It's like, aha. Okay. But then the other piece that I look at is like somebody could look at what we did and say, wow, those hundred episodes or so that we did was a waste of effort. But now we have this massive content that now let's say, for instance, if we do go into a restaurant and say, hey, would you like to do this? They say, well, let me check you out. Well, we're on Facebook, we're on YouTube, we're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn. We're all over the place. We're on all that content. So what does that do for our value?

Totally. It ramps it up because people say, wow, you're everywhere.

You talk about, hey, continuing education, do everything you can. And sometimes it's one of those things. And Andrew, just before we leave, we talked about traffic conversion. You've been to that many times in San Diego, right? And you said something last night, I thought that was interesting. And I heard this from Neil Patel. Now, if you don't know who Neil Patel is, go check him out. He's. He's ultra successful. He's uber wealthy, the whole thing. But he said when he didn't have any money, really go to these events, he still went. But where did he hang out?

Well, you know, I wasn't saying because we didn't have any money. I was actually saying it because I know some people that had a lot of money, but they didn't want to get tied up actual going to the event inside the room. But the real seminar, as I say, hanging starts in the bar or in the foyer or in the lobby of the hotel that it's at, because you can listen to some training and if you've got enough education, you don't need more training. But maybe what you want is connections and networking. So people go there just to hang out in the lobby. And when the brakes are on, there's hundreds of people out there, thousands of people literally talking to each other. So if you ever see a seminar that you want to go to and you're like, well, do I really want to go for the knowledge or the connections? Maybe it's the connections.

Wow. What did he say? Is it too loud now?

It's low. It's low but constant.

Okay, well, that's. We're looking for constant here. All right. So really, that's all we had. This was. We're going to go because of the education, continuing education we did yesterday. It can still.

Imperfect action.

Yes, that's right. We took imperfect action because of that. It wasn't even something that was talked about at the seminar. It was actually triggered at the seminar.

And.

And it's almost like it got you into. Or us into a creative mind space. Because, you know, if you look around, I mean, we're busy in the office, right? Always doing something and working with clients and whatnot. That gave us a time to say, hey, we were in the car for eight hours. And we were. I should say we were on the road for nine hours. Because an hour that we were actually.

On the road, taking. Literally on the road. Should send those photos.

To our cats.

We'll do that. Put some photos of what we did. We said, hey, we're on the road. Let's. Let's.

Let's be on the road.

Let's be on the road. So anyway, I don't know where I.

Was going with that, but anyway, hey.

Thanks for checking it out. Let us know your feedback. What are you doing for continuing education in 2019? I'm just curious.

Yeah. All right.

That's all we got.

Thank you. See you later. Bye.