Welcome to The Get Real Podcast, your high-octane boost and in the trenches tell-it-like-it-is reality therapy for personal, business and real estate investing success with your hosts, power-preneurs Angela and Ron. It’s time to get real!

Angela: Hey, welcome to the Get Real Podcast. This is Angela Thomas and I’m here with Ron. Hey Ron.

Ron: How we doing?

Angela: Hey, excellent. So today we want to talk about, this is kind of a hot topic for both of us, so.

Ron: We’re going to ruffle some feathers today.

Angela: We may ruffle some feathers and rant, I’m sorry.

Ron: We’re going to get real for sure. Let me just preface this by saying, Angela, that in no way are we, are we suggesting that people should do one or the other, that’s not true. I am going to suggest that people do one or the other or both. But just because Ron said it, I mean, you know, consider the source.

Angela: Yeah. This is all our opinion, obviously. So if you don’t agree with that’s all good.

Ron: Backed by fact of course, but mostly…

Angela: And experience yeah.

Ron: Yeah, which is fact.

Angela: Yeah. So we’re going to talk about why self-education is the key to success.

Ron: Yeah. And you know, that’s not to say that formal education is horrible because it’s not, and in some instances it’s necessary, right?

Angela: Yeah. Don’t be a doctor if you don’t get some formal education please.

Ron: Please, for the love of all that’s holy. If you’re going to be a neurosurgeon, get your butt in there and get some formal education.

Angela: A lot of education, right.

Ron: The more the merrier if you’re operating on my brain because it’s a, little bit of a hot mess sometimes, okay. And this is coming from my dad who was a professor. My mom was a high school teacher, okay. So I have all of the respect in the world for formal education.

Angela: I’m glad you prefaced it with that, thanks Ron.

Ron: And now that I’ve said that, pretty much going to say the exact opposite. So now, now we’re going to get real. But I wanted to put all that out there so that everybody who wants to say something angry at us because of what we’re going to say now, just understand that you know, I come from teachers, I mean that’s like I come from formal education.

Angela: And you’ve been warned. If you absolutely worship formal education, you may want to just hop off, okay.

Ron: Just skip to the next one.

Angela: Just hop off, it’s fine.

Ron: Because and I’m going to just, let’s just start this off with a quote from Jim Rohn because it’s a fantastic quote. I don’t know if a lot of people probably heard this, but Jim Rohn says, formal education will make you a living, self education will make you a fortune.

Angela: Amen.

Ron: Just let that sink in for just a second. Now, Jim did not say, don’t go get a formal education. He’s just making a contrast that’s all.

Angela: Exactly.

Ron: Now that we’re going to get into this, I think it’s pretty important for everybody to understand that I’m going to interview Angela because Angela has got a great story with respect to this. You guys are all going to want to hear what she has to say, it’s really pretty cool. This coming from a girl who, I’m going to get ahead of myself, but she’s smart. She graduated college very young, very young and it’s because of the way education works. So take us back to Napa, California and help us understand how this, like how this transpired. Angela, what happened?

Angela: Yeah. So Ron, as you know, I grew up in Napa, California, I have an awesome family, if they’re listening, I love you guys, no I’m just kidding. But yeah, mom, you’re great. But I was a major tomboy, I had a general disregard for the rules when I was younger.

Ron: And still does.

Angela: Yeah, I still do. I have a real problem with it. When I was younger, I’d pretend, you know, to follow the rules, but I’m mostly over that now. I’m trying to, I’ve tried to break free of that shell and be myself. Why pretend that I’m going…

Ron: Now she just doesn’t outwardly follow the rules.

Angela: Why would I keep on pretending it’s no fun? I actually went to public school for kindergarten and my mom pulled me out right after, she let me graduate kindergarten, but pulled me out right after, I don’t know what I did in kindergarten that was so bad, but she decided to start homeschooling me and my brother and my fours and my three siblings, sorry. Me and my brother and my two little sisters, she decided to homeschool all of us. So she was teaching four different grades at the same time and she was also starting her own business. I don’t know if I had talked about the timescale on that before?

