The $1M Poker Lesson That Transformed My Business | Connor Steinbrook DSH #520

and understanding and the wisdom and knowledge but then you need the mental endurance and toughness to be able to push past it for long enough in business for time to play out for things to manifest like one and i'd say that second half is harder for people because there's a lot of people that get good grades in school right they can shutty their off and get a's or whatever but they can't do in the real world well because school is not important because it's memorizing stats and statistics they're not teaching you how to apply things and

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All right, guys, we got Connor, Connor Steinbrook here today.

We're going to talk real estate, one of the top real estate companies in the world right now, right?

Yeah, EXP really is the number one brokerage for a transactional account in the world right now.

And you have the number two biggest team under them.

Not the largest team, but last year at our company, I was the number two net growth leader, meaning we grew by more than every other team in the company except for one last year, out of 90,000 agents.

So how many agents did you go from in that year?

We grew, and this is a tough market, too.

I think we just under 700 agents last year.

Yeah.

Very tough market.

There's a standstill right now, right?

For a little bit.

It's going to continue to be this way for a little bit, but

yeah, it definitely is slowdown right now for the market.

You got some intel on when things might start picking up again, you think?

Well, the Fed talked about possibly dropping rates a couple of times this year, but it just depends on how aggressive the inflation is.

And right now, I'm leaning that they're probably not for a little bit.

That people are thinking maybe actually this month or next month, but I don't think so.

I think maybe they'll drop it a little bit later in the year, maybe down like the sixes or something like that.

But interest rates have just been, they've been increasing them since like mid-2021.

Yeah, they're at 8% now, right?

Yeah.

So with all the inflation, they're aggressively, basically they're intentionally damaging the marketplace to slow everything down.

So that's why they raise interest rates to slow down the aggressive market.

Got it.

And they got to do a cut, I'd assume, before the election, right, to pump the market up a little bit.

You think.

Yeah.

Hard to tell.

Really, until they do something, you can't, you don't know.

So how were you able to succeed during this tough phase, you think?

What made you stand out from everyone else?

So we focus not just on like skill sets.

I think a lot of people in business focus on, you know, like skill sets, how do you optimize videos?

How do you do marketing?

But we, you know, I had a tough background.

One of the things I focus on is mindset and building self-image and belief systems and how to think correctly and how to, you know, not have what's called problem compounding.

So we kind of really spent years fortifying the mindset fortress of our guests or organization because when uncertainty is in the marketplace, people have fear.

And when people have fear, they lose creativity.

And when they lose creativity, they stop moving forward with a progressive mindset.

They just freeze.

They don't do anything.

They kind of just sit in a drift mode and wait for things to change.

And really what's going on is a lot of people are just...

fearful.

They're just sitting there doing nothing.

They're just waiting.

And so we work hard on the mindset.

So we build the person first and then give them the skill sets.

And if they're strong enough as a person and have a big enough self-image, then they'll push past risk.

So we're always working on mindset, self-belief and self-image issues.

Then we move into the skill set side of things.

Then we're focusing on optimization videos.

How do you communicate, you know, things like that.

That sounds very unique because I thought they just taught real estate.

You know what I mean?

I didn't know you were diving into personal development and stuff like that too.

Yeah, yeah.

So like there's a guy named John Asaraff.

Oh no, I think he has

called Brainetics.

You should get him on the show.

Yeah, that'd be dope.

He was part of the movie The Secret.

And he, I think he was at RE-MAX.

He built a big team back in the past, and he was doing a lot of training on skill sets.

And then they transitioned, what if we focus on the thinking patterns, the habits, the paradigms, the decision-making processes?

And they focus just on that, and that's when his business exploded.

And so, like, I always look back at that.

I had a rough run in my career.

I was a professional poker player for almost a decade.

The industry changed overnight with government regulation, and I hit rock bottom, fell into kind of a dark depression, and it was self-development and personal education that got me out of it.

So I stumbled across Napoleon Hill's 17 principles of success, which led me to Think and Grow Rich, which led me to like all the modern self-development people, Jim Rohn, Bob Proctor, Les Brown, Zig Zliger, Earl Nightingale.

So I really went down reinventing myself and starting over.

