From His Lowest Point To The Ultimate Breakthrough With Connor Steinbrook

BL Connor Steinbrook | Ultimate Breakthrough

For more than a decade, Connor Steinbrook made a fortune playing poker professionally, but everything went to dust when the game was shut down in 2011. Not letting his massive losses pull him down, he achieved his ultimate breakthrough by becoming a full-time real estate investor. In this episode, Connor joins Stefanie Peters and Ben Peters to share his inspiring story of going broke to becoming a powerful rebound boss. He opens up on what it is like to be in a dark place full of debt to unlocking multiple income sources through wholesaling, flipping, rentals, notes, mobile homes, and other profit-rich assets.

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From His Lowest Point To The Ultimate Breakthrough With Connor Steinbrook

I always say I am fired up about our episodes, but this guy that we have on, number one, I am so honored that he decided and he was open to jumping on the show, but above and beyond this, he is such an incredible power player on and off the court. There are some people that I have met and they are like, “They are good people,” but when you meet them off of Instagram, you are like, “I am not a fan.” When you meet this guy in person, he is the salt of the earth. He's so humble, but when you read his bio, you are like, “How can this guy be so humble and yet such a powerhouse?” Let's get into it. Connor Steinbrook, we are so excited to have you with us. Let me back up and give you a little bit of a backstory with this guy.

He was a professional poker player online for most of his career from 2003 to 2011, and then he hit a flat line. He's going to go more into that, but from 2011 to 2013, he was in one of the most dark places in his life, but I'm going to coin the phrase. He is now like the Rebound Boss because he came back with absolute fire.

He's a full-time investor. He's been around the block. Wholesaling, flipping rentals, notes, land, and mobile homes. Then he built a YouTube channel, talk about a force to be reckoned with, 40,000 subscribers, Investor Army. I started digging into that. It's fire. Go check it out. 2018 he joined eXp. His team ranks number three for total net agent growth globally at eXp. The list goes on and on, but I don't want to take the whole show going through his bio. Connor, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for jumping on.

I'm excited to hop on here and share my story and help you guys in some way give you some skillset, maybe some motivation and inspiration. How do you want to go into it? Where do you want me to start?

I would love to start with where you grew up and what sparked you to become an online poker player. Not a lot of people do that and be successful at it, and you did it for a long time so I would love to hear your story and how it bled into that.

I'm not sure how I became a poker player accidentally. When I was growing up, I was always into strategy games, chess, checkers, video games, or anything that had the ability to beat levels, identify patterns and sequences, and things like that. As I was growing through my youth, I played a lot of sports. I played football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and lacrosse. I was always playing team sports.

I was very competitive. I'm always doing things like this and then what happened was like a lot of people that don't go on to play collegiate sports or like the NFL or something like that, I had some pretty bad injuries. Shoulder injuries, knee injuries, and things like that. When I went off to college, I stopped playing sports completely and I didn't realize that it created a void and an identity issue and I lost that competition.

When poker came about, it was my freshman year in college. I put $20 into a poker site for fun like a lot of people were doing at the time the online poker group happened, which is when internet poker picked up. If you think about how slow the live poker scene is, you are playing a few hundred hands an hour. On the internet, you could play 16 to 24 tables at a time and catch up hundreds of years’ worth of learning curves of what you could have played live.

What happened was you saw kids that were sixteen sneaking on their brother's account. Young kids in college started to start for pennies, dollars, and tens of dollars like I did and rose to the highest ranks, but what happened was I was watching on TV, Chris Moneymaker, satellited into the main event World Series Poker from an online $40 tournament.

He ended up winning it for over $2 million something and every college kid has a head in America exposed and said, “I can get $40 to mom. I can get $40 for free.” It created this big poker boom and what happened was it seemed a lot easier to play a video game in my mind at the time than get a job working for someone else so I got into it.

If you do anything enough, a lot of repetitions in a short period you are going to identify the patterns that you can exploit whatever you are doing. That's where a lot of people if you are trying to do something new, do it. A lot do it condensed and looks for patterns and that's what creates a business later around it. That's how I stumbled into online poker. It’s an accident and then the nature of having a lot of money at a young age and having the freedom to control my schedule and not have a boss and things like that, but all that came into the perfect storm that led me into that process where I became a poker player.

It was freshman year, that void of sports and everything like that. Where would you say you first started making good money? I understand as a college kid, good money. It's relative.

I started playing live poker. I went to the University of Oklahoma. We had Indian casinos up there. Now you are starting to see casinos all around the country, but at the time, there were very few states that had brick-and-mortar casinos. The live games were a lot easier to play than the online games. There were bigger games played at the local casinos where I was playing a lot more individuals that had like 9:00 to 5:00 jobs but disposable income instead of professional poker players.

I started making a decent amount of money playing not a lot like tens of thousands of dollars, which is a lot when you are 19 or 20 but not like an agent that closed that on one check. It wasn't until I started playing small sit-and-go tournaments, nine-table tournaments, and multi-table tournaments, that also gravitated mainly to cash gains.

It was when I learned that I could play multiple tables at a time and I started doing what's called multi-tabling. I play 16 tables at a time on a 4X4 grid. To some people, their head is exploding. You are not playing every hand in every spot. You are mostly folding hands but you are spot-selecting. You are looking for certain types of players that play a certain way and certain positions on the table and then you are looking for batting patterns and tells and then you are only playing maybe 2 or 3 hands.

Out of sixteen at a time, you are folding everything else off and you are finding spots selecting and playing that many tables to get enough hand volume to be able to pick the spots that you can use to create a leverage position and beat the game essentially. Where I started a lot of money is when I started multi-tabling at the upper mid stakes, lower high stakes 5, 10, 4, 8, no-limit type of games if you guys know what I'm talking about.

I never understood online poker because whenever I have played poker, it's like you are reading a person. I always felt like online poker is harder because you can't see that person. You can't look them in the eye. That's super impressive.

In person, you are looking at body language tells and tonality. On the internet, you are looking at timing tells and bet-sizing patterns, meaning how fast it gets. For example, let's say someone goes all-in on the river. Let's say you check it to them and they ship it all in right away. It's a big decision, and there's been a lot of action up until that moment.

Usually, they are bluffing because if they have a hand in what's happening, they are thinking, “There's a lot of money in the pot. I want to maximize what I get out of this. I don't want to run them off or bet too much and run this person out of pot. What's the right size of bet?” They are thinking about it so they slow things down.

Whereas it's an unconscious tell that if they push real quick, they are trying to say, “I have no fear. I don't care what you have. I'm so stronger. I have the best hand. I'm going to push all in no matter what,” but it's the opposite. Usually, it tells us we give out or the opposite. You are looking for things like that. That's how you are going to beat online poker because you can't see people. You need to look at timing tells and bet-sizing tells. Did they check fold in certain spots? Things like that.

When you say, “I'm trying to identify patterns,” you are not kidding. You are all about identifying patterns.

