- I have invested more than $3 million
sharpening my saw as Stephen Covey would say.
In this video episode,
I'm going to share the third
of many secrets in this particular series,
"Doug Andrew's Secrets."
And a lot of people maybe have heard me reference
that I've invested 3 million bucks sharpening my saw,
but they wonder how, where.
So I'm gonna reveal this to you in this episode.
(upbeat music)
So, again, I'm Doug Andrew,
and I've been helping people optimize assets
and minimize taxes as a financial strategist
and retirement planning specialist
now for nearly five decades.
And during that 50 years,
I've been very, very blessed to have
learned a lot from rubbing shoulders
from some of the top minds on planet Earth
and belonging to mastermind groups,
also by learning, and implementing, and sharing.
Okay, sharing is having more.
The word TEAM is an acronym that stands for
together everyone achieves more.
So when I go out throughout the country and I speak,
a lot of times people realize,
"Golly, he's authored 12 books.
And where did he get all this?
This is over 3,000 pages of information and what have you."
Where did I get all that knowledge or wisdom?
Well, I'm gonna share with you.
In our family, we believe in education more than school.
Yeah.
I think we should go to school to get certain
background experience and knowledge,
but I actually have learned far more
from out of the classroom in the real world,
and I'm gonna share with you in this episode
some of the groups, mastermind groups, that I belong to
where I have invested the bulk of that $3 million.
It was not getting
a PhD, or an MBA, or anything like that.
In fact, out of that 3 million,
a very, very small amount of money
went towards my college education.
The book of my education came from
mastermind groups.
Okay?
And so, yes, I learned some of the basics in college,
but, frankly, I would get a little bit antsy
in an economics class or statistics class,
business management class in college
because, to be honest with you,
many times, I knew more than the professor did.
I remember many, many times sitting in a class
and listening to this elementary approach
of follow the herd and this is what you do.
And I was just, just like...
And then I would bring up a contrarian approach or whatever,
and the professor would be very intrigued,
but it is like, "Where did you hear that?"
or, "Where did you come up with that?
That's not in the textbook."
And so I've never really bought into some of the things
that are taught in college classes in textbooks.
I actually have learned far more
from the mega wealthy people
who actually many times do exactly the opposite
of what they tell you to do in a textbook,
or an accounting class, or a financial planning class,
financial literacy, okay?
It's sort of like when Ross Perot one time
was invited to come and speak
to the graduating class at Harvard.
They never invited him back again. Why?
Because when he got there,
he said to all of these graduates, these graduating seniors,
"I want all of you
who got a 4.0 here at Harvard
to stand up."
And they all stood up and...
He said, "Okay, sit down."
He says, "Now, I want all of you C students to stand up."
And they're like, "Ugh."
And they stood up and sort of hung their heads down,
and, "What are you gonna point out here?"
And he said, "I want all of you A students
to take a real good look at these C students
'cause they're the ones you're probably
going to be working for."
Now what was his point?
In fact, later he says,
"You don't learn a blankety-blank thing
until you get outta college," which is true.
So many doctors, dentists, orthodontists, chiropractors
tell me they thought they knew it all
when they graduated from medical school or whatever.
And then 10 years into their practice,
they looked back and went,
"I didn't know anything.
In fact, I had to unlearn."
In fact, a lot of times,
when I would have business people
come and apply for a job at our firm,
if they told me they had an MBA I thought,
"Oh dear, don't tell me that.
I'm gonna have to unlearn you."
Because of all this textbook stuff.
Okay, I learned most of my successful strategies
by trial and error,
but in the real world, not in a classroom.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so what were some of these organizations
that I belonged to?
If you remember the book "Think and Grow Rich,"
Napoleon Hill,
he interviewed over a thousand self-made millionaires,
and there were 16 general characteristics
that were sort of common among these self-made millionaires,
but there were the top five.