But that's where I took a lot of my personal experiences, what worked for me in my life, and I just help others find that same path to follow down behind me.

So business and life in general is about pattern recognition.

So we're trying to identify patterns that we had in our past from our own life experiences, but also study patterns of other people's life experiences to decide what we want to do in the present, to minimize the future as far as risks, things that we don't want, but also amplify the likelihood that we move into a future that we do want.

And so I'm always studying past and data and patterns and things like that.

That's cool.

A lot of people study that stuff, but they don't implement it.

So I think that's a difference between you and a lot of other people.

Implementation is so much more valuable than data accumulation.

So we're in a world where people brag about how many books they read, but not how many deals they've done.

So it's a combination combination of acquiring the information, but implementing it.

And then you have to have the mental resilience once you start implementing what you learn, which is not going to go right in the beginning.

You're going to get pushback to be able to push through that.

So it's about, you need two parts of the mind.

You need the intelligence and understanding and the wisdom and knowledge, but then you need the mental endurance and toughness to be able to push past it for long enough in business for time to play out for things to manifest the way you want.

And I'd say that second half is harder for people because there's a lot of people that get good grades in school, right?

They can study their stuff off and get A's or whatever, but they can't in the real world.

Well, because school is not important because it's memorizing stats and statistics.

They're not teaching you how to apply things and build something.

They're teaching you how to remember what year was ex-president elected.

Instead of talking about, you know, George Washington was president from these year ranges to this year.

You know, what we need to learn is how George Washington lived his life.

You know, that he was out there first on the battlefield on the white horse getting shot at first.

It's how he was as a leader, why everybody followed him.

But they look at the date.

So

That's what they're learning at school.

Yeah.

They made memorization.

Cities and states.

Pointless information.

Yeah.

Still remember that test in fourth grade, how to memorize every single capital of every state.

Pointless.

I mean, yeah.

And do you remember him now?

Probably not.

Yeah.

It's just pointless.

Yeah, definitely pointless.

There's a lot of unlearning you have to do as you get older.

If you, if you don't, what this is saying, like, if you don't use it, you lose it.

Yeah.

Everything's about repetition and what you're focusing on.

So if you're not constantly going over to repetition, even same thing with your body, your mind and your body work the same way.

So if you're in great shape, stage ready in a competition, all of a sudden you don't do the repetitions for long enough, your body is going to move back into that old pattern.

Same thing with your mind.

You can go and learn anything and everything, be an expert on skill set.

But if you don't focus on it, retain that information and go over it through repetition over and over and over, two, three, four years, five years down the road, you'll still retain some of it, but you're not going to be an expert on what you were at one point.

Absolutely.

Continuous overlapping and retaining the repetition of that same information.

So you were one of the top online poker players in the world at one point.

Yeah.

What kind of rank were you?

Did you, was there a leaderboard back then?

Well, it varied a lot.

So, I was an online cash game player.

So, you have tournament poker and cash game poker.

I was part of the online poker boom.

So, Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of poker, and then the big online poker boom happened where you could play it at home on a computer instead of driving to a physical casino.

And what it really did was allowed us to play multiple tables at a time.

So, I was what was called an online cash game multi-tabler.

So, we'd have big screens like this in our office, and I'd have 16 tables on a four by four grid.

16?

Yeah.

Holy crap.

Yeah, there's people playing 24 plus tables at that time.

Oh my gosh.

But

you're not actively in every hand.

You're spot selecting.

So you're folding off most of the hands, but you're only playing certain hands in certain table positions.

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In certain seats, when relationship, other players that you have kind of track their betting patterns and tells, so you're spot selecting, essentially, and you're playing lots of tables to fold off all the time wastage.

When you're at one table at a casino and you're out of the hand, what are you doing?

Daydreaming, talking to somebody,

and that's why you don't get enough hand volume.

Talking about pattern recognition, when you're playing 16 tables at a time, in each table, you're playing 20 times as many hands as you could in a live table.

A lot of data coming in so you can see patterns and exploit leaks in the kind of people's games and stuff like that.

But I think there was 7 million poker counts and I was like top 300 at one point.

Holy crap.

That's impressive, man.

And 16 at once.

So you were just doing that all day, pretty much.

Yeah, I was in my 20s.