That’s what we do. This is how you win in business. You can poker translates to business. Let's say I'm playing betting and poker and there's what's called a C-Bet or Continuation Bet. Let's say he opens and raises pre-flop then you get the three cards that come out. It's called the flop and he's going to do what's called C-Bet.

Most people continue to bet 9 out of 10 times no matter what the flop is. Let's say he’s got pocket tens and the flop comes, ace, queen, 9 with 2 diamonds or something like that. He's going to C-Bet. Let's say I have anything. What I can do is call a float. I can call with nothing knowing that the likelihood that he hit that flop is not high that on the turn he could check and then fold to me.

If I know that he C-Bets the flop and has a low check fold turn ratio, I can sit positioned in the right seat on the table and I'd mark certain players based on the pattern and certain colors when I'd hop on the internet. I'd have all these different colors and I know exactly where I sit against certain people and exactly how they played. That's how you are going to beat online poker. Find those betting patterns and tells like that, but that's also how you are going to win business. Find those similarities within whatever vehicle that you guys are driving.

I understood everything you said. Steph doesn't play poker so she had no idea.

It went straight over but it sounded very intriguing. You are a genius and I'm blonde so there's that. Honestly, when I think about what you said, it triggered how important it is to identify patterns and then how you can correct them. Even going to Tony Robbins’ events, even Unleash the Power Within, that's one of the first days he dials into patterns. I would love to hear from you when you break it down and put it into layman's terms. How can you apply that to everyday life? Let's say someone is in real estate or has some type of sales career. What would be a good example of how to identify patterns that can help them take it to that next level?

The pattern is everything that we do that develops an ability to take a risk later. If we do A, B, C, results, and D, we are guessing. If we know if we do steps 1, step 2, step 3, or A, B, and C we get the outcome as D, and 100 people before us did the same thing. We saw 100 people do A, B, and C and get the outcome as D, which minimizes risk.

Patterns minimize risk for you. Also, it gives you the ability to build a business because a business is a pattern system when you think about it. What we are doing here at the eXp for example. What are we trying to do? We are trying to figure out something that works and teach it in a way that can be learned but also learned in a way that can be retaught later for duplication.

What we train agents is a lot of people do things the way that they are going to do it. Each has its own system but if you want to grow faster duplicating business, everybody needs to be behind the same system. Think about McDonald's and the speedy system or something like that. A pattern should be something that you identify in your business that can be bullet-pointed or broken down in a visual form.

Anybody can come across, study, learn, and then apply later without you having to be directly involved in teaching. Now if you are training your business, you want to make sure that you can do this for them as well because it creates the ability to stay on track and follow something. Whereas if you are talking openly and throwing out advice, they can't see how something can build out over time.

The main thing that patterns do is give you the ability to identify present actions, how they lead to future results, and how to take a risk by looking at other people's patterns before they came. I was talking about if I make a bet all in and I lose 9 to 10 times that pattern. I won't do that again in the future because I'm at a 90% loss right here.

Reading patterns gives you the ability to identify present actions and how they lead to future results.

Percentages are patterns in a way when you think about it are ratios. If you track your business and you do anything enough. Let's say you take ten phone calls, how many turn into a contract? 2 out of 10, you have a 2 out of 10 ratio. What we need to do is start tracking our business and create ratios. Once we have enough percentages and we understand patterns, we can create a strategy around that and start growing our business and then train employees and other partners or team leaders or whichever model that you guys are trying to grow. Whatever business you guys are doing.

That's so good to know your numbers and then based on those numbers, make a system based on it. In the real estate arena specifically real estate agents, we are notorious for not tracking anything. There are so many agents who, “How much did you close last year?” “It's whatever.” I love that. If you make 10 phone calls, 2 of them turn into contracts. 2 out of 10, that's great. I love that.

It gives you the ability to return investment in cycle back through your business with the highest and best use of the dollars. Let's say that you guys are starting and you have $10,000 to spend on marketing and you are going to try 5 different things, $2,000, $2,000, $2,000, $2,000, and $2,000. You don't know what's going to happen because you are guessing. That's why you are split testing.

Now you spend that $2,000 out. Let's say you are driving everything to 1 phone number and 3 deals come into the office. Where did those leads come from? You don't know. It's very important to separate the marketing channels and have a different phone number for each lead source even if they are the same thing like social media that you know where the leads came in from.

Let's say all 3 came from 1 source over here, the other 4 brought in 0 leads. If they all came to one number, you can't identify that. Now because you separate tracking your business, you now know all three came from this. You may do it again another month. Let's say you get two more leads and they came from the same source and the other four didn't come from and you had zero leads commences.

What that means is you have 4 different lead sources, $2,000 a piece that's $8,000 that generated nothing for you, but this $4,000 over here brought 5 deals. Based on what you figured out by tracking your business, you can now say, “Instead of taking the $8,000, I was going to put into these 4 channels, I'm going to put it all into this 1 over here and maximize the dollar usage of what I have to operate my business with essentially.”

I didn't do this a lot in the beginning. It's probably how I went into what we talked about this. I didn't track where the leads were coming from. That's too cheap, to be honest, and we didn't have a lot of things like multi-number services. I ran everything to one number and then you are guessing where the lead's coming from. What I was doing was asking them when they got on the call, but still, you are guessing. You need to track this and you need to have a different phone number for any way that you are generating a lead to your office.

Even when I was kicking off my career from a transactional standpoint in real estate, I called up Ben because he had a number of years under his belt as far as transactions. I had a lot more experience as far as the investing game. When I was like, “I want to put my foot on the gas with all different aspects of marketing,” he was like, “Slow down. Let's go through all the homes that you sold last year. Where did those come from?” It was so eye-opening because I was hitting the gas on a completely different lead generation source when 90% of my leads came from social media. He's like, “Go all in to that.” A total game-changer. It's like the 80/20 principle where 20% comes from 80% and vice versa.

What we are talking about in the beginning, what is a pattern does. It gives you the ability to push past risk going forward. Now if you know this is generating business, it's not so hard to push past that fear barrier stroke the credit card, and let a campaign go out. If you don't know those direct mail campaigns bring back leads, how hard is it once you send out thousands of postcards and get zero phone calls to send out another round of those same postcards? It's very important to track the business because it gives you the ability to take risks and decide where your future dollars go.

I want to jump into the next part of your story. We have talked about you being an online poker player. What's the next thing? It sounded like you were fairly successful in online poker. What led to the dark place in your life?

Everything was going great and I was printing money at the peak of my career and having a good life. You could say young kids, sports cars, diamond watches, nights at the bars with friends, and all this type of stuff, and then overnight on April 15th, 2011, government regulation kicked in, and the online poker sites got shut down. It's called Black Fridays.

If you guys look it up, it's April 15th, 2011. The United States Department of Justice shut down the biggest poker sites which, at the time, were PokerStars and Full Tilt. We still don't know the exact truth of what was going on. I'm sure they were doing some sketchy things behind the scenes. Our government doesn't have the ability to regulate something or have their hands on it. They either destroy it or figure out how to get their piece of the pie.

