Episode #158 – The Expert is Never Certain

You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. How are you? I hope you're doing so, so well.

As always, if you need help with your online marketing strategy to find more motivated-seller leads and deals online, you know where to go. It’s AdWordsNerds.com. We can help you out. [01:07.0]

Now let's talk a little bit about experts. Let's talk about experts, and the reason that I want to bring this up is that I've been kind of immersing myself in a relatively long research project, not really related to online marketing for motivated sellers, but I consider myself a technology person. Obviously, I work online every single day, and it's part of my business and part of the value that I bring to my clients that I'm sort of ahead of the curve, or at least I should be, on things that are happening online. One of the things I realized recently was I just didn't really understand blockchain or cryptocurrencies, or Bitcoin or any of that stuff, right? [01:55.4]

I kind of knew a little bit about it. I knew this sort of sketch version of what it is and how it works, but I didn't really understand it and it sort of occurred to me that, hey, this is something that may be important. It may be influential on what I do. It may influence or impact my clients in some way in the next decade or so, so I should know about this. I should know more about it.

So, I took on this research project. I actually took a full week after the holiday and didn't do any regular work, only worked on this one research project. Before that, I spent about a month only reading about blockchain and crypto—reading people that were pro-crypto, reading people that were anti-crypto. Reading our arguments that crypto technology is going to change the world, and then reading arguments that, no, it's incredibly inefficient and it's ridiculous, and it's not going to do anything—and trying to merge those positions into some sort of coherent narrative of how this all worked. I wrote probably 30,000 words about the topic over the course of that week and I spent a lot of time on it. [03:14.2]

The and the reason that I bring this up is because, after all that work and all that time, and all that research and the watching the videos and reading the podcasts, and reading the white papers and reading the long-form articles and reading full books about it, after all that, I still ended up in a place where my primary conclusion about the future of crypto and blockchain is, well, it's really complicated and I don't really know what's going to happen—and I think a lot of people would look at that as a failure. [03:50.0]

A lot of people go into a given question or a given problem, or a given situation, and what they want to find is certainty. A lot of people are made profoundly anxious by a lack of certainty and by any sort of indication that we don't really understand or know what is going to happen, because they feel if they don't understand what's going to happen, they don't know how to plan for it. If they don't know how to plan for it, they're going to be caught unprepared, and if they're unprepared, then disaster is going to strike. That's a very deeply held belief and it's understandable, right? It's understandable.

But the reality is that most difficult questions, most intractable problems, are incredibly complex and, many of the times or much of the time, it is simply beyond our ability to fully comprehend. The universe is uncertain. There's a lot of chaos and randomness at play—and so, no, I don't really understand exactly what's going to happen. [04:58.6]

Now, I may have opinions and I may have predictions, but because I'm a student of rationality and a student of decision-making, and a student of statistics, not an expert, but a student, I understand that lots of people make predictions and most of us vastly overestimate the extent to which our predictions are going to be accurate, and so I tend to go into the, these things with a lot of humility.

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Now, why do I bring this up? Why do I bring this up? [06:00.0]

I bring this up because particularly in this kind of crypto world, there are a lot of people who hold themselves out as experts and as, quote-unquote, “experts” in this space, what they are selling is certainty—Bitcoin is going to go up. It is going to be the world's reserve currency, yada-yada-yada, or Ethereum, yada-yada-yada, or crypto is a disaster and it's going to drop to zero and it's going to destroy America, yada-yada-yada, right?

Whatever they are selling, whether it's pro or con, or a particular type of technology or whatever, what they're really selling is certainty. They are selling the feeling you get when you feel like you've got it all figured out.

Now, there's a real pattern in this kind of thing, and, generally, that pattern is, the more a person really knows, the deeper they've dived on the content, the longer they've spent in that space, the less confident they are. [07:11.6]

Now, they may be confident that they know a lot and they may be confident in their knowledge, and they may be confident that they've done the work, but they aren't certain that they can predict exactly what's going to happen.

Certainty, in many cases, is inversely correlated with knowledge, by which I mean the smartest and the best-read and the most knowledgeable people are the least certain, and the people that are the most certain and the most confident tend to be the people that know the least. [07:50.2]

Now, the reason I bring this up in a podcast on marketing for real estate investors is that you very much see this in marketing. One of the things I have learned about marketing for real estate investors is that you cannot predict with any certainty how things are going to go. I've had clients come in with the right budgets, the right setups, the right everything, and not find success, and I've had clients come in that didn't check any of the boxes we thought they would check and do really well.

Now, this is not knowledge that I gained by watching a YouTube video on how to do PPC or reading a book about SEO, or reading a blog or signing up to someone's mailing list, or taking a course. These are things we have learned the hard way. We have learned them by serving real estate investors in markets all across the country with budgets big and small for over a decade. [09:00.0]

Over the course of that decade, even though all I do every day is help real estate investors find more deals online—that's all we have done for over a decade, every single day, day in and day out—at the end of all that time, I am less certain than I was when I started and I'm less certain because I have more knowledge. I know all the things that could possibly go wrong, all the things that could possibly make any prediction I make inaccurate.

Now, it doesn't mean I'm not confident. I am confident. I'm confident in my ability to figure things out. I'm confident that I've built an incredible team. I'm confident in the processes that we've built, but I'm not certain—and you shouldn't be either, and you should be very, very aware when somebody is trying to sell you certainty. [10:03.5]

One of the best things you could ever hear from a service-provider or from an author, or somebody who is trying to pitch you anything, is that when you ask what the result is going to be, they say, “It depends,” because the truth is, it always depends, and the more you know, the more things you are aware that success depends on.

Make sure whoever you are working with or even in your own business, your own life, making sure you are doing the work required to have an opinion. Don't just take someone's word for it. Don't read the blog posts or listen to the podcasts and think you've got it, because those channels, what they're selling is entertainment. They're not selling true knowledge. [10:56.4]

There's nothing wrong with that. Entertainment can put you on the path to knowledge, but you've got to go deeper than that, so make sure you're doing the work required to have an opinion and make sure anyone that you work with has done that work—and if they tell you, “It depends,” instead of giving you a really rosy picture of the future, take that as a really, really good sign.

I hope that was useful. I hope you get some value out of this podcast, and I really deeply appreciate you listening every week. Look, AdWordsNerds.com/Strategy, that's where we talk to real estate investors every single week for free to show you what we would do in your market to help you get more leads and deals online using PPC and SEO. If you would like to check that out, go over to AdWordsNerds.com/Strategy.

As always, this is Daniel Barrett signing off. Have a wonderful week, and I will see you next time. [11:56.0]

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