I was crazy.

I was addicted to it.

That's awesome, man.

And I don't think it's a coincidence you were successful in real estate.

There's probably some stuff you learned from that.

You took over, right?

Yeah, for sure.

A lot of the

emotional control.

So like in poker, you have what's called tilt.

If you lose money or take a bad break, this is one of the biggest problems people have in business is you're going to have problems, but they problem compound.

So they take one bad thing that emotionally shifts them in their mindset, say like a tenant, they have to evict them or an HVAC goes out.

That problem is one problem that's already going to happen.

But if you take the frustration and you go home and fight with the wife, or you take it to another business partner, cause a fight with them, you compound that problem.

So I learned early on that in poker, if I can't control my emotions, the other players are going to exploit me and I'm going to lose more money.

So I had to learn emotional control.

So most people don't think about that.

And when you come into communication and working at a high level and you're playing with lots of money in high-level negotiations for multi-million dollar properties, you have to have control of your emotions.

Absolutely.

And then I also learned a lot of body language.

So I learned how to communicate with people.

So I studied how people's eyes look, which direction, do their lips curl, the posture.

So I can communicate.

So there's three levels of communication.

The words that we say, the actual words,

the tonality of how we deliver those words, and then the nonverbal body language communication.

So poker taught me a lot of nonverbal body language communication.

So people can say words, but if their body's saying

you're really seeing through what they're actually saying.

Right.

In business and communication and negotiation, you're dealing with that quite a bit.

Yeah, that's called a tell in poker, right?

Yeah, tell.

That's why people wear glasses so they can't see their eyes, which way their eyes move, because which way your eyes move connects to a different part of your brain.

Wow.

So if you look to the right, what would that mean in poker?

Don't even know anymore.

Yeah, so like if you

yeah, so there's called kinesiology.

Can you say it right?

Kinesiology.

Kinesiology.

Yeah.

So like it's been over a decade since I really studied it.

But like what I look a lot at is

people's posture, how they're sitting.

So like let's say you're in a business conversation, so I'm relaxed sitting back right now.

But let's say like I'm in a recruiting call, I'm talking to a broker that I'm trying to bring over.

Well, if they're sitting back, not paying attention, but also they sit forward, now they're involved in the conversation a little bit more.

So now I can lean on that point, talk more closely to them on that talking point.

So the way people are sitting at a table in poker, their attention to it, are they talking to other people in the hands?

You know, did they just drink their water?

How relaxed are they?

These are all tells that can tell you relatively, do they believe they're in a vulnerable spot or not?

Meaning, are they at risk or not?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You ever get any crazy large hands where you were, a lot was on the line, basically?

Yes.

I mean, I put my entire banker on the line.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

So you were an all-in mentality kind of dude.

You weren't.

messing around with what well usually gets there after a few losses so you were tilting for sure yeah and a lot of my losses went to like blackjack and gambling.

So like poker, I had a little bit more of control over, and then I'd make bad decisions gambling.

But yeah, you go from betting like $100 a hand, $100, $100,000, $200, $400, before you know it, you're betting like $1,000 a hand, dropped $10,000 just like that.

Yeah.

What's that strategy?

Martingale, right?

You have to keep doubling until you win.

Well, it makes sense because you're eventually going to win at some point.

Frankly, you're supposed to, yeah.

Unless you run out.

So the casino wants you to do that strategy.

Yeah.

I stopped gambling, man.

But poker is actually actually really good for networking.

Oh, for sure.

That's also where I picked up a lot of.

So what happened was the online poker boom ended on April 15, 2011.

It was Black Friday.

And literally the United States Department of Justice seized the big poker sites.

And for two years, I kind of played Poor Me, thought it was going to come back, and then I realized it wasn't.

So I've had to figure out where I'm going to go in life.

And I decided.

to study patterns of people I was playing poker with.

So a poker table, poker player loses money, they look like they want to jump off a bridge.

A wealthy, successful person in business that has cash flowing businesses, they lose 10 grand.

They're talking to the person next to them.

And I'm like, how did these successful people lose all this money, come back the next day, still look like they're having fun doing it because it was their hobby?

They were successful entrepreneurs.

And so I started, while at the poker table, asking a lot of these people what they did.