Ron: It’s like sainthood right there, sainthood.

Angela: But how crazy is that? So she’s teaching and she started out with us, like at desks, like teaching our individual subjects, getting one of us going and then moving to the next down the line, you know? So the first few years was kind of crazy, but it was really cool because she encouraged us to study whatever it was we were interested in. You know, she made sure we knew the basics in each area, but then if we were interested in a subject, we were able to just keep studying it and take that as far as we wanted. And if there was a subject she didn’t have, she’d order us the books and let us go ahead and study on our own and learn whatever it was we were curious about.

Ron: Which is entirely different than what happened with me where I had to study whatever they wanted me to and told me to right. And I did not have the same experiences as you in that I just kind of floated through school because I was a pretty good test taker and I didn’t, you know, I didn’t do very much homework. 

I got crappy grades on that cause I wasn’t interested so I just didn’t do it. And here you were…

Angela: Were you interested in of the subjects or did…

Ron: Yeah, I excelled in those, right, but you know even those they were capped, right. It was not like you could just dive in and keep going, that’s not the way it works. You dive in and you go to a certain point and then you’re not rewarded for going any further so why the hell would anybody do that? In your world, your experience is entirely different than that. You actually were rewarded for learning and going deep in subjects.

Angela: And I wasn’t studying to pass a test, although my mom did give us tests because she wanted to make sure she wasn’t failing as our teacher and going to ruin our lives or something. So she did test us to make sure that we were, at least at the level we were supposed to be for our age, but, but I wasn’t studying for that. You know, I was studying because I was fascinated. I was interested in a subject and I just wanted to know more. We also read a lot about business back then because that was something I was interested in and my mom was in the thick of it. I kept trying to help her at like eight and she didn’t want my help. So I was like, well, I got to figure out how to, how to be more help so. And I don’t think I ever did help her, but I’m sure she appreciated the encouragement. But because we were free to study and learn whatever we wanted and my mom just encouraged us to keep going. She also, I think she got sick of teaching us or something, she encouraged my brother and I to test out of high school and take the entrance exam to start college in Napa when I was 14.

Ron: I want everybody, let’s not gloss over. This was at the age of this when I was a freshman starting. You were testing out of high school?

Angela: Yeah, I tested out of high school when I was ending junior high, what would have been junior high.

Ron: Okay. All right.

Angela: Yeah. Yeah. So, but I didn’t think of it as anything crazy because I mean I was terrified to go to public school, but I knew that they weren’t going to expect me to. I mean I took the test, they were pretty, I mean they weren’t that crazy, you know. And you go on to college and they don’t expect you to know everything. You learn what you have to learn in the classes. So I was like, I can do that.

Ron: Like the first two years they reteach her everything that you learned in high school, which was, that was the most unbelievably frustrating thing for me…

Angela: That’s when you, you, you left, right?

Ron: Oh yeah I bailed and I’m really interested because I, and I’ve heard your story a million times, but I don’t think we’ve ever talked about the part where you’re in college, you’re experiencing now the same thing I experienced and yet you graduated college.

Angela: Yeah. But let me just tell you, it wasn’t easy because going from, you know, the freedom of homeschooling to a structured college environment seriously made me realize that I hated school, hated it. Like I wasn’t, it’s not just like boredom or wishing I was home doing something fun, like singing or whatever.

Ron: There’s a big distinction, you hated the structure of the school, not learning that you hated it was all of the, the bs that kind of goes along with the structure.

Angela: Yeah, the structure, formal, forced what they call learning. You know, you’re told exactly what to study, what to read, what homework to complete. And a lot of the tests that you’re given are on meaningless memorization things. I feel like the teachers, and I’m really sorry to teachers out there, like we said, we know there’s great teachers, but I felt like some of my teachers…

Ron: My mom was one of the greatest teachers ever, so.

