At the very core of finding one’s prosperity is establishing the sort of financial freedom that affords you a powerful peace inside. If it’s prosperity you seek at the end of the day, there’s a lot of sacrifice required, and you have to be ready to put in those long hours if it truly is something you want. John Soforic, the author of The Wealthy Gardener, is back to talk about his book with Marco Santarelli. John focuses on the concept of sacrifice, doing what you have to do in order for you and the people you love to live a prosperous life. If that is indeed what you’re looking for in life, learn from John, and find your way to this special prosperity.
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The Wealthy Gardener – Lessons On Prosperity (Part 2)
This is part two of my interview with John Soforic, the author of The Wealthy Gardener, Lessons on Prosperity Between Father and Son. It’s lessons on prosperity for anybody and everybody regardless of who you are and your age. This is an incredible book. If you didn’t read part one, I strongly suggest you stop this episode, go back, read part one of my interview with John and the book The Wealthy Gardener. It is chock-full of great information and it continues to stack on top of each other and get better and better. The book is a great book. It’s written in a story format but it’s built on 55 principles and lessons that are great for you, for your children and their children and so on because principles are timeless. It’s a heartwarming story full of practical wisdom on entrepreneurship and wealth. Each lesson unfolds as the story goes on and it builds on top of each other. I was taken back and touched by it. I had some great conversations with John outside of the interview and all of that shows through in the interview that I had with him. Without further ado, let us get on to part two of my interview with John Soforic. I hope you enjoy it and let me know what you think of it.
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Your book is full of lessons. There are 55 lessons, is that correct?
Yes, on the powers of wealth, that alone.
What people might not realize and I have this conversation is that we’ve already covered a small number of the lessons that you go into in the book. We’re talking about it conversationally and not laying it out in bullet point form but this is how the book unfolds and we’re going to talk about a few more of them here. I know I’ve told my wife this and I’ve certainly told my daughter is that I never want to be average because being average in the US is being broke. I don’t want to be there. You talk about this lesson of being unrealistic. My question to you is, why do you say that it is impossible for an average person to achieve wealth?
I wrote a book for my son, Marco. If you’re writing a book for your son, you want to give the harshest truths. I wasn’t writing a book that I wanted to say, “I am going to try to massage the mass population. I’m going to try to make people feel good and hopefully, that’ll help me sell a book.” I need him to know the truth. This is all an unintended consequence. Me speaking to you, what an honor it is, but I didn’t intend this. I intended to give him the truth. One of the truths that he needs to understand fundamentally upfront is that you must be different. Being average in our society is dangerous. You have to be an outlier of our culture. Why is wealth impossible for average people? We have to define wealth.
A common formula that I used, was always your retirement income times 25 equals the amount of money you need in the bank. It’s a generalized idea. What is wealth? For me, I needed to have $100,000 for me to feel wealthy, for me to retire, $100,000 times 25, that’s $2.5 million. I don’t make up these numbers. $2.5 million is the number for me to have $100,000 in my retirement. Let’s talk about the average man in life. Let’s say this guy is 30, he has a family, he’s got two kids and has a wife. The average man in our world has very little savings, has an average income. He’s busy over his head. The kids keep them busy. He works 40 to 50 hours a week and everybody’s bone tired. At the end of the month, there’s maybe $500 to $1,000 on a good month and on a bad month, there’s nothing.
Help me spell this riddle. How does that guy get $2.5 million in the bank living that life? I’ll tell you, I can speak for that man because that man was me. That was me at 30. That was my scenario, my context of life. I was the average guy in the middle class with the circumstances that are racist. I can’t get out of this. I was there too. I can speak from experience. It’s impossible. You can’t do it. Don’t talk to me about compounding, it’s not going to happen. If you don’t believe that, all you have to do is look at average statistics. What is the average savings of average people? It’s $172,000 at the age of 65. That’s a far cry from $2.5 million. It’s not an opinion, it’s not going to happen.
The question is, “What’s the only way for this to work,” because I did it. I started there, “How’s that possible?” That’s the million-dollar question and in my opinion, the only way to rise to wealth is ownership. You cannot do it any other way. You have to get yourself transitioned from a consumer to an owner of stuff, an owner of things that have passive cashflow and income. Things that you talk about on your show and I resonate with you when you speak of this because you’re speaking my language now. There’s no other way. There’s a quote about luck, “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” I’m here to tell you that preparation is a pile of cash when opportunity knocks. It’s having your money, it’s being ready.