Many of them were in real estate, owned apartments, built teams and things like that.

So I decided that I was going to go into insurance and real estate at the same time.

So I got my insurance license.

I joined World Financial Group.

That's where Ed Milet's from.

It's where he built his team.

I started building a team there.

And I went into the investment side of the industry on the real estate side.

I started what's called wholesaling houses, and I went into flipping properties and then buying rentals, creative financing.

I started creating owner finance notes and selling notes, mobile homes and things like that.

But I was,

when I went to WFG, that's where I learned the power of team building, which later when EXP popped up, you know, that's kind of how I identified that opportunity.

But

yeah, so basically I went from online poker to insurance to real estate investing, but I picked these paths in life from people I saw successful at the poker table.

And I saw patterns of their life and what they did, listen to their stories to decide where I wanted to go with my future.

So that's why mentors are important.

We're studying the stories of our mentors to say, I'm just like them.

I can see that they had a past.

They did something in their present, they created the future that they wanted.

I need to figure out what they did, study them, and look for the patterns that they applied in their life.

And that's how I kind of got into real estate.

And did you find a real estate mentor?

Many of them.

Yeah.

So like if you guys are trying to find mentors that are successful, they don't need more money.

What they need is less time and less stress.

And so what I did was I went if you guys are trying to get into investing I went to a lot of the biggest REI club real estate investment club owners in Dallas.

Yep I was like, how do I get into proximity with these people?

They don't need me.

What am I going to do?

So I offered to do stuff that they didn't want to do that they was an annoyance for them.

So I started working this check-in desk for their clubs.

People come and checking in.

I'd worked the email list.

And what that did was I'm helping them out, taking something off their plate because they don't need money, but this is an avoidance of stress and time for them.

And then because that most people that are successful want to help the next generation, they see themselves, they see you as part of them in a way they see you as like the past them and so most of them are trying to help and then also by getting in proximity with successful people like that you get inside their network and so then a lot of my older mentors would introduce me to certain people and this is going to shave time down on your your scent to hitting your goals big time absolutely so yeah so but you have to take what they teach you and actually do it we're talking about books and learning but if they tell you what to do and you don't do it then you're just operating off your own thoughts and then at that point it doesn't even matter

But that's why if you're trying to find a mentor, figure out how to take time and stress off their plate and they'll let you into their life.

Yeah.

And during this transition from poker to real estate, you were actually 100K in debt, right?

I went into afterwards.

So after poker went away, I made some bad decisions.

I gambled off most of my money.

And this time I was driving sports cars, Diamond White, I had a good life.

I had to move back home with my parents, literally into my sister's bedroom.

Because my bedroom was storage now.

It's kind of the jerk.

So I had to move back into a little room, twin-size bed, bar bar stool, trying to figure out life.

And

yeah, so basically, basically, I had to start over.

What did you ask me?

You were 100K in debt.

Yeah, so

where I went into debt was paying for high-ticket coaching.

So I decided I was going to go into real estate.

I was doing insurance.

And I put up like 35 grand to go into one of those big ticket coaching companies and they kind of screwed me over.

And then I started spending a bunch of money on marketing campaigns.

that I didn't practice on communication.

So one of the things is I help entrepreneurs focus on communication skill sets first before they start spending a lot of money marketing because I was getting the phone to ring, but I couldn't take the phone call to a contract.

So there's no point to learn marketing skill sets until I learn communication skill sets, how to start conversations, how to exit them, how to control them, the questions to ask.

And so I got myself into 100 grand debt.

And what happened was I was in a very dark, depressing point at this time in my life, but YouTube was there.

And I was watching free YouTube channels.

teaching myself how to build WordPress websites and optimize and SEO and learn internet marketing.

And I built the number one house acquisition websites in Dallas, Texas for some of the biggest keywords.

Wow.

Like we buy houses Dallas, sell my house fast Dallas.

And I started generating leads inbound through the internet is really what happens.

So when I talk to entrepreneurs, one of their limiting beliefs is I need money to build a business.

You need a goal big enough in your work ethic now because social media, I mean, look at what you're doing here.

How many people you touch on a daily basis.

It's unbelievable.

So as long as you have the work ethic, social media is the vehicle to get you there.