Essentially, these websites were hosted through offshore islands. The Alderney Gambling Control Commission registered them. It was all that type of stuff. Overnight, I woke up and I went to work the next morning and the sites had been shut down. You saw these big banners, US Department Justice seizes Full Tilt. I was like, “That's weird.” I go to PokerStars. The same thing.

I was in denial for a little bit, to be honest, but what happened at this moment was my entire identity that I'd spent almost a decade building around one skillset, the entire world that I built, all my friends, the world that they built. It wasn't that like I lost everything. It was like all of us. I tell people in real estate, it's like, “If we woke up tomorrow and eXp was gone, that's not the same.”

It'd been as if the real estate industry was gone and we all were chickens with heads cut off, not knowing what was going on. I did what was called tilt, which is a shifting of your emotional pattern where you make fewer decisions than you would have if you were not out of your mind at that moment. I gambled off all my money at blackjack.

I gambled off a fortune, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and before I knew it, I had to move back home with my parents, tuck tail because I was going bankrupt and had no way to create income. Nobody wanted to hire me because we were coming out of the 2007 and 2008 crashes. I had no job history. If I go to a corporate company, it's like, “Guess what?”

Mid to late twenties, never had a real job, and I gamble for a living. I was lost. I moved back home with my parents because I needed to stabilize a little bit, stop the pain, and be around supporting casts. You could say that of me when there's chaos everywhere. That helped. I lived in Dallas an hour South of WinStar Casino.

I played poker live for a little bit waiting for online to come back, and this is where I came across a lot of real estate individuals that led me into real estate a little bit. I'd wake up in the morning, drive to the casino, play all day, stay at the casino at night, wake up, play all day, casino night, play all day, and come back on a 3-day, 2-night pattern, and I did that on and off for years.

I was playing the highest stakes at the local games and when a poker player loses a big hand, they look like they want to jump off a bridge. When a successful entrepreneur loses a big hand, they smile and laugh with their friends and I couldn't figure out. There were so many individuals who were losing $10,000 a night with a smile on their faces and they were having fun.

I'm like, “How do they have the time to do this for one and gamble or play poker all day, and also how did they have the money to lose and not destroy their life?” I started finding out that they were all in some type of business or ownership position. They either ran real estate teams, they had apartments, they had storage units, or something like that.

They all had businesses where they had employees or teams of people. This is where I realized some of my mistakes. What I created was called the wealth quadrant and I started teaching this to people a long time ago. The first one is multiple streams of income, and this is where I learned this, which is if you have one income stream, you are in a very risky spot.

Multiple streams of income are taught incorrectly out there because most people hear this and they assume having MSI or Multiple Streams of Income is a way to increase your income. It can if every income stream is profitable, but this is an insurance policy if you want to think of it for your future. If you had 1 billion income streams that make $1 and 1 income stream that makes $1 billion, the same net profit, but look how many different income streams are in a relationship.

What MSI is for is if you have one good income stream that makes $1 billion and it goes away, you have another one to lean on that you are not set back. What happened was when all my poker went away, I didn't have anything else to lean on. It was years before I could find my feeding again and catch my knees underneath me. It slowed me down and set me back.

That was the first lesson I learned is solopreneurship and having one income stream is not going to be conducive to making and creating wealth. The second thing was you need to have duplicatable components to what you are doing. It doesn't matter what you do. It matters what happens around you and you need to have multiple rental properties, multiple YouTube videos, multiple agents, and multiple employees, something outside yourself that duplicates itself without your direct efforts once you start a catalytic event.

That's the second thing I realized. If I was sick, tired, had health issues, or had to take care of friends or family, I couldn't play. The other two parts of the wealth quadrant that I created are the equity side meaning equity ownership and then residual income. What I realized was all these individuals who are doing all this that can have money to play and the time to do it were wealthy because they had equity ownership and some type of asset or business and then they had residual income streams.

That's when I realized if I have all four of these things, if I have multiple streams of income to insure myself, duplication I get outside myself, equity that can expand without my time allocated to make my business grow so I can be sleeping, but my stock can be growing. Our property value could be increasing and then residual income would give me the time freedom to have the life I want.

This is where I came across all that type of stuff, but at the same time, I was playing at the casino and I got my insurance license. I joined WFG, which is what led me later to identify eXp, which is where Ed Mylett is from, and I went into wholesaling houses at the same time. I got stuck into some bad educational systems and before I knew it, I was getting into debt.

I started getting $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000 into debt. This is like when things started getting rock bottom for me where I realized online poker wasn't coming back. I had no other direction at this moment even though I was giving the lesson of what led me to real estate. I was trying to figure out my life and what I was going to do. This is where it got dark for me and I can go into that a little bit or however you want.

We are all about darkness. Bring us into the darkness.

Anything in life that creates progression is when we feel content and happy and feel like things are going well. Anytime something is regressing or going backward, this is when depression and anxiety kick in. Anytime we are thinking in the past, past wins or past losses, and we are dwelling on either and not thinking of the future, this is going to create depression and anxiety.

When we are forward-thinking, that's how we can create progression. That's when we think we have the ability to change the future because we can't change the past. That's why we are still optimistic hopeful and full of faith. I was trying to not live in the past but I was caught up in these looping thoughts that my best days were behind me, my worst days were coming, and that life wasn't worth living essentially. It is dark like a cyclical loop that I couldn't get out of where I thought my life was over and no point in living. I got to where I almost wanted to take my life at one moment.

This was like for the two years I'm dwelling in this. What happened was a couple of things. I had walked away a little bit from my faith at the time. I came back to it during my mid-twenties and then I also came across personal education and self-development at the same time. I came across the black-and-white recordings of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Keys to Success: The 17 Principles of Personal Achievement.

I went through all those and that led me to Think and Grow Rich, and this sent me down the rabbit hole in self-development. I read all the cliché books. The Richest Man in Babylon, As a Man Thinketh, and then the modern ones like Rich Dad Poor Dad. I have been following Jim Rohn, Bob Proctor, Les Brown, Earl Nightingale, and John Maxwell, all the way up to the modern growth leaders.

I gravitate a lot more towards the older generation because it hit hard with me because everybody on the internet is trying to sell you something for the most part. We are in business. People are telling education. It's not wrong or right. It's that's what's usually happening. When you are watching a 1920s recording of someone who's passed already, there's no threat of what's the gotcha, what's coming next, or where's the episode.

You understand that they are giving genuine information because they are not trying to take anything from you, and then at the same time, you are looking back and saying what he's talking about here worked thousands of years ago. It worked at his time, works now at my time, and works going forward. These are generational ideas and strategies. That resonated with me. The first thing I did when I decided I wanted to become wealthy was study both. This is what you guys need to do. Whatever you want, study aggressively.

