Professional Learners Don’t Get Paid

Learning can feel productive, but it often isn’t. In this episode, I’ll explain why consuming more information keeps many people stuck, and why real progress only starts when you stop learning and start doing.

[0:12]
I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The ListBuilding Lifestyle. The podcast is for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[1:05]
Learning can be a form of procrastination. How a lot of people are have now become professional learners, and as a result, they’ve conditioned themselves to feel like learning or attending a class or reading a book or watching a course is actually progress, when in reality, it’s not progress.

How do I know? Because I’ve now stopped counting how many times people joined my programs and told me, hey, Igor, this is my last resort. This is the last thing that I’m going to try. I’m going to give it all my best.

I’m going to give it my best shot. You’re the last guy that I’m sending money to, to finally get this done and build my online business, because I’ve been trying for 10 years, and I haven’t made any progress. And when I get chatting with them and I start digging, because I love to dig, I don’t know, it’s just something, I always like to get down to the bottom of something to make sense of it all, because many things in life on surface make absolutely no sense.

Like, why would a beautiful, gorgeous woman be with an abusive, low-life boyfriend? You know, how many of these have you met in your life, right? And I’ve seen so many of these. I was like, she can do better. Certainly she can do better.

You know what I mean? And he’s treating her like shit, and he’s not making money. She’s the breadwinner. He’s just staying at home drinking. It’s like, what is going on? And, you know, so I always like to get down to the bottom, to the very, very bottom, to the core of something that I don’t understand.

[2:50]
And so for many years, I did not understand how is it possible for people to be learning how to make money online for 10 years, 12 years, 15 years, 20 years, and still not making money online? Sure, I wasn’t the fastest to figure it out myself. It took me, like I said, three and a half years.

I’ve told this story many times, you know, but I’ve tried things, you know, like I’ve given my best shot to social media. I’ve given my best shot to blogging. I gave my best shot to launch sniping and everything.

Eventually, I figured that I had to build a list, and that’s what I committed to and, you know, broke through. But how can you go for 10 years or 15 years and not have anything to show for it? And to get down to the bottom of this, I had to just interview a lot of people, a lot of people who just found themselves in this situation. And the core reason why people ended up in this predicament is because they became professional learners.

They became great at investing in education and not implementing the education. So they could recite by heart a book, a course. They could quote a guru a thousand different ways, but they can’t implement.

They don’t implement. Not that they can’t, they don’t implement. Like, for example, they know everything about building the perfect email sequence because they took a course from Russell Bronson.

They took a course from me. They took a course from Ben Settle. They took a course from Dan Kennedy.

They took a course from Yannick Silver. They took a course from Perry Belcher, Ryan Dice, Alex Hermosi, Alex Becker. They took a course from everybody, but they haven’t written a single email sequence themselves.

Or if they did, they did write an email sequence, they did not set it live. Or if they did write an email sequence and set it live in their email sending tool, they didn’t go and actually generate the leads to go through that sequence. And then they went on to buy the next course.

So eventually they became extremely knowledgeable, but they did not become extremely successful. And that’s, in my opinion, that’s a tragedy. It’s the reality of the world we live in.

[5:09]
And by the way, it’s true for every industry, but it’s a tragedy. And so I kind of developed an allergy almost to learning new things. Like, I felt like I can’t really go and learn new things.

And by learn, I mean, read about new things, watch courses, it just became noise. I really don’t know how else to describe it. Everything that was a new information intake for me, whether it was stuff that I didn’t know or stuff that I already knew, became noise for me.

My brain would just tune it out. And so that was the mental switch. That’s the point where I made the switch to just go and do stuff.

Meaning, okay, someone was bragging about their webinar converting because they created a two-tier offer on the webinar. Now, the old Igor would basically go, find a course on that, study that course for several hours, go through a planning phase for a week. The new version of me, after that switch would be like, oh, a two-tier offer.

Interesting. I would just find someone making an offer like that. And I would just completely model it.

And I say, okay, so they’re selling a $500 course. It’s a core training for 500. But if you get the premium version for a thousand bucks, they get the course, a coaching call, five bonuses and something else.

I said, okay, I can try that. So I take an existing offer of mine and I create a hybrid offer and I stack it up like this and I test. If it sells well, great.

If it doesn’t sell well, I tweak and I test again. And if that doesn’t work, I scrape it and move on. Right.

But I do it, all that I do while someone else is still learning. Okay. Then they’re getting ready to get ready.

I’ve already done the testing and I’m either making more money or I’m moving on to the next idea. Okay. So making that switch, going from professional learner who’s just there to consume information, consume knowledge and accumulate, accumulate, accumulate to somebody who is a practitioner is an incredibly important switch.

[7:38]
All of you will have to make at some point if you still haven’t. So think, how does somebody become a doctor or a good doctor? First they go to med school and they just accumulate knowledge for a few years, right? But then at some point they have to switch and then they actually have to go and work in a hospital, work in the ER, you know, drain some blood, pump some blood. They have to do stuff and that’s how they become better.

That’s where they actually, really, truly learn. Until then, it’s all theory. You learn on the job.

And that’s actually the great, the big, I think, scam of the modern day education system. Today, we were sending our kids to school and they’re spending, I don’t know what, seven, eight years in that, you know, facility and they come out and they know nothing. They know jack shit.

They certainly don’t know anything about the way life works. They know next to nothing about money besides the fact that you can buy stuff with money. They have no idea how to earn the money.

They’re being told this bold-faced lie about you having to go and work for someone to make it. They’re not being taught anything about credit cards, about interest, about the way the financial system works. They’re not being taught anything about the way you are a cog in that machine.

I was just talking to a friend of mine who owns a few properties in Toronto and he was telling me that he was reviewing an application by a 24-year-old who was applying to rent a unit of his. And this 24-year-old already had six different credit cards and balance on all of them. 24-year-old had more credit card debt, okay, at 24 than most people have probably in their 40s.

Also has a student loan. And where does he work? He’s a waiter. He’s a server at a bar.

That’s somebody who, I think, the education system failed, okay? He’s learning about the real world when it’s too late. He’s learning about it as he goes and he’s making terrible, terrible mistakes.

[10:07]
Now that’s where mentoring could come in handy for someone to actually, you know, mentor him while he’s living his life, right? For example, I got when the Ukrainian-Russian war started, a bunch of Ukrainian people moved to the area where I used to live in Toronto and I started mentoring this kid.

Now it was a very frustrating experience trying to mentor somebody from a poor family with a very, very bad mindset and lots of raging hormones at that age. But I finally was able to break through to him to a point where not only he got rid of the debt he did have, but also he’s been able to save about $8,000 in the last three months, okay? He was able to get a car without debt and he’s also helping his mother with the bills, who’s really struggling because she’s a single mom. But that mentoring was happening in the real world, okay? Kind of like what we’re doing here.

You know, I’m not just telling you what to do. I’m showing you what to do and I’m hoping you actually do it too, because that’s where you go and you learn how it’s done. So I recommend to attend fewer classes and to go and implement things.

Now, not to say that you don’t want to learn new things. Of course you do, especially in the beginning when you’re still, there’s a lot to learn. But make sure you’re implementing at least as much time as you’re learning.

So if you’ve allocated four hours a week to this business, make sure that two hours of that is an implementation. At least, preferably three hours. One hour learning, three hours implementation, that’s the ratio that you would want to see.

[11:56]
Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package!