You don't need traditional dollars to run a marketing campaign.

Think about like 70s and 80s.

You had to have money to run your business, an actual lump sum sitting there to pay the bills to right billboards yeah you don't need that now and so that's where I started generating leads and I went from like a hundred grand in debt to even one week I made like almost a hundred grand wholesale deals holy crap and then I wholesaled houses then I took the money that I was making from wholesaling I started flipping properties and then I started building my rental portfolio which the main reason I went into real estate was passive income residual income and then that led me to the creative financing space because I was building a rental portfolio but I ran out of kind of operating capital, so I got pinched with my business.

So what I did was I started selling those properties on owner financing.

So when you sell property on owner financing, you take the down payment money on the front side.

So the front side, there's a cash flow position.

So I was bringing in down payment money.

I'm still in the residual income side in the middle because I'm not the landlord.

I'm a lender now.

So I'm getting still cash flow in the middle, but I'm avoiding the back end expenses on the business because now if an HVAC goes out, they own the property.

I'm not the landlord anymore.

I'm not the owner of the property.

I'm just the lender.

So I went into the creative financing space, started creating creating notes, and then I did mobile homes and land deals and things like that.

And then I started a YouTube channel called Investor Army that I was pretty active on up until around the pandemic time.

Long story, not sure why I shut that one down, but I'm actually revamping up.

But that's where I started teaching people single-family residential investing strategies.

And then as that channel grew, that's when the exp reality brokerage model was just now kind of taking off and everybody started reaching out to me about exp reality.

Have you heard of eXp Realty?

And I wasn't actually licensed at the time.

So I actually got my license to join eXp after two years of kind of blowing it off.

I see it in a lot of Instagram bios.

So is that basically the largest real estate brokerage in the country?

Biggest independent brokerage.

Independent.

Now there's some conglomerates and franchise companies that are a little bit bigger by age account, but as far as an independent brokerage, we're the largest independent in the world.

Got it.

And the fastest growing company to get to the size that we have in

history of real estate.

So essentially, our founder was a tech guy, Glenn Sanford, and he spent part of his career working in tech, and I think he was at AOL.

So when the last financial crash happened in 2008, a lot of brokerages went out of business because of expenses.

The revenue side was agents are selling less houses.

You have a front door and a back door, incoming revenue, and then expenses.

And so expenses are what's putting people out of business because they weren't bringing in revenue.

But the biggest expense a real estate company has is the brick and mortar office and the management of that office.

So he had an idea of what if we get rid of the brick and mortar office, create a global technology, a virtual metaverse, essentially a virtual building in the sky, and we operate with the reduction of not having having brick and mortar expenses.

And so that's really what he did.

He created the first cloud-based brokerage, three-inch stream model.

There's a seven-tier override revenue share growth model, very similar to like how different companies, like how PBD made its money

initially, and then Ed.

And so similar thing is we have a seven-tier override team building model.

Wow.

So there's no physical locations?

Not from the corporate team.

I mean, you can have an office if you're inside the company.

As an individual broker, you just have a branch office, but it's your choice as an individual owner.

Like, I could could go get one if I wanted to, but I don't have to have it.

Yeah.

That's impressive because a lot of people during couldn't make that switch from in-person to the virtual.

Well, they have to.

I mean, you can't compete against, like, how are you going to compete?

I mean, different, depending on which business model you're in, which industry, but there's certain models in business now.

There's just no way you can compete unless you go digital.

Because if your competitor is able to drop overhead expenses, then they can offer a similar product for less and still have a bigger profit margin.

Right.

You can't compete against that.

Yeah.

And it's a lot of people.

I mean, how long do people want to hang on to their horse?

I live in Dallas, still go to Fort Worth and still see people riding a horse through Burger King.

So people always hold on to it.

But

how fast the world's changing now with AI and stuff, if you cling on to the past, you're three to five years away from being competitive in the future, whatever you're doing.

You have to constantly stay on that front edge.

Absolutely.

Now, you mentioned passive income earlier, and that's a term you hear a lot in the real estate space.

For sure.

In your experience, is it truly passive at your level?

There's no such thing as passive, like passive, passive income.