I started studying the industrialists like JPMorgan Chase, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and Ford. I started reading their biographies and things like that. I started studying how money works. What is $1? How does the Fed work? How do interest rates work? All this type of stuff. I started studying what I wanted to know. At the same time, I was going through this personal journey and got heavy into self-development.

A lot of people understand sometimes you get into this process and it makes you feel invincible. I ran a little bit too fast and tripped over myself because I thought I was going to manifest everything. It was all going to work out. I made a bunch of mistakes and I trusted a lot of wrong people and that's what put me in debt.

I got put to a very tough decision where I was almost $100,000 in debt. I'd run out of almost every dollar I had to borrow from friends and family. I would max up my credit cards and I had a choice to either get a 9:00 to 5:00 job, file bankruptcy, or work for minimum wage and pick up rooms, and sweep floors while I try to figure out my businesses.

Behind the scenes, I had my websites that I was teaching myself through watching YouTube videos, how to build WordPress websites, and doing SEO. I was taking private YouTube channels and linking to the backside of my websites and I was watching my websites go from 7 to 6 to 5 moving up the Google pages. I knew if I could get them to rank number 1 or to get to page 1, I would start generating leads.

My mentality was, “Let me work on my business all day, and then at night, I was going to go sweep floors from minimum wage and stock shelves to keep enough money coming into the business to keep my websites going but also not to go get a 9:00 to 5:00 job where I may get stuck in a comfortable life and never pursue my dreams and goals after that.”

I decided to get a room and I worked for minimum wage. Academy Sports + Outdoors. It's a true story. My websites went from 4 to 3 to 2 and finally, I got them up to 1. I started journaling a ton of leads over the internet and I went from making $10 an hour and $100,000 debt to sometimes making $100,000 a week wholesaling houses. I did almost 40 wholesale deals that first year.

I went from wholesaling and started getting some working capital, and now I was able to take on bigger deals and started flipping houses. What I was doing was watching the houses at wholesale, what the investors did with them once they put it on MLS to see what they did and renovated it. It gave me the confidence to take on a house myself.

I started flipping houses. I did this for quite some time. We'd do about 8 to 12 houses at a time. Started building a rental portfolio and then I realized it was cashflow but it wasn't as much of a residual site as I wanted. I got caught to a point where I was running out of working capital in my business. I started selling my properties on owner financing, which brought in cash on the front side of my business side.

Now I have working capital. I'm still in the controlling position in a way when you think about it. I'm a lender, not a landlord now, but I still have a cashflow position in the middle. One of the main things that was hurting my business time was the backend expenses when I was taking properties back. I didn't have to worry about all these other things going on with the house.

I brought in money on the front side, controlled the cashflow, and avoided expenses in the back, and I went heavily into the owner financing space. I started creating notes and notes holding partial notes. I started doing mobile homes, land deals, and things like that. Along the way, I started Investor Army and I started saying, “Here's my problem. Fix it. I hope you can do the same thing.”

After going into the deep dark place, you move home. What were your parents thinking in all of this? You are still playing poker a little bit and then you get into wholesaling. You do it wrong. You are $100,000 in debt. What are your parents thinking? Are they like, “Let's do something a little different here?”

They are praying a lot for me. At the time, there was probably not a lot of hope looking at me and my life from my friends and family looking in like how most of you guys are as an entrepreneur right now. Nobody understands what you are doing. Why are you going through this hell? Why are you not stopping and doing the easy thing like everybody else did, getting a job?

I don't think they understand it. I never was too open with what I was doing. They knew I was in real estate. I'm pretty much the only entrepreneur in my family. That's the case, a lot of times, in families when there's somebody that breaks outside the box. Everybody went through the Rich Dad Poor Dad route in my life. They all went, came out of college, and got married at a young age. Most of them. My cousins and extended family had families and nice houses.

They all have dual-income families. Nice $500,000 to $600,000 houses. I'm sitting here struggling in debt living at home with my parents. It was not an easy road and I make sure to tell people this. I worked 1,100 days without a day off legitimately. This was before it was cool to grind on the internet. This was before social media.

I was doing it because I was going to go bankrupt. I was terrified but I worked 1,100 days straight. A few days after that I thought I got out of debt, I found a partner who stole $35,000 from me. I went right back into debt. For almost four years of my career, I worked almost every single day to break even. I will point this out for people because people don't understand the sacrifice it takes to get to where you get to.

You see so many people try for something for 3, 6, or 9 months and then they give up on themselves or give up on what they are doing and then they stop. Whatever you guys are doing, you pursue it with all your heart and conviction and don't stop until you get there because it didn't ever seem like it was going to happen all the way through.

It was ups and downs but finally, you will catch a breakthrough. I want to point that out because a lot of people are entitled to like, “We are going to start something be successful in a year,” and it's not like that. You are going to have to go through this sacrificial wind of your life where you are making big mistakes and you are coming across unethical people. You have to learn all these things to avoid these things in the future and that's when you become successful.

The thing that resonated with me about your story of you being in such a dark place. What was that instigator that helped you to keep going? A lot of people at that point, if they were in such depression, they would lie down and die. “I'm going to go by default like everyone else does. It would be easier for me to get a 9:00 to 5:00.” You didn't have a blueprint around you of anyone being an entrepreneur to take it to that next level. Where did that come from?

I have met enough people that I knew were not coming from massive blessings, generational wealth, had an Einstein IQ, or got lucky. I met enough normal people who had become successful and had multimillion-dollar lives. What always helped me was I saw all these other people who did it. They were born into the world like I was. They are no better. They are worse than I am, and they figured it out.

Somehow this person didn't cheat. Some probably cheated, and probably most cheated. Unfortunately, they still made it to this. Somehow, they got there and this person got there. They didn't come from this angle, they didn't cheat, they didn't scam, or have this blessing. I always knew that if this many people had the ability to figure it out, that if I kept going every single day, eventually, I would figure it out. That was one thing.

The second thing was that change. I was lost. What causes loss stress and depression is not having control. When you think about something, let's say you have control over something and then you don't have control over it. What does this cause? Frustration, anxiety, and all the negative patterns in our lives because we blame everything externally. We don't have control to change our future because we think everything's controlled around us.

There are two different thought processes. Does my internal thinking, the thoughts that I think and act on, create my future environment, or does my environment that I operate externally within that create my thinking? Is it the president? Is it how I look? Is it my family, my background, or where I was born? Is that what creates my future results or is my internal thought process what's going to create my outcome in the future?

I don't care who wins the presidency. I don't care what's going on out there. It doesn't matter to me because it has no relevance to what's going to happen in my life. The first thing I was blaming everybody and this was a big part of my shifting mindset where I blamed God, the government, poker sites, parents, birds, and you, guys. I blamed everything I could because I didn't want to blame myself.