I get this question nonstop from young people. They always say, “How can I get into rentals? I see what you’re doing. That looks exciting.” They watched the shows on TV. It looks like a great adventure. I said, “I’m glad you have ambition. I love people with ambition. Follow your ambition. How much money do you have in the bank? Let’s talk about that.” The answer is always nothing. I understand that there might be people that buy things with no money down. I can speak from my experience in my area, no money down properties are the crumbs at the table. It’s the worst of the worst houses. They’re desperate. I’m not saying that’s everywhere. I don’t know everywhere. I can speak from my own experience only and what I’ve done, where I am is the best properties. They come with bank loans and they come with a little bit of money down. The owners can hold off. They’re not going to be desperate. Why would they be? They have great properties that we want.
How do you get the money? Let’s go back to some timeless principles. Let’s talk about using some free hours for earning. Let’s talk about extra time, side hustles, call it what you want but there is no forward progress. There is no money in the bank without extra earning. I’m telling you, money in the bank is important. If you want to buy some rentals, a car wash, a laundromat or whatever your gig is. It’s impossible unless you get into ownership and ownership is impossible in my world unless you prove yourself worthy. I told my son this. William Clement Stone once said, “If you don’t have the ability to save, the seeds of achievement are not in you.” It’s not politically popular, is it? I sometimes think that the harsh realities get us moving and put a fire under us. I wanted the truth. I didn’t want to feel good. Tell me how it is and I’ll take it from there. That’s the advice I gave my son.
Sometimes people need to hear the harsh reality. They need to hear the things that are maybe not politically correct. I’m not a big believer in sugarcoating things to make them politically correct. You need to say things the way they are and be right upfront about it and truthful. That sometimes is the only way to get through people’s skulls and get them to realize the lesson that they need to hear and hopefully they learn from it and take action. If you don’t get it straight, you’re going to be in the same spot you are now than you were five years ago.
Delusion gets you nowhere. I have seen that sometimes people can’t get through my book. I hear this all the time, “It’s very direct. It put a fire under my butt. It’s a real kick in the pants.” When I hear somebody like you where you say, “I got through it.” What I’ve found is that I was surprised to find how many successful people come back and talk to me about the book. It’s the feedback from successful people. You’re given a podcast on getting ahead passive income. You would think that most of your audience is going to be people that are struggling and need things and they’re in financial pain. Sometimes, the audience is successful people. It’s like their gym members who are already in shape and they are looking to get in better shape. They’re ambitious and that’s what I’ve found with my book. They can handle it, not everybody can and I can’t help you if you can’t. This is my story. All I can tell you is this is what I told my son and that’s sacred to me.
The reality is that success and freedom, those two things don’t come easy. For some people, they want the easy road. They want the quick pill to get to where they want to get to as fast as possible. Success and freedom don’t come easy. They require dedication, hard work and focus. You talk about this, what is the real sacrifice that is required to become financially free?
It’s coming from my world, one of the things people don’t like to hear is that I have a very strong opinion that goes into a job, 40 hours a week, is commendable. I value that. I’m a worker, but I don’t call that a sacrifice. A sacrifice is something we have an option to do or to not do. We don’t have a choice to not work 40 hours a week. That’s part of being alive on planet earth. That’s the basic minimum requirement for food, shelter and taking care of your kids. In terms of that statistic we said, there’s $172,000 at 65 and those people go to work. That’s not where you get ahead, in my opinion. Sacrifice is found in your free hours. It’s found in the optional hours of life, but keep in mind, we’re not talking about digging ditches. We’re not in coal mines like my grandfather was. We’re talking about engaging our time. We have to get our time engaged and use time with more purpose and more aim.
Bill Gates once said that we overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in ten years. I’ve always found myself that five years is a sweet spot for me and the reason it’s a sweet spot for me is that it’s a long enough time to change everything. You can transform your entire life, every aspect of it in five years, but it’s a short enough time that we can manage. Ten years starts to get a little bit far out for people. I’ll give you an example of that. I have a cousin. I call her my sister. We’re close. She graduated with a business degree at the same college I graduated from.