There's different levels of passive income on how much time and money it takes to maintain that passive income stream and how much time and money it takes to scale that passive income stream so like you build a rental portfolio it's making 20k a month don't water that seed and ignore that business for a while guess what's going to happen tenants are going to stop paying you properties are going to have deferred maintenance so there's different levels of reoccurring residual income but there's nothing truly passive even if you're just a passive money lender as a lender let's say you're flipping houses i'm lending my money to you yeah i still have the communication back and forth with you i still have to go through writing the documents up and it's not a lot of time but there's still focus on the business.

And then it's not just, so you have to look at residual income on how much time and money and effort it takes to get there, and then how to maintain it.

You know, do you have to keep putting money into this business, like renovating your rental properties to keep that cash flow?

Or in a team building business like I'm in, if you don't talk to your agents and don't support your agents, they're going to leave.

So there's maintenance to that residual income stream.

Now, if you stop putting time into it, you're going to have any passive recurring interest stream come in for a while, but over time it's going to start to self-liquidate itself out, if that makes sense a little bit.

100%.

And then it's like how much money to scale it, how fast can it compound?

So the reason why I like a growth model like what we're doing here is it's exponential leverage.

To double my cash flow on a single rental property, I have to buy the same rental property, do it again.

It's a linear growth model.

Buy a house, fix it up, put a tenant in it, finance out, do it again.

Whereas an agent can come in the business and go attract multiple agents, and I can track another agent that can track multiple agents.

So it's an exponential growth instead of like a linear growth model.

So if you're trying to build a big recurring income stream, you want to look for things that have exponential growth to it.

Yeah.

I'm sure you get asked a lot about work-life balance, given your financial success.

Do you feel like you had to sacrifice a lot to get to where you're at?

Oh, for sure.

I tell people,'cause yeah, I get this question a lot.

I don't believe in balance in the beginning of building a business.

I believe there's balance later.

So I worked 1,100 days straight in the beginning of my business, not because I wanted to, because I was in debt.

I was terrified I was gonna learn lose my life, you know, like and uh but then so so I probably put in a

12 to 18 hour day for like seven years straight.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

And then as I built my businesses, then I was able to find more balance later because now you have the money freedom and

you, yeah, so you can't do it in the beginning.

You need to condense your workload in the beginning.

Agreed.

As fast as you can, get it up there.

And then you'll find your balance later.

But now, I mean, if I don't want to work again, I don't have to.

I work because I choose to now.

And so, but yeah, so I have ultimate time freedom now.

But in the beginning, I had no time freedom, but it was a choice.

But I knew if I condensed all my time in the beginning, that I'd get to where I was trying to get to on the back end.

So it's a choice, it's a sacrifice.

Do you give it up today or do you give it up tomorrow?

And most people want to go slow and incremental.

I want to work 30, 40 hours a week this week, 30, 40 hours, and then instead of just condensing it and just running full steam.

100%.

Similar story with me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I worked five years straight, seven days a week, 12, 15 hours days, and now I can chill.

Yeah.

I can not work.

and this is just fun man and it yeah and it's not like

if you if you want it bad enough you'll do it people that are not doing that it's they have an emotion involved in the goal they're trying to chase enough they just really don't want it right but like when I like it wasn't a question like every day I woke up it just what it was like literally saying eat sleep whatever you're doing that is what it is for the beginning of a business yeah and if you're not willing to do that probably don't go into business and that goes into my next question actually so why do you think most successful entrepreneurs are lonely right now

Because for one, like most of them are introverts, for one.

And just naturally, that's why they're successful is because they don't have the temptation of being an extrovert, meaning always wanting to go out partying friends and be around other people.

And when you have your full attention of your time and focus on your own, you can concentrate and you can also, you don't have as many distractions being an introvert.

I think also as you become successful, it creates a weird psychology gap in your mind, how you look at others and also how you think they look at you.

And this is why successful people stay around successful people.

And most people kind of birds of feather flock together.

And as you start to become successful, you realize there's not that many successful people.

And so, and then also the other successful people out there, they're super busy.

And then there's a little bit of time, they want to give it to their direct, close friends and family.

That's true.

And so it's a combination of lots of stuff.

But to really build something big, like a big business, it takes an incredible sacrifice and focus.