The reality is I took a bad blow, but also another reality is I made enough money before I took that bad blow that I spent in bad areas that if I invested it, I would have never had to work again. I started shifting instead of saying, “It's the government's fault,” and on the poker side's fault, “It's my fault. I didn't do this.” I'd started shifting to having internal control and internal blame. If it's everything else's fault around me, the only way my life is going to change is if God changes, the government changes, family changes, and friends change.

If you guys have ever tried to change people, does it work very well? It does not. You are going to get people to change around you when you change inside yourself. Act a little bit better and act a little bit differently and that's when things start to change around you. That was one of the big changing points. I was a very negative person at the time and I had convinced myself that I caused my problems by my thinking processes, by getting frustrated, ups and downs of losing poker, and having all these bad breaks happen.

People around you change when you change inside yourself and act a little bit better.

I realized after reading Think and Grow Rich and books that if I can control my thinking, I can control my outcome because my thoughts create my feelings and my emotion, which creates my attitude and my attitude is going to dictate. Do people want to come around me or be around me? Go more into a little bit of that if you want or we can go into something else.

I heard somebody say, “Point out to me somebody successful who has a victim mentality.” It's few and far between. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist because it does, but it's so few and far between. I love the fact that you took the bull by the horns and it was like, “I'm negative. I'm going to become positive here.” That was a catalyst for change, which I love.

The question I wanted to ask you is because you got involved in investing fairly early. What's your favorite avenue of investing? You talked about flips, wholesaling, and all that stuff. It might have changed throughout the years, but if somebody is watching this right now like, “I don't know how to invest. I have never invested,” what would you suggest? “This is where I would get started,” and then the second question is, “What's your favorite?” It might be different right now.

If you don't have a lot of money saved up for any reason outside of effort, before you try to get into real estate, wholesaling is usually the number one strategy for people to get into the business as far as a low barrier of entry. For a couple of reasons, you don't need to raise money. There are a lot of skillsets that you don't have to take to figure out first. You don't have to learn how to work with contractors and construction.

Usually, people start out wholesaling, but as far as my favorite strategy, which everyone is going to apply at that moment to get the biggest check or be the highest and best use of that deal coming in. This is a big decision-making process as leads come into the office because you are going to have equity positions and then you are going to have price points.

You want to separate the price points by cashflow market versus probably not cashflow. In my market, sub $250,000 is where our cashflow market is. Once you get above $250,000, it gets a little bit harder to make properties cashflow when you are looking at the relationship between rent rates, taxes, and everything that's going to go into it.

Let's say a lead comes in the office and has high equity and you can do anything with it. You can flip it and rent it. Let's say has low equity and almost no equity, what are you going to do with it? You could probably list it as an agent. You could do some type of creative financing on it. You could do a sub-to, a wrap on it, or you could do a lease option. What if it's no equity and it's a super high price point that doesn't cashflow, you are not going to deal able to do certain strategies.

Each one, you are going to look at on its own. One strategy that helped me a lot get out of a bad spot was selling a house that wouldn't get traditional financing on owner financing and then turning around to selling the note right after closing. I had a house that was by the lake. It was like a frame house that had three different levels on it. It was completely structurally compromised.

I had tried to wholesale. I couldn't do it. No bank would give me a loan on it. Nobody wanted to finance it. No matter what I did, I didn't have the money to take a loss at the time. I tried to have 2 or 3 other big companies like New Western that were some big ones in our market. I tried to wholesale it. Nobody could wholesale it.

Some of you may follow a man named Mitch Stephen. He's a good friend of mine. He wrote a book called My Life & 1,000 Houses. I saw him speaking at an event where he was talking about how he would sell a house on owner finance, create a note, and turn around and sell that note. This is something I'd never tried before and saw on the house. I ended up selling the house.

I took a house that had no other profit center. I sold it on our finance. I turned around and created a note. I sold a note probably $0.88 to $0.92 on the dollar or something like that. That's where I usually sold them and I made over $20,000 on a house that I was going to take a loss on any other way and had no other ability to control and no ability to finance by selling it and understanding how interest rates work and owner financing works.

You will understand why banks are the biggest buildings in every major city because they understand how to play with interest rates and how to create value out of thin air. That's essentially what I did. That one little experience sent me off down the rabbit hole of creative financing. I started doing more of those types of deals. I would look into that. If you are stuck in a bad deal right now, that could be an option for you.

I have opened up my brain to creative finance. I follow Pace Morby on YouTube. He's a big creative finance guy, sub-to and all that stuff. It's pretty amazing once you start realizing that there are so many agents out there who might have a house on the market that’s not selling. It's got a 2.5% interest rate. There's so much value in that 2.5% interest rate. What are you going to do with that? Have a creative way to market that. That's huge.

Not just on the sell side. It's on the buy side too. You need to be making offers to the seller and don't think of one that popped up when you were saying that. Carol was almost 70 years old and she sold her house to me on owner finance with a $60,000 purchase price as $10,000 down then she did 5 years, $500 a month with no interest and then I had a $20,000 balloon payment.

Add that up. It should be up to $60,000. I reached out to homeowners on Zillow who had houses up for sale by the owner while I was eating lunch. I sent them these messages and I remember specifically hers. Everybody was offering her $20,000 to $30,000 cash and I was like, “I can do the same,” but I made her owner finance offer.

I borrowed the $10,000 on credit card cash advances to get into the deal at the very beginning when I was building my rental portfolio. Once I had the house controlled and closed on it, then I didn't have the money to fix it up. I brought in a JV partner and I found a partner in my market who had money sitting in his IRA I explained how to get a self-directed IRA and I had him come in and put in half the money or whatever it was, but it was going to cover the full renovation, and I gave him 50% of the deal.

I borrowed the money from the bank and a JV partner. I had almost no money in this deal and had 50% equity in this property and got this property up and rented. It was 100% amortizing because I had no interest in paying $500 straight into the property. I knew that once we renovated the property and over time, we'd have an appreciation and it would pay down that there'd be enough equity in it that I could refi-pull money out some other way five years from that moment and be able to pay off that balloon payment.

I took that property back from a renter and that house is probably worth $230,000 or $240,000 now and we have been cashflowing it since 2015 or something like that. That's a creative way where people say they don't have any money or they don't have the ability to start doing this. You don't need that. You need creativity, play around, and try making offers in different ways. You need to get out there and be active. I acquired quite a few properties that I had almost no money into these deals, and this is not wholesale. We are putting up option money. This is an actual principal in this transaction. I had 50% ownership in a deal where I brought nothing to the table.

It's so interesting because I grew up with a dad, very old school, and a Baby Boomer. You need to control everything, There is an element you need to control because once you give up control, it's a whole other thing. He's not one to JV anything or anything like that. Learning about that, I'm like, “There's so much opportunity.” You got to make sure you have a good partner, but it's so interesting. Learning from people like you who are uber-successful and it's like, “If I don't have the money, I will find somebody else who has the money and I will keep equity in the deal,” which is awesome.