She came out, she went into a small business in my local area. She worked for two years and she found herself to be unfulfilled. There was a ceiling, there was no progress and people were happier with a direction in life. She was stopped already after two years. Now, she has a challenge. What do you do? Do you get in line and start bemoaning your fate and say, “I wish I would have chosen something else,” or do you dig deep and say, “I’m the captain of my fate. If I’m willing to sacrifice some of my free hours, what do you do?” These are the moments of life. She went back to school to get an MBA. Now, she’s married, she’s working 40 hours a week and she’s going to school at night in which she’s not going to school and not attending class, she’s studying.
She starts running out of money because an MBA costs a lot of money. Now, she had to get a job as a part-time waitress. She’s going to have her job 40 hours a week. She’s going to school, she’s studying for school and she’s a part-time waitress. That’s an all-out obsession. That’s giving your life for a cause, but the cause can give you your life. She went back and she did this year after year. Fast forward five years from when she started, she’s working in Pittsburgh now. She’s working in a big multinational company. She rises into the company and becomes the Northeast Director of that department. She travels her whole life to cold places around the world.
That was always an inclination, a drive for her. She always wanted to see the world. I say, “Where would you be if you didn’t give that five years?” That’s what’s necessary. It’s not everything. Sometimes people get trapped because they think that it’s so big and so they never get started. People underestimate what can happen in five years. The success of life does take sacrifice, but the sacrifice is temporary and the results are permanent. It’s my belief that ambitious people will sacrifice if they know it’s not forever. They have to know the deal. Set your goals for five years and stop there. That’s how I live my life.
That takes discipline and to quote you, I believe this was right from the book. You said, “We don’t need more information. We need more discipline to behave in a manner that leads to monetary accumulation.”
It’s so much like dietary habits. We know what to do, but do we do it? It’s like health. You notice I don’t get a lot of personal finance. I don’t think that’s the challenge of the game. I do understand we have delayed gratification. We understand all that stuff. We had to spend less and earn more. I don’t spend a lot of time there. The challenge is all about our financial behavior. That’s where it’s all started and all stopped, emotional control. That’s the game of getting wealthy.
In winding this down a bit, I like the idea of being passionate about things. It’s great to be passionate about things and get up in the morning and have that drive and excitement to get on with whatever you do. You talk about challenges. Why do you say that passion is overrated and it’s even dangerous advice? A lot of people would have a hard time understanding why you would say that.
Here’s me being in political non-kind to everybody. I see two camps these days. You have a passion camp. Do what you love and follow your passion. There’s another camp out there. It’s the plowing camp. It’s the plow the fields, shut up and earn money like the rest of us. I’ve been on both sides. In my early life, I read a book called Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow. It convinced me at that time that life should be without its fair share of troubles. Work should be a joy. There’s a soulmate out there waiting for you. If you find that soulmate, your life is made. A man with a job he loves will never work another day in his life. It’s utopia.
I didn’t find life to be quite that idealistic. I do think that we choose problems in a job. I believe Malcolm Forbes who said, “If you have a job without aggravations, you don’t have a job.” We have a choice about what problems we choose. We are all inclined toward a certain set of problems we can fix. We can adapt ourselves to and I think that some people are lucky. Honestly, I look at you, I listen to your podcast. I would venture to say that you, Marco, are lucky. Your passion is real estate. I can see that in how you speak. Lucky you because real estate makes money. That’s fortunate. What about the person whose passion doesn’t quite make the money who goes down that route? I’m telling you, those people end up with results that they don’t find to be too passionate down the road.
Eventually we find out that income does matter for our lifestyle satisfaction. There is an income down approach to this whole thing. You can’t say there’s a set of problems out there that work. I want to find the most suitable set of problems for me, but I want those problems to give me back. I want to give it to my job but I need that job to give back to me. I needed income. We all come to understand that this is important. Work as a friend. It’s supposed to be a steady, sober relationship that we can trust. We give it to it and it gives back to us. One of my best friends from childhood is a perfect example. He’s like the rest of us, he went to school and he was considering becoming a pharmacist. It’s a good career. For him, he said, “There’s an income ceiling here. I don’t think I like that. I want to try to find a different job with an occupation possibly with higher pay that I could like as easily.” He was looking around. He went for the income down approach. He became an orthodontist.