Angela: Yeah. So, but I felt like there were some teachers, and I’m sure everyone’s experienced this, that are, they would pick out these meaningless stupid little facts and try to like trick you on them. You know, they’d find these facts that had nothing to do with the subject and just throw them on the test and that was so annoying. So anyway, it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy learning. Like I said, I was an avid reader, but I prefer to choose my own subjects, and read things I’m curious about. I think that the educational structure, I know it’s there to prepare students for the real world, but I think it kind of learned, it teaches you to just accept whatever you’re taught blindly and to be a regurgitator of facts, you know, whatever facts they teach you about and that doesn’t really teach you how to, you know, it doesn’t teach you critical thinking or how to ask questions or how to, you know to be curious.

Ron: My understanding that was the whole purpose of higher education, right, is to be this great think tank and to, you know, and to encourage all of those things. That is not what I experienced when I went to college.

Angela: And I don’t think you experienced that until, you know, you’re writing a dissertation, right, for a PHD or something. I don’t know if it’s before that.

Ron: Which I was never going to do, let’s just be clear. That was never going to happen because I would have never made it that far. I mean, that’s, that’s eight years, good hell, I didn’t make it past one. Well, I made it barely passed one.

Angela: No and Ron you said, you know, you skated through school. I did the exact same thing in college. Once I was in a structured environment, I just skated through. I did the very minimum I had to do back then you know, attendance didn’t count for grades, I didn’t go to class. I rarely applied myself and was kind of a slacker. Luckily I’m good at taking tests that’s the only way I escaped alive. So anyway, so I did the exact same thing and I’m not sitting here trying to say that, you know, I’m special or whatever. I was bored because I’m smarter than anyone else. But the point of it is that that many, many people hate the structure and forced learning environment of, you know, formal education. It discourages you from critical thinking and being curious and asking questions and learning more about what is actually going to make you successful in life.

Ron: I think there’s even a place in society now for us to be asking the question before we, before we drop couple hundred thousand dollars or go into debt for a couple of hundred thousand dollars to get this degree. What is it that we’re trying to accomplish with a degree, right? Because there’s a whole lot of things that you don’t actually need that to be able to go do and that it would serve well to not have the $200,000 in debt. And then there are on the other side, on the flip side of that coin, there’s a whole host of things that you got to have it to go and do those things, right. But it, it begs the question and I think it begs the question nowadays, because college is so expensive that, you know, when you get out, there’s a financial piece to this, right. If I’m going to get out and make $30,000 or $40,000 a year, is it worth going to college and coming out with $200,000 of debt starting my life with a mortgage, basically, right when I get out of college, that literally never goes away. You cannot get rid of it. That doesn’t go in bankruptcy, And there’s nothing you can do with this debt. It chases you around forever. It’s like an IRS lien, it’s horrible. So I think that you need to understand, you know, if I’m going to spend $200,000 on x bachelor’s degree, is that bachelor’s degree actually going to make me any money moving forward?

Angela: That’d be really cool if you could like calculate the return on that investment before starting school, but who actually does that, you know? Maybe a doctor or something.

Ron: I think people need to do that nowadays. I think they really do. You know, because I’d much prefer to have, I’d much prefer to hire somebody who has a skill set that they developed while actually performing the skill than somebody who went to college and doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing because they didn’t learn anything other than how to memorize facts when they were in college. College does not teach business, even though they have business degrees, they don’t teach any of that stuff….

Angela: That reminds me of, do you remember we hired a marketing intern to try to help out with Facebook and Google Marketing. And it’s crazy because they were in school in 2018 learning the newest marketing techniques and social media marketing and he said he knew all about Facebook, but getting in there with him, I quickly realized he knew nothing he knew theories and facts about, you know, people who got returns on certain things in Facebook or whatever, what it supposed to look like, but nothing about how to do it, nothing.