When you guys try to raise money, you want to go to not real estate professionals. It sounds weird, but real estate professionals are going to use their money in their deals. You want to go to real estate professionals who can't use their money on their deals, which is why I did a lot with the sub-direction of IRA because let's say JR has money in IRA, there are prohibited transactions. He can't lend his money up the vertical family line.

Think of anybody that could potentially inherit that money if something happened. Parents, grandparents, or children, that vertical family line. You can't lend yourself or an entity that your partner or partner that's in your entity now you can lend horizontally to cousins, uncles, friends, and other people that you know. If they have their money tied up into an IRA and they can't use their own money, they need you to get their money to play.

If we are trying to get longer-term loans, if people have $100,000 in their bank account versus $100,000 in their IRA, the distractions or the opportunities so they can do with this over here. Vacations, fun, and all sorts of stuff are a distraction. They are more likely to limit out a longer time window and they are also more likely to give you a better rate on it because it's a tax-avoidable dent.

That 10% outside your IRA versus 10% return in your IRA because the way that plays the taxes is much higher than the 10%. This is where I would start trying to raise money if you guys haven't, and then also going entrepreneurs outside of real estate business networking events and successful entrepreneurs.

Some of my private lenders ran gyms, local businesses, and things like that, but they weren't coming from real estate as real estate investors. I spun my wheels, trying to raise money from real estate investors for years, and couldn't figure out why. When I got to entrepreneurs that ran businesses or doctors or attorneys, that's where you are going to raise the money.

I never thought of it that way, but with money inside your bank account, there are so many more distractions whereas inside of an IRA, 401(k), and all that stuff, there are not any distractions. There's a lot higher likelihood. I'm learning stuff right now. I might be pulling this up.

Usually, if people have smaller amounts in their IRA, they are not going to be able to fund $300,000 or $400,000 properties. For a couple of spots, you can use $30,000 or $40,000 IRA amounts to get into the down payments as we talked about on the front side of an order finance deal. Let's say you get caught into a house that the frontend lender won't give you the amount that you need and you need another $15,000 to $20,000 to rehab a house. A lot of times, you can get a second position loan where someone has $15,000 in their IRA but they can't do much else with it and they have got $17,000 in there. Those are good spots to find these types of partners to use that type of financing for.

Let's say there's a new investor that's coming to the table and they say, “This sounds so amazing. What's my first step?” What would you say would be a good go-to resource so that they can start learning more about creative financing and help them step by step?

I still have quite a few videos on my Investor Army channel. You all can go check those out. There's another channel that can tap along. Back in like 2018, and 2019, I created the Investor Army Podcast channel. It’s still out there somewhere. Look for Tim Cook and Grant Kemp. They are two of the most savvy and skilled creative financing investors I know of.

Grant Kemp owned a private lending here. He made millions of dollars selling his company at 30, which is a large loan origination company, and then very well versed in sub-to. He has a course called Creative Cashflow or something like that. He did go deep into wraps and sub-to. Tim Cook was one of my local mentors when I got into the business, I would work at his REI club for free to check people in because I was trying to get proximity with him so that he could help me.

You can't go to a mentor who's successful financially and say, “I want to help you make money.” What you say is, “I want to take off time. Remove some stress from your life.” If you can remove time or stress from their life, you can get into their life and then they are going to work with you and help you in ways that you are going to help them, but it's never like, “Can I make money with you?” If you bring a deal, they are not going to want to be in that deal.

I started reaching out to the biggest REI club owners in DFW. I offered to work their desks, do things for them, and work for them for free. I tried to tell these entrepreneurs working for free for years made me a multimillionaire. That sounds crazy to most people, but you are not going to get into proximity with these types of individuals unless you bring value to them.

I did. I worked for years, waking up on Saturday mornings when I was in debt not knowing if this was going to work and driving down at 7:30 in the morning to be there by 8:00 and check people into these events. That's when they started introducing me to more people and relationships started building and then I started to develop a reputation locally and that led to a lot of opportunities.

I don't know how we got to that part. It’s where I start if some of you guys were trying to get into the industry. Go to local REI clubs. Try to find a local mentor and do something for them first. Don't ask for anything and that's where I'd start, and then I'd be aggressively educating myself by watching YouTube videos for real estate investors on the specific strategy you are trying to get into wholesaling.

On the side, aggressively studying everything to come in with personal growth and self-education. Working on your physical body. Working on your mental intelligence but also on your mental persistence and push through and have that strong mental toughness, and then I'd be working on communication. That's one of the first things that people should be working on. Everything is secondary to the skillset of communication because you can't take a phone to a contract. You can't influence anybody. Everything is a battle of influence in life and communication is the center of that. Those are some things that we focus on if you guys are now getting into business.

This is a purely selfish question. What is the most amount of money you have ever made on an investment deal, whether it be flip or whatever, and what is the most amount of money you have lost on an investment deal?

I never broke the six-figure mark. A lot of people have. I had a number of deals that were caught up in the ‘90s but I never clipped fully netting a 6-figure deal, unfortunately. My biggest wholesale deal, I did a deal that was $77,750. The craziest thing on that one was I didn't do a double close or a double escrow. I assigned that contract and it was seen on the HUD. It was almost an $80,000 deal. I know a lot of people are like, “I got to double close everything and pay all these fees.” You don't have to do that. On the biggest loss, probably not that big. A couple of times I lost maybe $15,000 to $20,000 on a flip but I never got straight crushed. That's still bad.

It's not like you are losing the $15,000. You are losing the opportunity cost of the time invested in that project that you could have put into another deal. You have the amplification of problems in your business because you are stressed out and frustrated. It creates what's called thought occupation. You are focused on your problems which drops your morale and now, you are creating more problems because you are not feeling good about what you are in and it causes you to make more problems.

I tell people it's okay to have problems in your business. It's not okay to create problems off those problems that would not have been created otherwise. You need to have a strong emotional awareness as you grow into business and you are going to have a bunch of bad things happen. The way that you conduct yourself as they happen determines whether or not God or however you want to believe in the world gives you the promotion to get to the next level of life.

Imagine if you have someone complaining and whining when they have, let's say can only lift 100 pounds on a bench press. Am I going to put more weight on that bench when they are already complaining that they can't lift this little mountain? For team leaders, I see all these agents that are frustrated running a team of ten agents and it's like, “I get it but don't be entitled to ask for 1,000 if you can't handle 10.”

We need to handle the problems that we have at the moment with the highest level of dignity and honor for ourselves and those involved in that problem to be able to condition our mindset to be able to handle bigger problems later. If you can't handle small problems a day, there's not going to be bigger problems tomorrow because you can't even deal with what you are dealing with right now.

If you can’t handle small problems today, you will not be able to handle bigger problems tomorrow.

The thing I look at in terms of losing $20,000, I always put it in terms of, “It's cheaper than a year at college and I learned a lot more.”