Orthodontistry is the business, but you’ve got to have a lot of intelligence to get into it. He became an orthodontist. He’s now the richest and most fulfilled person I know. There is no question about it. He earns quadruple of what I earn every week and he works half as much. It’s not that he’s out there killing himself. He loves what he does. He commits himself to it. He’s created a sense of mastery in his craft and he feels good about himself. It’s all good but he started with the income down approach.
I’m not sure it’s wrong to do that. I wrote the book for my son and he’s into finance. He’s a banker. He goes into finance, he’s making a lot of money, but that’s a passion to him. He’s lucky. It’s safer for us to forget about a search for a soulmate out there in this thing called work. Sometimes what we need is one good friend and that friend may turn in to the love of our lives. We have to spend time with the things that give back to us. That’s what I’m saying with being aware of the following passion too much. You might suck at passion, whatever your passion is and it might not make any money and you might have kids someday. Think about that.
At what point does passion become dangerous? When do you think it’s dangerous advice?
It’s dangerous advice. If getting ahead is your goal, it can be dangerous. If you’re the unlucky ones who’d like to do something that doesn’t earn. There’s a need for what you do or there’s not a need for what you do. The world gives back to you based on the need for what you do, how well you do what you do and those kinds of things. How many people did you serve? I was listening to Gary Keller, The ONE Thing. He always looks in his businesses and says, “Which ones are working and which ones aren’t?” He closes the ones that aren’t. What a novel idea. In business, we do this.
I understand the idea of wanting to be an actress, but what are you going to tell your kids? I understand the idea of dreaming. I would say that I’m getting tongue-tied because there is a practical aspect of life. I do know that when you hit your 30s, you’re going to find lifestyle satisfaction to be very important. Lifestyle satisfaction does come from your payments and in your household. I fought that all my life. I’m a lot happier when I’m on top of the money situation. I can only speak from my own experience. It’s dangerous when you follow it down the road and you expect it to lead it to wealth and you have other people relying on you. It’s not going there. There is a time to abandon ship.
You’ve been talking about time and then you’re talking about your 30s now. It seems that it’s this concept that you talk about what you call the arc of your journey to financial freedom. Can you talk about that? That might be of great interest to our entire audience.
In terms of what I did in my 30s, you mean?
Talk about the arc of your journey to financial freedom.
As I said in the introduction, it was about those 20s, 30s and the 40s and it was a growth period. For me, it was all about getting stronger. Let me tell you this story. Imagine me at twenty. At the age of twenty, I walk out of the house and I’m unprepared for what’s outside, but I know that it’s my time. This is my time to take on the world. I’m of age, I’m twenty years old. I walk out of the house and I have to go out to work now and I want to go out to work. I’m eager toward life. I go out and I climb a mountain. I go to the other side of the mountain. I found out that what my job is that of a battler. I’m a warrior on the other side of this mountain. Every day I have to fight the same opponents. It’s the same stubborn opponents and this guy is strong.
In my twenties, I don’t have the strength. I don’t have the skill. I don’t have a strategy for wealth. I don’t even know what I’m doing but I show up day after day and I take a butt whooping, non-stop, every day of my life. This happens through my entire twenties and to my credit, I don’t give up. I keep showing up. I come home every night with battle scars. The 30s rolled around and now I have a family and I’m walking out the door. I go over the mountain, I come down, my family doesn’t even know what I’m doing, but I come back at [spp-timestamp time=”8:00″] at night now and I come back a little more beat up when I left in the morning. There’s a difference to the 30s. In the 30s, I have a little bit more of an erect posture.
You can see that I’m taking a beating but I’m not taking the killing beating when I was in my twenties because when you fight enough and you battle enough, what happens is you gain a little bit of skill. You start to understand the strategies of battle. You start to get a little bit of competence for the first time in your life and it starts to feel good because you’re not losing every day, at least you’re sitting the battle. I take a butt whooping but that’s the stubborn opponent on the other side of the mountain, I’m giving him a good old fashion butt whooping as well. It’s an even fight now. I’m losing and I’m winning and it’s even.
