Ep 29: How to Turn a $10,000 Student Loan Into Six Figures

There's a lot to unpack there because you learned some of the lessons that some people spend a lifetime trying to learn or maybe never learn.

And I think it's amazing.

First of all, you're at an early age.

Yeah, so that was a big advantage for you.

And a lot of people either fear risk or they don't respect it enough.

And I always use the metaphor that risk is like, well, I tell the story of my dad.

He was an amazing carpenter and he could swing a hammer like no one else, right? He can bang a nail down with one swing really fast.

But then all of a sudden, the new generation of competition arrived as he got older and the new generation arrived with hydraulic nail guns.

So they're able to go 10 times faster or 20 times faster than him.

But he was old school.

He was never going to get one.

But I use the hydraulic nail gun as a metaphor for risk because it's a high power tool that can leverage your time and effort and produce something much faster and easier.

But if you misuse it, if you don't learn how to use it properly...

You can shoot yourself in the toe or worse, and it's no longer a valuable high leverage tool.

It's a detriment and something that can really hurt you.

So that's kind of like my simple layman way to describe what risk is.

So you think of risk as this power tool, and if you use it properly, you can leverage it and make a lot of money.

And what I love about your thinking is that the other side of the equation of using it properly, of course, is focusing in on what you can lose.

And so you were assessing this student loan and just through logical thinking and you figured the risk was very small and you had a means of solving that anyway, even if everything, if all hell broke loose and you lost everything, it wasn't going to, you weren't going to wake up tomorrow and have your life materially changed.

Exactly.

It kicked in the shins, but you don't lose your legs.

So that's kind of my take on risk.

But you learn that just instinctively.

You thought it through and figured it out.

And then the other thing that I thought was amazing, because this is something I teach to the people that come into our Backpack Trader program.