Ron: The rubber hitting the road was not there. It was if he had the back end jacked up and he was stepping on the gas, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

Angela: The gap between education and implementation that we always talk about.

Ron: Yep it’s massive. And listen, that’s not to say that kid that he didn’t get something out of his education, so don’t get us wrong, but if you are, if you are in college and you were studying. Like marketing like this guy was, what we’re suggesting is if you’re studying it because you love it, then there’s a whole host of self-education that you can do that is league’s better than what you’re going to get in college. And when you combine the two of them, that’d be really powerful. You think you’re going to graduate college and be able to get out and actually do marketing nowadays. Well maybe it was a really bad hire…

Angela: But no, there’s another, another side to that. Like I went to college, I graduated in Exercise Science, which originally I thought I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, but…

Ron: Let’s just, I just want really quick…

Angela: Oh your going to make fun of the exercise, come on.

Ron: Angela is the in the biggest irony on the planet, Angela graduates with an exercise science degree and hates exercise.

Angela: That’s how much I hated school, Ron okay. Everything we touched on I now hate.

Ron: It’s the funniest thing ever. If you actually knew Angela…

Angela: I would rather starve than exercise there you have it. Although I’m going to go punch some stuff, maybe that’ll be good.

Ron: And now you have some motivation. I’ve just publicly, you know, so there you go. Now you can punch me at the gym.

Angela: All right. I’ll come to South Carolina and punch you good idea.

Ron: And I meant the bag.

Angela: Oh, I’m sorry.

Ron: Don’t learn how to go punch and then punched me for real next time you see me. No, that’s not okay.

Angela: Just like a joking one in the arm. No, okay. Alright but my point was I go to school for Exercise Science, you know, quickly learned I hated school and I did not want to be a doctor even though I think I’d really enjoy actually the work of being a surgeon there was no way I was going to make it through the schooling and it probably would have been too structured anyway, working for a hospital. I can’t handle that. So the point is, I, you know, I started working with Ron. I’ve told that story in previous episodes throughout the years I’ve been working with Ron Nine, 10 years now. Throughout the years I taught myself how to build websites, do minimal coding and market on Facebook, how to write ads, create campaigns, get tons of leads.

Ron: Better than agencies.

Angela: Better than anyone we hired.

Ron: And all of that through…

Angela: No education, formal education of any kind on that.

Ron: And guys, look, so I mean, the thing you got to do is you’ve got to start asking yourself some questions, right? What do you enjoy? And if you enjoy it, dive deep, go deep. You got to use the knowledge that you’ve got to adequately, to go pursue a goal or a dream that you have. Well, and it doesn’t make any difference what it is. Just understand that there’s a ton more education out there than what everybody tells you that there is. And I’m not suggesting, again, I’m not suggesting you don’t go to college. I’m not suggesting you don’t graduate from high school. I think both, obviously you have to graduate high school number one. Some way I mean, Angela tested out, so if you can do that then super. But you’ve, you’ve got to get the knowledge that’s going to make it so that you can attain your goals. And self-education, when you add it to whatever education level you’re comfortable getting, that’s how you actually get ahead. That’s how you get ahead of every one of your peers out there because they likely aren’t going to do it.

Angela: Yeah. And if there’s, I just want to say if there’s a subject you’re interested in, like I wanted to learn more about marketing. I didn’t go pay for a Facebook Marketing course. I didn’t pay a cent. I didn’t even go take Facebook’s. I know now they have, they have their own blueprint courses. Those are probably really good, but I don’t have patience to go through them, that’s how ridiculous I am. But anyway, I found everything I needed to know, just looking through Google, just reading articles and answers to the questions and all kinds of different forums. And then I went into Facebook and Google and started playing around with it and practicing. So that’s the next step. That was my point there is you got to find the knowledge. You don’t, you can pay for a course if you know, if you want in something you’re interested in or you can find it on your own. You just got to ask the right questions. It all starts with the right questions, right. That’s the most important thing with Google. I never really realized that Googling was a skillset, but I’ve come after however many hires we’ve made over the years, I’ve realized that I naturally Google really well I don’t know why, but I guess it’s the, you know, asking the question the right way so you get the exact answer you want. So that’s super important when you’re looking for, you know, the resources to teach you what you want to know. And then the next step of it is you can’t just read forever. It’s really easy to get in, you know, educational paralysis or whatever where you keep reading and keep reading and keep reading and you never do anything. I never would have actually got to where I am with anything, but you know, we’ll use marketing as an example without practicing. You have to actually go do it, right.

