down so that they can have a talk.
“Walk on road right side, safe. Walk on road left side, safe. Walk on road middle, sooner or later, get the squish, just like grape. Here, karate same thing. You karate do ‘yes’ or you karate do ‘no.’ You do karate ‘guess so,’ sooner or later, get the squish, just like grape. Now ready?”
“Yes, I’m ready,” says the student. And so they begin.
The mentor has a context. He knows that learning karate is a much more serious venture than his young student can imagine. To me it shows that the eagerness of a new student often overshadows his ability to think at a deeper level about where this new path will lead. It also shows how easy it is to get the squish. That’s an important lesson for us to remember as investors, too.
“Either you learn to invest ‘yes’ or you learn to invest ‘no.’ You learn to invest ‘guess so,’ sooner or later you get the squish, just like grape”
Still, it takes the boy actually getting the squish a few times before he learns to accept the mentor’s unorthodox training methods and realizes that learning karate will require his total commitment. His teacher invites him to enter into a sacred promise. The teacher’s job is to teach the student to the best of his ability, and the student’s job is to learn to the best of his ability and give his full effort.
The mentor emphasizes that the young boy will follow his instructions with no questions asked: “I say, you do. No question. Deal?”
“Deal,” the boy answers.
The boy thinks he’s going to be getting cool lessons on kicking and punching. He thinks he’s going to learn a couple of slick moves and go back to those bullies in a few days and take them down.
To the young man’s dismay, the first lesson has nothing to do with punching or kicking. Instead, the old man instructs the boy to wash several cars and wax them.
“Wax on, left hand. Wax off, right hand. Breathe in through nose, out through mouth. Very important.” Immediately, the boy questions the methods of the teacher only to be reminded of their promises to each other: “I say, you do. No question.”
Day after day, the boy is instructed to do various tasks that involve menial labor: waxing cars, painting fences, and sanding floors. With each passing day the boy becomes more frustrated because each day he arrives at the home of his mentor hoping to learn how to punch or kick.
Eventually the boy decides he wants to quit. At that moment the mentor shocks him by delivering a flurry of kicks and punches. The boy reacts instinctively and effectively blocks each punch and kick. By doing as his teacher has instructed, he has developed the muscle memory he needs to be able to defend himself without thinking. Waxing the cars, painting the fence and sanding the floors helped him learn and gain proficiency in a very natural way. He discovered and learned some things that were outside the traditional classroom through methods that he had never seen or experienced. Most importantly, his context dramatically improved. He was not only learning karate; he was becoming more mature. His philosophy began to change. His view of the world began to change and improve.
I smiled at the end of that movie, and I’ll tell you, I wasn’t the only one. When Daniel rears up into that crane move with his injured knee he triumphs over those bullies not just by being the better fighter, but by being the better person. He is completely transformed by his education with Mr. Miyagi. Education is transformation.
I know of no more powerful path to proficiency than when someone who is already proficient shows you the way. Even if you don’t recognize the path they walk.
The Fog of Concern
When I finished reading Rich Dad Poor Dad, my wife and I were raring to go. We wanted to start out by investing in real estate. But we still had not changed our context. We were still focused on buying things more than learning things. We had a desire to be rich so we wanted assets on day one, but we had not yet shown proper respect for gaining our financial education. As a result, investing was very difficult for us in the beginning.
We looked at many houses and became frustrated by what seemed like a fog of concerns. It was as if we could not see what was a good investment and what was not. Every time we got close to making a move, we began to worry. What if there’s mold? It looks good, but I don’t know anything about mold. What if I can’t get a tenant? Worse yet, what if I do get a tenant and they trash the place? Why does the guy want to sell it so low? It seems like it’s almost too good to be true, so there must be a reason why he wants to dump this on me. Can you relate to this? I had a deep desire to buy assets, but I was shrouded in the fog of these concerns.
I wanted to call Robert (who I didn’t know back then) and just yell, “Why couldn’t you just print the address of the house I’m supposed to buy?!” Because that seemed like the answer—buy the right property, rent it out, sit back, and collect rent. Rinse and repeat until wealthy. If only Robert would tell me the right property to buy.
I didn’t understand Rich Dad at all. I had missed the point completely.
But I didn’t give up. I was determined to learn this stuff. I reread the book. What did Robert have that I didn’t have? Duh. It was right on the cover in big yellow letters. He had a rich dad. He had a mentor.
My wife and I talked and changed our focus from looking for property to buy to looking for a mentor. And (go figure…) if that wasn’t exactly what we found as soon as we started looking.
Mentors and Criteria Clear the Fog of Concern
My wife and I ran into an old basketball buddy of mine named Greg. We started catching up and I asked what he was doing these days, and lo and behold, he was a real estate investor. Now, if I hadn’t changed my focus from finding property to finding people, that might not have even registered. But it did. He started talking, and my brain went…Bing! I started peppering him with questions. He was doing a couple deals a week buying residential properties, and had been in the business for about three years. From that I figured out three things: 1) if he’d been doing it that long, he must be more familiar with it than me, because he couldn’t take on that much debt and survive without knowing what he was doing, 2) he had to have a money source other than a bank because no way could he finance stuff that quickly through traditional routes, and 3) he had to have a way to find these deals because I’d looked at dozens of houses and I hadn’t bought one yet. So I knew he knew more than I did.
I was bold. I said, “Look, man, I’d really like to come to your office and just watch what you do.”
He was kind of polite and changed the subject, but I just kept at him. I explained that I’d been trying to do real estate and was getting nowhere. I said, “Look, Greg, I just want to see, when you pick up the phone, I’m just curious who you call. Because I have a phone but I don’t know who to call. And when you get in your car and drive somewhere, I want to see who an investor goes to see. Because I have a car but I have no idea who to go see. I just want to see what it is you do.”
But I wasn’t looking for a free ride. I didn’t just want (or expect) to get all of his knowledge for free. In fact I paid him about $10,000 for teaching me how his system worked.
Now, Greg, he was organized. He had systems and criteria for analyzing a deal I had never thought of. But more than that, the day my wife and I came in, he said, “You’re going to do a deal this week.” He had a private lender who didn’t care who I was as long as I could bring him a good deal. That was the first key. His investor cared about the deal, not me or my credit. This was definitely not