By the 40s, it rolls around and I start to have more mastery. I understand the mindset of wealth. I understand the strength of fighting. The fortitude is necessary to fight 10 or 12-hour days sometimes. I understand that if I take a whack, I’m going to give one back. I understand what I’m after so my time is used well not only because I’m more focused on that, but because I’m a better person. I’m stronger inside. I’ve gone through a growth period all my life and because of that, I become a stronger battler. The day arrives when I come over that mountain and I faced that opponent one more time. I take my sword and I give a final whack at that guy. Do you know what happens? He doesn’t get up. The first time I look at this guy and I sit there and wait because he’s going to get up but he doesn’t and it’s over. The game is over.
I walked back over the mountain, back to my house. I sit on my sofa and for the first time in a long time, I can think. Instead of a sense of elation, instead of this big celebration, what I feel is a relief. I’m tired. Thank God that the whole battle is over. I didn’t even know I was going to be fighting this all my life. At that time, my son starts walking toward the door. I see that he’s dressed in armor and he’s carrying his own sword. I say, “Mike, where are you going?” He said, “Dad, don’t you know? I’m twenty years old. It’s time for me to go out and battle now. I’m going to go over the mountain. I’m going to fight my own battle.” The opponent that he’s talking about is the financial condition of life. We all have it. I don’t care who you are and where you come from, that is one of the common aspects of being human.
He’s about ready to go out there and fight that battle. Here I am with all the lessons of a battler. I sit there and I said, “Mike, come over here and sit with me. I need to talk to you. I need to tell you what I’ve learned over these last 30 years. I want to tell you how to struggle. I want you to understand the fight and the strategies that you’re going to get into. I want you to know what I’ve learned over all these years and maybe you won’t have a 30-year-old battle like me.” That’s my life. That’s why I wrote The Wealthy Gardener, Lessons on Prosperity Between Father and Son.
That’s beautiful. I love that story and that’s exactly how I feel about the knowledge that I’ve gained over the years and the experience that I’ve accumulated. I want to pass that on, spoon-feed my daughter with it but also share that with the world. That’s part of the reason why I’m doing the show and bringing guys like you on is to share that wisdom and knowledge.
I send my book out to you and three others. You are exceptional in what you do. I guarantee you, everybody who is reading right now reads these blogs because you’re authentic. You’re one of the voices in the world of finance that isn’t out for something other. You’re doing it right and you can feel it. You can feel your soul. That’s what I was after in my own book. I wanted something pure. I can tell you that the story that I told you right there, that’s one of the few times I told it without breaking down. I was practicing this with my wife. I said, “I don’t know if I’m willing to tell this.” When my son is walking out the door, I pause, I start sobbing. It gets me. That’s the heart of a father and it went into the book. There’s no question that you’re the real deal, Marco. We all do appreciate you.
I appreciate that. You’re too kind. Wrapping up here, you made me think of something. I think this was this past president that said this, “You learn in your 30s and earn in your 40s.” That’s a two-decade span, but you’re talking about it in three decades, the 20s, 30s, and 40s. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your teens, your 20s or 30s. The point there is that everybody goes through this arc in a journey, the power and the magic is when you can learn from other people’s experiences, lessons, knowledge and take that in as early as possible when you have time on your side. Be able to accelerate the speed that you achieve your goals because you are piggybacking on other people’s success, experience and systems. Learning from their success and their mistakes, it’s so much easier to do that with technology, the internet and podcasting than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. There’s no excuse to be able to achieve your goals at a faster speed than your parents and your parents’ parents and so on.
It’s a double-edged sword. There is no doubt about it. What you said is exactly true. I always say that the internet is amazing. It’s amazing for our ability to put it to good use. It is so amazing as well to put it to bad use. Right now, I’m reading a biography. I’m talking about always reading and learning. I’m reading a biography on Thomas Edison. When Thomas Edison was developing film, he was so excited because he knew this would transform education. It would bring education, the greatest ideas of the world to the everyday man. Little did he know what it was going to turn into. He despised the idea of sitting there and being entertained by it. Thomas Edison was a big developer of that film. He’s so excited and he ended up creating something that took people’s minds and put them on something else. The internet is like that. I listened to you. I’ve already achieved what I wanted to achieve in life financially but I don’t get tired of hearing great truths. Quite frankly, I’m not happy unless I am learning. It can become a positive addiction. That’s what it does for me.
ne last question. Do you have any final thoughts for our audience? You wanted to talk about relationships or at least your lesson in relationships. That’s a great place to end.