And among those,
they had a specialized knowledge,
they had an entrepreneurial spirit,
they were decisive in nature,
but they belonged to a mastermind team.
They collaborated with other successful people.
They learned more from collaboration with masterminds
than they did in sitting in a classroom
in an outdated textbook with a professor
who maybe couldn't make it in the in the business world
and so they went and taught college.
And that's not true of all professors, but a lot of them,
they go to teaching because they couldn't make it
in the real world and so forth.
So I began to realize that I could learn more
from rubbing shoulders with some of the top
entrepreneurs in the world,
rather than being in a college classroom.
Okay?
Now, same thing with my family, with my sons.
They've experienced the same thing.
Some of them got so antsy in colleagues,
they couldn't even stand to sit there
because they knew more than the professors did
about the particular topic they were studying.
They learned by looking at real tax returns,
instead of hypothetical ones
that were out of date in a textbook
because they would look at hundreds of tax returns
as they met with my clients.
In the classroom, they were looking at
outdated hypothetical tax returns.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
So rubbings shoulders.
One of the first groups
that I actually should have belonged to sooner than later.
I actually had a coach.
He was wonderful.
He was a life balance coach,
and I learned a lot from him.
But I met Dan Sullivan in 1992,
and I met him in in Naples, Florida
at a Top of the Table convention.
And I was in the top 500 financial advisors in the world.
And I thought, you know what, I do need to
belong to that group.
I didn't think I would qualify yet.
I should have started.
when I finally joined Strategic Coach
at the turn of the century around the year 2000,
yeah, it was a heavy investment.
You pay 25,000 bucks to be in that room.
And then later on, I went to the higher level one,
and you had to pay $50,000 to be in that room.
Now, some of those who pay that
pay it because of who's not gonna be in the room, okay?
Those that wanna sit there and be spoon fed
or take up time with questions that are down here,
instead of putting skin in the game
and learning a lot of the things
so that you can start out a conversation
one day every quarter at this level,
instead of this lower level of being spoon fed.
These are self-motivated.
They had batteries included.
So I was surrounding myself with other entrepreneurs
that had batteries included so to speak.
And so it was worth it.
And at first, I thought,
am I gonna get a return on my investment?
I belonged to Strategic Coach for 20 years.
Okay, 20 years.
Was it a cost?
No, it was an investment.
I got a return of well over 10 times,
probably closer to 20 times,
what I invested belonging to Strategic Coach.
That was a big chunk of the $3 million
that I invested sharpening my saw.
And I learned so many ways to think.
So Strategic Coach, he's a master at helping you think,
and collaborate, and bounce things off,
and articulating in a setting where other like-minded,
quick-start, out-of-the-box thinkers are all together.
You start bouncing off your ideas
with people who don't do that,
and they're like, "What are you talking about?"
And so it allowed me once a quarter to go and think.
And so we would go through thinking exercises
in the morning, the afternoon, and early evening,
and we would articulate it.
Then we could come back home and we could pick
the three projects we were going to implement that quarter.
That was a game changer, okay?
That was a return on investment.
It was in Strategic Coach I met Joe Polish.
And Joe Polish is a connector of people.
I mean, you can be talking to him,
and he'll say, "You need to talk to Richard Branson.
he's probably on Necker Island right now.
Hold on, let me get him on FaceTime."
And he would pull him up and say,
"Hey, this is Doug Andrew.
He's got an idea and I think you could help him, Richard."
And so he was just so connected
and like with Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post
before she sold it.
And he got me talking to her
and all kinds of other people
that's called the Genius Network,
but it was originally called 25K
because you had to pay 25,000 to be in that room.
Okay?
That was not a cost.
That was an investment.
And so, we would pay 25,000
to gather together three times a year,
and we would be in groups of about 50 or 60
for two of those meetings.
The other one would be a large conference
for two or three days.
That was always like over the top investment.
It was not a cost.
How am I gonna pay for this?