You learn more than that. If you get a bad deal, just cut it. I know a lot of people either have to let it sit on the market or cut it. If you have a high caring cost, you are going to sit there and pray, “That one random buyer is going to come,” and now and then, it happens. Going back after doing as many deals, you are better off cutting it, dumping it, getting it out, bringing that money back in, and getting it back into a more profitable deal moving forward. Clear up the mind, clear up the time, and redeploy the dollars into something that can bring dollars back and they are not going to keep going out the back side of the business.

Get rid of the problem children. Ben, do you have any other questions for him overall?

No.

I am excited to go into my Lightning Round with the Lady Boss. I'm going to ask you three questions before lightning with the lady boss to get your perspective on the overall picture of life and business. Let's say someone came to you and said, “I want to be the boss of my own life and call the shots.” What's my first step?

I would have an awareness of where I'm at right now. I do a full self-audit. If you want control of the future, you have to figure out why you don't have control now. I would look at the relationships that you have, your financial situation, where you are living, what you have tried up until now, and do a self-audit, which is what I was doing when I had to start over.

At that time, I had to look at it. I'm stuck at home with my parents. I don't know how I got here, but I'm here. You have to be upfront and have the awareness of your situation either doing horrible, bad, average, or whatnot. You need to have an idea of how much money you have to put into something and how much time you have to put into something.

Those both are going to be a big part of starting something new. If you are working a 9:00 to 5:00 job, you need to figure out how you are going to exit it. If you want to be an entrepreneur and have control and freedom, you are going to have to work your 9:00 to 5:00 and then come back and work your 6:00 to 12:00.

You are going to have to put that type of work ethic in if you want to escape that job. You are going to have to figure out where your situation is right now what's all going on and where you are at, but then also decide where you want to go. It doesn't matter what you are going to do to get there. You need to know where you want to end up. You need to have a vision in your mind of what you want to achieve because if you can't see it, you can't create it.

You should be creating a future vision of yourself of what you want to have, how you want to look, who you want to have relationships with, the type of business you want to have, the house, the cars, and all this type of stuff because everything in life comes from the three-step process. You have the intellectual side, the emotional side, and then the physical manifestation side.

You probably never heard anybody relate this to Think and Grow Rich, but what's the point's famous thing? Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve. If you break this down, this wolf on the wall behind me did not get up here and show up in the physical world. There had to be something that happened before. Everything starts with a conceptual understanding, the intellectual side of the mind. You have to have a thought in your mind first. Meaning, I want to paint something on the wall. If you don't have that thought, then you can't create a picture of what you want to paint.

The first thing comes with an intellectual understanding or a thought that creates a picture or a vision in the mind, and then now we have the ability to get emotionally involved in that thought or that picture of that vision. Now think about what we want. I'm going to paint the Mona Lisa on the wall. Now if I get emotionally involved in it enough, I want to do this. I'm going to take the risk to buy the paint and take the time to do all this.

As I can see it in my mind, I can create it in the physical world. Everything, if you think about it, comes through that three-step process. If you look at what Napoleon is saying, whatever the mind can conceive, meaning whatever we can intellectually conceive and understand in the mind, the conception of the thought, whatever we believe, the emotional involvement in it. Now, I have an idea that I want to start a business, get into a relationship, start sports, or whatever it is.

Now I can emotionally involve myself in it. If your emotional involvement in it is high enough, you will pursue what you are doing for long enough that the physical manifestation process will have it. Now you can achieve it. A different way of saying what Napoleon is saying there. Whatever the mind can't conceive and believe, it can't achieve.

Whatever you can intellectually think about first in the mind and control it as a thought, you can create a picture in the mind and that vision can be now emotionally attached to it. Once we have a high enough emotional attachment to it like, “For sure, I'm going to build my eXp team to 1,000 agents no matter what.” You tie that emotion to it and then stick with it long enough and the physical results will happen.

This is also why people don't understand why you set goals and why you write your goals on pen and paper. If you think about a goal, it's a dream. When you put on pen and paper, what are you doing? You are writing down in word form, describing a picture that you are going to see visually in your mind. When you are writing something, you cannot not think a thought.

You are trying to write something like, “Where are you going to go to dinner tonight?” Try to write where you are going to go and not have the thought come first of the place that you want to go eat. It has to come as you are writing it. You can't think of something that you are not writing, which is why we write our goals because it creates a thought and our thoughts can create the picture and the picture we can emotionally evolve in, which can cause us to go out there and have the results.

What we focus on, we move toward, and so you need to create the picture of what you want to have in your future. I got one on my vision board right here. I got a lot of them to show you guys I do this. This one is in my room. This right here, I get my new boat. I will get my new boat. I wanted it. I thought about it and I have been doing this for several years.

I think about what I want and then I put it in front of me and I focus on it, and then that's the starting process of where you are going to move towards and then you are going to figure out what you are going to do and it may change. I started on poker. I had to move back from my parents. I went into insurance, and then I went into real estate. I got on YouTube and then that led to eXp down the road and now, here we are.

The doors that you go through at one point are going to open up other doors and other opportunities. Don't worry about what's happening along the way. GPS knows the outcome and where you are starting. Take one step forward every day and eventually, those directions will fill in along the way as long as you keep moving towards your goals every single day. That's what I'm telling you.

Take one step forward every day and eventually, those directions will fill in along the way.

We are going to jump into the Lightning Round with the Lady Boss. Thirty seconds or less, you have to answer these questions, just whatever comes to mind. People would be surprised that you spend so much time doing what?

Fast fishing. I like fishing.

They wouldn't be surprised. I see it on Instagram.

Not now. In the beginning, I'm not big on showing my personal life. I'm there too much. People are like, “You got to show more of what you do.” I don't do much. I work all day. I go to the gym. I read, I watch a little bit of TV, and I go fishing. They are like, “Start posting your fishing stuff.” I started posting fishing.

I feel you there. I don't like stuff out there either. Chipotle or Chick-fil-A?

I like them both though, but Chick-fil-A.

Your favorite way to spend downtime.

Sleeping.

Get that booty rest.

You work more hours as an entrepreneur, and sleep is very important so I try to catch up as much as I can sleep.

What are you addicted to?

Probably progression maybe. I'm always trying to move forward towards my goals. If you think about what I put my time into, it's trying to hit my goals in the gym, trying to hit my goals fishing, and trying to hit my goals in business. Everything I'm focusing on, if you think about my thoughts, is something on what can I do to do now to do better tomorrow, improve, or grow in whatever I'm putting my time into. Achievement and progression.

That's a great thing to be addicted to versus something like popcorn. What are you reading right now?

There's a book that I'm like halfway through that I need to finally finish this. It's called The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. I started reading it and I read a little bit. I had a bad habit of not reading as much as I used to, but then I do when I travel. I do it on the planes. I will get a third of a book in, tell myself I will read the rest on the way back, and then sleep or forget. I sometimes will finish books. I used to read a lot, probably 4 to 6 books a month. Now, I try to read maybe 4 to 6 books a year. Not because I don't want to, it's more of as you get further in your development journey, you are more implementing things that you have already learned.

