Doctor? Lawyer? – You’ve got to be kidding.

The careers held up to us all our lives — being a doctor, a lawyer — make absolutely no sense to me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad someone out there wants to do it. But I’m equally glad it’s not me caught in that trap.

The sheer amount of time and money it takes to even become a doctor or a lawyer makes me twitch and start thinking of making a run for the beach or the woods …

But it’s the actual day to day drudgery of what you actually have to do if you are trapped in one of those jobs that makes my head spin. (There’s a Thoreau quote I’d like to toss in here, and will when I dig out my copy of Walden. Something about the tortures endured by modern man, chained to his desk, trapped in his cubicle and worried about management taking his stapler … oh, wait, that’s actually the movie Office Spaces.)

Back to doctors and lawyers.

You can keep ‘em. I wouldn’t trade my freedom for that racket for any amount of money. Give up my ability to travel around the world at my discretion? Give up my ability to call my own shots? Give up my ability to sleep in if I want to, stay up late if I want to, spend a month on a sailboat if I want to?

Nope.

Doctors and lawyers spend ungodly sums of money to get their educations and then go into practice, work 60 to 80 hours a week for decades, and have to be in their offices every day dealing with human misery and unhappiness.

I think I’ll pass. And take the rest of the afternoon off.

More Insanity

I just read something I had heard once before: the average franchise in America (not even the big ones, but something like a coffee shop or a Quizno’s Subs or a UPS Store — that kind of thing) costs about $250,000 before you can even open the doors! And then there are massive monthly operating expenses, employee hassles, tax nightmares, insurance, permits, hundreds of things.

And then?

The average time to start making a profit is 5 years!

And along the way?

You have a full-time (more than full-time) JOB!

Good gravy, who wants THAT???

Impossible to Do Anything Else

Went to dinner last night at a wonderful Thai restaurant. Stopped in next door at a new shop — clothing and jewelry, imported from Morocco, the shop run by a couple who had just moved here from France.

And I actually felt sorry for them. I asked them about their story, what brought them to Venice, Florida, and so forth. The amount of effort and clearly the amount of money they had put into getting this little shop opened up … not to mention the amount of TIME they have put in (and continue to put in, every day, seven days a week) … And I am looking around and they’re getting maybe a couple of people now and then strolling through, very few buying anything, and even those who do buy, maybe spending ten, twenty, fifty bucks (of which maybe 50% is profit?).

I look at that and I almost get dizzy with how crazy that all is.

These people are investing huge amounts of money, effort, time — and for what??? A JOB! And not a very well-paying job even.

I’ll return to this theme. I see it all around me. Everywhere you look, you see people slaving away at JOBS that aren’t taking them anywhere; people trapped in paycheck-to-paycheck survival mode; people working themselves to death to maybe attract more business — which translates to MORE WORK and LESS TIME.

It’s insanity.

Then I look at the opportunities I am exploring online, these incredible systems that enable us to build (very easily) long-term residual income streams … these systems that enables us to build lives of freedom.

I mean … after you see something like that and know it’s possible … how can you ever go back?

Don’t Get Me Started on the Mortgage Business

OK. I admit it. I wasn’t cut out for the mortgage business. I think I could have become damn good at it — all of the strategic equity stuff, the Mortgage Coach, Steven Marshall’s Strategic Equity and Douglas Andrew’s Missed Fortune and TEAM concept, the Loan Toolbox, Todd Duncan from morning to night.  But in the end, it just wasn’t the way I want to earn a living, or live my life.

My friend was doing very well at it, and I thought I saw a way to make a heap of money (and by a heap, I mean $20K months).   I immersed myself in the industry, lived and breathed the material night and day, studied it to the exclusion of about everything else, ultimately may have ruined my marriage over it, moved to Texas, and came out the other side exhausted and disillusioned.

Fact is, you can make a lot of money in mortgage consulting. (Or could. It’s getting a lot harder now and times are getting skinny.)

But in the end, it is still a job.

And in truth, it’s not a very fun job. Even if you can make a lot of money at it, the sheer amount of work and grief you have to go through to earn a commission is positively horrific.

Selling medical equipment is easier. Total time invested in a given client when selling him a sterilizer that might earn you $500 to $2000? Call it 15 – 30 minutes. That’s not very bad. Selling an ultrasound that might earn you the same amount? Maybe an hour or two, tops. If you know what you’re talking about, and you have marketed successfully to bring in the business, actually closing the deal isn’t all that time-consuming, and unless something weird happens, grief is kept to a minimum.

Mortgages are different.

Mortgages can be hell on wheels. Things exploding. Paperwork everywhere. Clients that want to commoditize you in spite of the value you can bring to the consultation. Realtors giving you grief. Title companies giving you grief. Lenders doing their crazy lender thing, threatening the deal at every turn.

Just too many damn wheels that have to turn. Too much paperwork to work through. And if you really want to earn a lot of money at it, you are going to need staff to manage and an office to live at.

The problem with both of these is that you have to be there, working, to earn an income. You have to be there closing the next deal, and the next deal, and the next deal.  If you aren’t there in the trenches every day, you are not making money. And the more money you want to earn, the harder you are going to have to work.

In the end, even if this market turns around again, the mortgage business might be lucrative, but it’s just too damn much grief.

And try to take six months off to hike New Zealand.

Ain’t gonna happen.

Regular Businesses Suck

I have several businesses in motion. I’m phasing out of a mortgage consultancy in Dallas, delegating most of a real estate investment group I’ve put together in Ohio and in West Palm Beach, and trying my best to automate & delegate more and more of my medical equipment company in Venice, Florida.

I earn a fine living. But I’m not really getting much living in.

For example. I spent about two hours, altogether, selling an ultrasound to a doctor. Even after another hour on the phone with him helping train him on the system, and even after maybe another hour on the combined paperwork and so forth, my total time invested was maybe four hours to earn the commission. A respectable effort, which put me on a par with what a really good lawyer earns as an hourly rate.

But there’s more to it. I would rather do this than be a lawyer, but the picture isn’t perfect yet. What gets left out here are the hours of work I’ve put in not selling that ultrasound. And then, today, the hours I’ve had to put in dealing with the ultrasound when it turned out to have a problem.

Whenever you sell something, you run into a few problems inherent in the whole arrangment:

1.) If it’s a physical something, you usually have to ship it. You might have to stock it even, before you ship it, which is worse still. You have to worry about it breaking in shipping. You have to worry about them not liking it or driving you crazy with questions about it or wanting to return it after a week.

2.) Even if it’s not physical, you still have to actually SELL it. You sell it, you make some money. Then you have to go out and sell another one. If you don’t sell another one, you don’t make any more. This is a problem.

The beauty of a residual income stream is that it’s … residual. The money eventually just keeps coming in. You get it in motion, and it all rolls in. And even when you are first getting started, with it being a web-based business, it’s working around the clock for you, everything is automated!

The traditional business might be for some people.

I’m done with it.