And you spend a lot of time alone.

And you get used to being alone.

And then the same thing with the other entrepreneurs that did that.

And then you got a bunch of like awkward introverts sometimes hanging out, you know, but

you'll have like periods of being going from introverted to extroverted.

But I think that's a lot of it.

And then it's just like also

how you look at the world and how you think changes along the way on the path of success is really what you're evolving as a person.

And then you just can't have normal conversations with the average person anymore because you're in like a different world that you kind of operate in.

I can't.

It's cringy to me talking about sports or whatever.

I just can't do it.

People like for Super Bowl, they're like, you're watching Super Bowl.

I don't know who was in the Super Bowl.

Yeah, for real.

But going up, I did.

That was normal, but that's just a mindset shift.

And it's because you made a decision you wanted a better life.

Yeah.

I would say 80% of my guests are introverts.

For sure.

When I go to conferences and crypto conferences or whatever and masterminds, almost everyone there is an introvert.

Yeah, it's definitely related, right?

Introvert and success.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah.

It's very common.

Yeah, I don't.

I mean, there are extroverts that are successful, but I feel like it's way harder.

Yeah.

Well, because if you're always thinking, because if you, if your energy and your excitement in life comes from being around others, what do others do?

They take from you, they take your time, they screw you over, they cause problems in your life, your friends screwing you over, and so you're going to have all those relationship dynamics that create distractions and problems and build your focus.

And then you're always, like, say you're sitting and grinding long hours.

You're always, I wish I was with my friends.

I wish I was hanging out with them.

You know, instead, you know, so basically like three and a half years, all I did was I worked all day, every day.

And then on Sunday night, I would go to the movie theaters one time.

And I couldn't even afford to go to like the normal movie theaters.

I would go to the dollar movie theaters, which are now like 20 bucks.

I didn't even know that was a thing.

Dollar movie theaters?

Used to be.

Wow.

That sounds amazing.

Yeah, they're like 20 bucks now.

Plus they upsell you on food and drinks.

Oh, for sure.

And then I was like, I couldn't even, I was sneaking like talking about Walmart, Walmart brand snacks in.

I used to do that too.

But I tell people, and so I did that for years.

Well, because I did that, I was able to become a successful entrepreneur.

Now everybody going to that has to get up to go work a job on Monday because of the nine-to-five job.

Well, now I can go to a movie at midnight on a Sunday night once the movie's been out for a couple weeks and there's nobody in the movie theater.

So when I went to see Creed, I remember I was the only one in the movie theater.

It was like a thousand-person movie theater and I was in there and I was jumping up around and I was like doing stuff like shadow boxing.

And I just remember being like, this is, if you're willing to pay the price of sacrifice long enough, you get to have this type of life because everybody's going to work tomorrow.

And now I have the freedom to do whatever I want with my time.

Now in the beginning, you don't have that.

But if you work hard enough and stay consistent long enough, you'll get there.

And I believe anybody can be successful.

I think that the, how you hear like 95% of businesses fail, that's an aggregate of bad information and data points.

That's everybody that started something for a week and stopped, six months and stop, three weeks and stop.

But if you took everybody that put a five-year grind like you did and went into ghost mode and sat behind the scenes and really gave it their all, put all their money, all their hope, all their heart, every sacrifice online, I bet you people that build a successful business way over half.

Probably higher, if not more, if not everybody, if they never give up at some point.

Because you're going to fail on a number of them.

Yeah.

Social media is glorified entrepreneurship.

People think it's easy.

It's really not.

Yeah, business.

I mean, look at you.

It took you seven years to make your first profit.

Yeah.

I try to tell people, like, people are like, why don't you vlog your life?

I'm like, nobody wants to see someone sit in a room for 16 hours a day and do Zoom calls and handle phone calls.

So one of my mentors, he's like, I was watching him work in his office all the time.

And I was like, so I'm trying to think, when you're looking at someone from the outside successfully, you're trying to create in your mind what they do, how they act, what they're doing.

And he just sits there all day in his office.

And he told me one day, he's like, Connor, business isn't sexy.

It's consistent.

It's just doing the same boring things that you know work over and over and over and over until you get the money that you're whatever your goal is, that you're driving.

And it really is.