More lifetime learning from them but I still listen to like a lot of podcasts and audio. I was listening to Bob Proctor. I try to do 2 things at 1 time all the time but try to teach how to have a 30-hour day. The way you have a 30-hour day is to compress six 1-hour activities with another activity. There are three different types of breakdowns of activities we do on a day. We have mental, physical, and relationship focuses and you can't do two of those at the same time usually.

For example, you can't read a book and listen to a podcast at the same time. Those are two mental practices, but I could run on the treadmill or run outside and listen to a podcast where I'm having a mental and a physical. If I combine those 2 and I'm doing 1 hour, now I have a 25-hour a day because I multitask. If you guys work for 6 hours a day, and so my goal is to create a 30-hour day every day and I did a training on this for our teams. I'm looking to separate all the tasks I do, how can I do more than 1 thing at 1 time? That's how time compression and multitasking are going to accelerate how fast you get your goals.

Best piece of advice you have ever received.

Never quit. Keep going.

Most embarrassing moment.

I have some embarrassing moments that are a little depressing but they are getting picked on or something like that, but they are probably not good stories. I'm trying to think of something where I'm embarrassed by a lot of people. You stop me. I don’t know if I get embarrassed very often.

I asked a lot of power players, “What were your embarrassing moments?” Most of the time, they say, “I don't get embarrassed all too easily. I just roll with it.” Maybe that's a success principle. That's interesting.

To get embarrassed you have to feel a negative emotion about, “I wish I would have done something differently,” and have regret. I try to not live in regret, hold grudges, or anything like that. When bad things happen, I try to push past them as fast as I can. I don't dwell on these types of things. I get embarrassed misspeaking on a stage or something. It doesn't stay in the mind. Let’s put it that way. I do things that probably most people would be embarrassed for, but I don't dwell on it and I let it go out of my mind. I don't even think about it. Everything I'm doing, I'm thinking forward so I rarely think of past thoughts.

Try to not live in regret and hold grudges. When bad things happen, push past them as fast as you can and don’t dwell in them.

When I think about it, I rarely think of the past, which is interesting because someone asked me that. Almost all my thoughts are forward-thinking. They are always forward-thinking. You can't be dwelling on things that if we were embarrassing you, things that were in the past because you are not dwelling on them. There's probably stuff like I was bullied a little bit like every kid coming up in school and stuff like that probably were the most embarrassing things.

I had one coach who used to pick on me. I played a lot of sports and I won. I didn't grow super tall. I had kids shoot up to 6-foot and I was still 5’5” or something like that. I grew a little slower than most kids. My coach would always do stuff to embarrass me in front of the team at the state tournament. For my free throws, I'd shoot a little short and hit the front of the rim. He'd say I have to shoot it over the full backboard to show that I cannot short, and he'd embarrass me in front of everybody.

I don't understand what goes on in the coach's head sometimes. I'm upset.

I told the story at the Virginia speech where I was talking about how I wanted to quit this every single day. I hated being in it, but my dad would never let me quit because my dad understood if I quit that, it would create a pattern of understanding that when things get tough, I can back off and quit. Even though my dad was well aware I was being abused in public and it was horrible, he knew that I needed to go through that so I could stand up against it and that once I finished the season, he let me not do another season but he wouldn't have quit that last season. That was a very tough time in my life. I will probably tell stories on other sides because I had some other crazy stuff playing sports, but that's probably where I was most embarrassed when he was doing that type of stuff to me.

Coffee or chocolate, what would be harder to give up?

Chocolate.

Describe yourself in one word.

I’d say weird.

We have a church series talking about how weird is the best way of going about it versus default and in the box. Weird is where it's at.

I wouldn’t say weird. It’s more like not cut from the same cloth as most people because most of my family and most people you grow up around all moved down that same path. I went outside of the world I came from to go in a different direction. Outside the normal path. Not weird. Weird sounds bad.

Any last words of wisdom?

If you are going through anything right now, know that in the present moment, it's going to seem horrific, you are cursed, everything is coming down upon you, it's not what's supposed to be happening in your life, and it's not worth living. It’s sheer chaos and you are in the middle of the storm. Know that in the present, what you will find out later in hindsight in the future, if you try to get out of that, you make a plan to get out of it and work hard to get out of it, you will look back at what you are living through right now as an opportunity or a blessing. The one thing that helped me a lot was when I came across what's called the Law of Polarity.

It's an understanding that there's always an opposite or there can't be one without the other. You have to have an up and a down, left and right, hot and cold, day and night, inside and outside and all. There's always an opposite. What that means is in hindsight, reflection when my poker career went away, it was such a bad moment that I didn't want to be here anymore.

Now looking back, if that moment had not happened and I had not gone through that, it would not have stopped my path where I was going poker world for so long. I would have kept going down that path. Instead, I had to go through that. It led me to a different path which led me to where I'm at now. When I look at that moment, it's simultaneously the worst moment that ever happened to me, but I didn't know that it was the best moment in total in hindsight, looking back.

What I want you to understand is the problems that you are facing is a gift and it's not a curse. It's something that you are going through that's going to make you strong enough to become the person that's going to hold the success that you are chasing later. It's normal to be lost and feel alone and struggle, but I promise you, if you keep going, you are going to get out of it. You can't quit and go backward to what you were doing before. You have to plow forward and go straight towards the goal that you had originally. No matter how dark it looks, no storm is going to last forever.

It’s such a great way to end the episode. Connor, thank you from the bottom of both of our hearts for jumping on. You slate it. I want you to share where can people connect with you on your YouTube channel and your Instagram. Share both of those.

My Instagram is my name Connor Steinbrook. I didn't do a lot with Instagram. I built and I decided. I started posting on there, so now you can see me being active on there. The main YouTube channel that I'm hosting right now is my brand, Connor Steinbrook. If you are trying to get into investing and things like that, which a lot of you guys are, I still have 300 or 400 videos on that Investor Army channel.

Thank you, Connor. As I say every single time, this is your opportunity to fire your fear, build your faith, and become the boss of your own life. Let's get after it. Thanks so much.

About Connor Steinbrook

2003-2011 - Professional poker player (online most of my career)

2011-2013 - Dark years where everything fell apart until falling into the Personal Development World

2014 - Present - Full-time Investor (wholesaling, flipping, rentals, notes, land, and mobile homes)

Built Investor Army my real estate investing YouTube channel to 40,000 subs

2018 - Got my real estate license to join eXp Realty

Founder of the Wolfpack Organization at eXp

Currently we have just under 2850 agents with agents in all 50 states and 14 countries. We have already sold 8000 houses give or take this year in 2023.

At the end of July we were ranked for the year #3 for total NET agent growth globally at exp.

Launched a new YouTube channel under my personal brand "Connor Steinbrook" a year ago.

PodcastStefanie PetersSeptember 1, 2023Poker Player, Wealth Quadrant, Self-Development, Flipping Houses, Real Estate Wholesaling, Creative Finance