It’s something we’re all going to face especially those with ambition. What I would tell somebody, how I’d wrap it up with final thoughts. One is to spend time daily with your goals. Don’t pass by what you said and what I said and surround those with insane faith. Don’t let those be words that go by. That is so important. That is narrowing your potential. You’re harnessing your potential when you use goals like that. Focus them on something and then I say, “Learn continuously.” There’s no limit to what we can learn and it’s the only way out. I came from the middle-class and I can see that the differences between me and others, a lot of times came from the book of Napoleon Hill’s, Think and Grow Rich and all the books that followed that. I couldn’t write a book on lessons if I didn’t educate myself. Educate yourself, that’s the way out.
I promise anyone that I could find a wealthy person and put them exactly in the circumstances and the conditions of anybody out there and they’d rise to wealth. It’s due to their knowledge and that’s not to put down anybody. That’s to give you hope and to say, “It’s about knowledge and you have something to do for that.” I was able to achieve my goals only because I learned. Last I say, it’s so important to speak openly to your family. Wealth requires sacrifice, there is no doubt about it, but your family wants you to win. It’s your job to be vulnerable, to tell them your fears and dreams.
There is not a moment when my kids didn’t know exactly what my financial condition was. I say, “This is what I’m facing. I want you to know it so that you’re prepared for adulthood. This is why I’m sacrificing. This is why I’m putting my hours out there.” My kids had a great education by just watching me. I explained everything and I didn’t stand on a pedestal near them. I was very vulnerable and I treated them equals as I did my wife. She didn’t resent anything. She knew why I was doing it and she supported me. I say that if they don’t support you, I would say you look to yourself. Communication is so important. Be a conscious communicator with people. Help them understand your why and how they will benefit them. Relationships will mess you up if you become self-centered and ambitious but if you share it with them, what a great education it could be for your family.
That’s the way I feel about it. The added benefit that you might not have mentioned there is the potential accountability that it gives you when you share your goals. Now, all of a sudden you’ve exposed yourself and you might feel accountable for achieving them. Otherwise, you’re going to say, “I was a failure. I said I was going to do this, but I never did it.”
The common refrain from parents is, “I want you to live your best life. I want you to go for it. I want you to know that dreams are possible.” What does it look like if you’re saying that but you yourself aren’t sacrificing? You yourself don’t have direction. I wanted my kids to know what I was doing and see what I was doing. That was crucial.
Everyone around me sees that I work hard, a lot harder, two and a half times as hard as the average Joe, if you will. I used to wear that as a badge of honor and now, I don’t want to be working that hard. I want to peel things back and scale back so things are more passive, especially on the income side. I’m closing down some of the businesses that I have because they’re too time-consuming.
In your area, do people make comments about that or do they leave you alone about the workload and work ethic? Do you hear it from people?
Commonly, people will say it’s admirable and impressive how hard you work. You’re a workaholic, you’re successful and you continue to be more successful and all these things. I don’t know if they’re truly genuine, if they’re complimentary or if they’re superficial comments. As I said, there was a time where I thought being busy was a good thing because you wear it like a badge of honor and if you’re busy, that must mean you’re successful. Now, I’m starting to think the opposite. If you’re too busy all the time, then it’s a bad thing. You’ve painted yourself into a corner where you don’t have a choice. You’re stuck in everything that you’ve built around you. You can’t get away and you don’t have that freedom. Maybe you have financial freedom but you don’t have the time freedom. For me, they’re both very important. In fact, time freedom is even more important so you have to have both.
The reason I was asking you is that where I came from, I always tell people, “This is the middle class.” I love the middle-class. These good sons of the earth people here. The good people but they don’t have the same ambitions that I did. I was a unicorn in my environment and I would hear things like not so complimentary when people say, “You know money won’t make you happy and there are more important things in life than money out there, John. You’ve got to live through the day. You work too much. You can’t take it with you. You want to be the richest man in the cemetery.” I was making a lot of people uncomfortable sometimes because they see me working and progressing. A lot of people can identify with that and they were always curious to see, “Is that just my place or is that everywhere?” I wasn’t sure but I had to always resist the ideas of some negativity. Maybe it’s the tribe wanting me to stay like them and normalize their behaviors. I had to fight through a lot of that stuff and close my mouth and mind my own business.