Business is not that exciting behind the scenes.

It's really not.

Yeah, I sit in my office probably eight hours a day.

Yeah, but the future outcome that you're going to have in life with the income and the things that you create with doing that non-sexy thing for long enough is the sexy stuff that people flash on social media.

The cars, the watches, the lifestyles, the traveling, and this is what people want.

They want the outcome without the sacrifice to get to it.

Yeah, and you said you went through a phase where you were buying cars and stuff, right?

I did that with my new money.

Yeah.

So when I was young, this is before I became an investor.

So when I was young, I would, yeah, I'd flaunt it.

So you know people that have new money and old money.

That's why you hear like multi-millionaires next door, you don't even know who they are.

And some people are every single thing they have, they're letting the whole world know about it.

And so I had it all, and then I lost it and I had to start over.

And as I went into the vesting space, I was like, why did I waste all this money on all these, you know, $1,000 nights at the bars with my friends?

Well, what if I invest this money?

You know, so I shifted as you get a little bit older, you get a little bit more mature, yeah, and you learn from stuff.

But uh, in the beginning, when you make money, you spend it all instead of, I should have invested it.

So, I made enough money by the time I was 25 playing poker that I never had to work again in my life.

If I had taken that and invested it, right?

Could you imagine?

I bought crypto back when I was $100, Bitcoin, bought rentals and things like that.

But instead, I spent it.

I bought diamond pinky rings and diamond watches.

I was a a tool.

I think a lot of people go through that phase, though.

You have to.

Yeah, you have to.

You have to lose it all once, I'd say.

People that I go in business with,

if they haven't lost it all, it's actually a red flag for me.

Yeah.

Scary.

And that's good to bring it up because it's okay.

Like, I think a lot of people think everything has to go perfect.

And the reason why if they're not losing all, they never took a big enough risk.

And if they're not taking a big enough risk, they may be able to build a business.

that makes money, but not like the money that they have as far as the big goal that they have in their mind.

Like if you want to make seven figures a year, you're going to have to take a risk.

You're going to have to risk your time.

I mean, there was many times where like my bank account was like a crop, a plane flying over crops and I was about to go out of business.

I had maybe like a month left.

I'd borrowed everything from every person.

I have every credit card, every maxed out, and I'd do a deal and I'd kind of get up and then I'd kind of do this.

Same.

Yeah.

It's part of the game.

I put it all on the line.

Literally, I put it all on the line.

You have to, man.

It's that conviction in yourself, though, if you believe in yourself.

It's like people don't want to take a risk and they're like, oh, I don't want to fail and I don't want to have anything.

It's like, you're already failing.

If you don't have any money in a bank account, you don't have the life you want.

You're already failing.

So go for it.

Swing for it.

Show up tomorrow and go to work 16, 18 hours, do it again every single day until you get to where you're going.

Yeah, especially when you're younger, before you have kids and stuff, that's the time to really take a risk.

A lot of people die with regrets.

Oh, for sure.

And because of social media, you can start over.

Like, I mean, obviously, don't make a catastrophic mistake.

Don't be crazy, you know, but like you can start over.

I mean, actually, I wasn't making money in business until I lost all my money.

So how did I go into debt?

Making bad decisions.

Sometimes when you have money,

you make quick, irrational decisions real fast because you're not thinking.

Like I said, like when you have millions of dollars, you're not analyzing every dollar in your bank account.

And so once I went into debt and got 100K in debt, that was when I'm like, okay, this is how I started making better decisions.

So I was massively in debt before I started doing deals.

I had money, I didn't do deals.

So the money that you have starting out a business is irrelevant to what happens in that business going forward.

It's the energy that you put in and the ideas and the decisions you make over time.

I love that.

Connor, it's been fun.

Anything you want to promote or close off with?

Yeah, I mean,

go check me out on Instagram.

I've got my Investor Army channel out there if you're interested in investing, still hundreds of videos.

And then I'm building out a new channel under my personal name.

But other than that, if you're a real estate agent globally, anywhere that EXP operates, if you want to work with us, just hit me up.

And that, just grateful to come on here.

Absolutely.

And have fun.

Come check out the show.

Cool.

We'll link it below, man.

Thanks for coming on.

Appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you next time.