Ron: Which is one of the biggest problems with the educational system that we have is because the people teaching business aren’t business owners.

Angela: Usually not.

Ron: They teach theories and the theoretical part of business, they don’t teach the actuality of being a business owner, an entrepreneur, at least very few of them…

Angela: And then you know Ron, you were ranting about finance stuff. You take finance classes and somehow you get out of school and you don’t know anything about managing your own finances, right.

Ron: And how do you like people who have a finance degree.

Angela: That you got, and you’re like, wait, no one teaches you the actual pieces you need, right.

Ron: The whole rubber meeting, the road thing again, you know. So look, you can, you can get this education in any part of your life and you’re right, Angela, you, once you get the book and you read the book, you have to actually apply the book. You have to apply the principles that it teaches in the book to your life. So if you’re, if you’re trying to become more healthy, well, there self education about that out there, about every aspect of it, about your internal systems, how everything is, how everything works about muscle, exercise science.

Angela: How to lose weight without exercising. I’m just kidding.

Ron: I’m sure there’s several out there that are really bad that you could go get .

Angela: But don’t read those they’re probably bad for you.

Ron: Don’t read those because they’re really bad for you and your health.

Angela: But those are great questions. Are you happy? Are you healthy? If not, you can find it out there. You know, do you have as much money as you want? Are you, you know, in the career that you want to be in? Is your relationship fulfilling?

Ron: And in every single one of those, there’s education that you can implement and you can make yourself better in every one of those aspects.

Angela: Exactly. Exactly. So, I mean, I think that’s pretty much where I want to end is that, you know, you got asked the right questions. It’s important to be curious. Those, those questions are critical to guiding yourself education and then, you know, start looking for answers start today. Google is your friend.

Ron: Yeah, and look, whatever your path is, education doesn’t end when you get done with college. So if college is your track and you’re going to go out there and you’re going to get your degree, just become a lifelong student. And that, and what I’m saying is that doesn’t have to be in a formal education environment. I’m saying when you get out of the formal education environment, whatever that, however far that takes you be a student for as long as you live, right, get out there and learn, understand. Because there’s such, there’s such a wealth of information out there that you can get for free, as Angela said. And you, and you can just internalize all of it and then you can make it a part of you and that’s how you become a better person. Better business owner, better husband or wife, better father or mother, better everything better, anything you want to be. That’s how you do it. And, you know, remember a formal education will make you a living. So if we’re talking about financially successful, business successful formal education will make you a living self-education will make you a fortune. Just, I mean it is 100% true. And so man, if you, if you like it, if you like our episode, if you like our podcast like it for sure Angela, right. And then make some comments about how awesome it is. And if you don’t just go find another one that you like, that’s cool but don’t dislike ours because that’s hateful. We should do a podcast on not being so hateful.

Angela: We will, if they start disliking it. Well listen here.

Ron: Angela where they go to get information on our stuff?

Angela: Yeah like Ron said, like it thanks for listening. Go to GetRealEstateSuccess.com. And you can subscribe to our podcast and leave us feedback. And also requests future topics that you’d like to hear about.

Ron: Yeah, please do. This show is really all about you guys. I mean if you, if you want to, if you want us to talk about a certain thing, which put it down there and we’ll probably will.

Angela: Yep. Alright. Thanks for joining. See Ya.

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