I learned very quickly.
No, I can't wait to go
'cause I'm going to make a hundred, 200,000.
In fact, when you go to the Genius Network,
he gives you a sheet of paper that holds
10 ideas worth a quarter of a million or more,
and I would fill out 2 1/2 sheets of that.
I'd fill out 25 ideas worth a quarter of a million or more.
It wasn't, do I have any ideas?
No, which ones am I gonna implement?
He had another one that was just elegant ideas sheet,
and that would have 10, or 15, or 20 elegant ideas.
Those are only worth maybe 10 grand.
The point is that was an investment, okay?
Another mastermind group that I belonged to
was called Positive Deviant Network
headed up by Marshall Thurber.
How would you like to be called a deviant?
Yeah.
And Marshall just said
humanity in the masses is like a bell curve,
and a lot of the masses occur in the middle,
but there are negative deviants
like the Hitlers of the world,
who affected the world negatively.
But they were the positive deviants
like Edison, Lincoln, Christ.
These are positive,
and he said, "I want to create a network
of 20 positive deviants that are affecting the world
for the positive."
Sort of the concept that
just the tipping point as Malcolm Gladwell would say.
And when he read my book, he said,
"Doug, your strategies are going to change the world."
So I was invited to be in this group
of 20 positive deviants,
and then he invited 20 developing deviants
to come and just observe.
They couldn't participate.
They could observe as we sort of shared ideas and so forth.
Those would be two-day events once every four months.
That was never a cost.
It was always an investment that I gotta return on.
Another one was 12 Leaders with Dr. Robert Cooper,
one of the world's top neuroscientist.
You paid $75,000 to be in that group for one year.
You only met three times.
So that's 75 grand for three meetings,
and there were three huge takeaways
that has returned 10 to 20 times
on that 75,000.
Then there's Abundance360.
Sometimes people talk about, well, how's Vistage?
Vistage is a good place to start.
There's one here locally called Brilliant Minds Group.
There's the CEO Space.
there's the Hero Group.
These are all different mastermind groups.
The point is this.
When I began to realize that belonging
to a group of other like-minded people
that you could collaborate with,
it was not a cost.
It was an investment.
On the 3 million plus that I've invested
in my career sharpening my saw,
I would estimate my return has been well over $100 million.
Okay. Pretty good return, right?
So let me just say this.
Have a lifetime learning commitment.
That spells LLC.
We have LLCs in our family.
People think I'm talking about limited liability companies.
In our family, LLC means a lifetime learning commitment.
Never stop learning.
Now if this is resonating with
and if you're a business owner,
you ought to get a free copy of my book
called "The 10 Keys Transformation."
And you will learn a lot about that.
You can go to free10, the number 10, free10keysbook.com.
If you want to, as a member of the general public,
learn about asset optimization
I wanna gift you a copy of this book.
It's called "The LASER Fund."
It's actually two books in one.
This side is about 200 pages, 14 chapters,
with all the charts and graphs.
You flip it over to this side.
This is for the right brain learner,
about 100 pages, 12 chapters,
with 62 "Chicken Soup for the Financial Soul" stories.
You can use your whole brain and read both books.
But you simply go to laserfund.com
L-A-S-E-R-F-U-N-D .com
or click on the link below.
You contribute a nominal amount
towards the shipping and handling.
You put some skin in the game.
I'll cover the rest
of the cost of the shipping and handling.
I'll pay for the book.
I'll fire out a hard copy to you.
It'll come priority mail.
And there's options there to listen and learn,
watch and learn,
but check out some of the educational webinars we teach.
And you can even schedule a time to talk
to some of the top creme dela creme financial advisors
in the entire country by plugging in and putting
a slot in their calendar if you would like.
But this is about you and your brighter future,
and now you know the third secret about Doug Andrew
and why I have invested over $3 million
and it was not in college.
It was when I got out of school.
(gentle music)