You know what happens when you are one of the crabs in a bucket of crabs and you’re trying to get out of the bucket. All the other crabs are going to grab at you and pull you back into the bucket. People want you to be more like them and not to be different because then it puts you in a different place and they become uncomfortable. If you’re going to live your life that way, you’re always going to be like all the other crabs in the bucket. You’re going to be that average person.
I can tell you, Marco, that for me to overcome being that crab, to get away from all those other crabs, I had to tell myself, “John, wealth is your way to impact the world. You can do this. The more money you have, the more people you can help. You can use your full potential more if you have more money.” You’re working for the protection and providing for your family. I had to get new belief systems. I had to continually put that into my head and I don’t know if that’s normal or not for everybody in the country. I was fighting those crabs non-stop so I had to do something. It goes back to Napoleon Hill, “Beware of negative suggestions of family and friends. It can kill you.”
I’m going to encourage people to get a copy of your book, whether it’s the audiobook or the paperback. In fact, you released a revised and expanded edition if I’m not mistaken. Why don’t you tell our audience how they can find out more about you and/or get more information? Where can they find the book? It’s one of those mandatory must-have books on your bookshelf.
Thank you for saying that and kudos right back at you. I’ll always be a follower. WealthyGardener.com, that’s the website. It’s easy to remember. I would suggest this in terms of plugging a product, there’s something special about the audiobook. It’s different. There’s no question in the paperback and the hardback, they serve as a reference book for a lot of people, The Wealthy Gardener. I’m telling you, I found Dennis Kleinman. I made him do this audio. I would not allow him to not do this audio. He nailed it. He’s the perfect person. He’s got the soul. There’s something magical about the audiobook when it’s my words coming through Dennis and his words. I can tell you that what I love about that man is he told me that when he was doing the audiobook, he broke down and cried a couple of times. I will thank him for the rest of his life for that. Because the author, me, writing the book to my son, I broke down and cried a few times. When you get the audiobook, you’re getting a lot of heart and I love Dennis and he brought it home. If you could get one or the other, I would say start with the audio. I’m selling something that’s not even completely mine because I love Dennis’s version.
I have to agree with you. In fact, I even told you the last time we spoke that the voiceover, the voice talent you got for the audiobook, nailed it. Because it’s a story, you can hear the passion in his voice. He’s got that voice that can tell a story like this the right way. It was very entertaining to listen to his voice. I highly recommend the audiobook.
Sometimes things come together and they’re bigger than the parts. Penguin came and bought the book and they liked the audio so much. They said, “There are no changes. We don’t want to mess with the magic.” That’s an awesome compliment. I love Dennis. He is a fantastic man.
John, thank you so much for all the time you spent with us. This has been entertaining, enlightening, and inspiring. I’m sure a lot of people are going to enjoy the audiobook or the book, whatever they ended up getting. Thank you for your time.
Thank you for what you do for all of us, Marco. We all appreciate it.
I appreciate you and thank you for everything you’ve done.
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I hope you all enjoyed this two-part interview with John and his amazing story in the book, The Wealthy Gardener. I felt bad going as long as I did in the interview, but I couldn’t stop listening to what he had to say. I know we could have talked for hours. I’m glad I had him on and I’ve had some great conversations with him. He’s an authentic and genuine person and I appreciate him taking the time to come on the show. If you are new to this show, remember to subscribe. If you haven’t downloaded The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing, it’s a free download on our website. Go to NoradaRealEstate.com or PassiveRealEstateInvesting.com and you can find the link and the form to download that on both of the websites. Get your free strategy session with our investment counselors. If you’re thinking about investing in real estate or if you’re looking to expand your portfolio, there are all kinds of great possibilities out there.
Help us spread the word about the show. Visit us on iTunes, leave us a rating and review. I greatly appreciate it. I’m going to thank you in advance and I do read all of them. If you have any questions about real estate investing, you can click Ask Marco at the top of the PassiveRealEstateInvesting.com website. I will do my best to get to all of them in due time. I am traveling a lot and flooded with emails. I need to dig myself out of that hole if you will. Again, I appreciate you all. Thank you for reading. Let’s continue this show and we will see you in our next episode.
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