New BiggerPockets Article: The Dangers of Action-Faking and Hustle Culture
"Never mistake activity for achievement" - Bill Walton
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on BiggerPockets.com
Back in 2011, I attended a conference on buying multifamily properties, and at one point, a speaker asked the audience to hold up their hand if they owned any investment properties. (I should stress that this was a seminar about buying multifamily properties, not about how to get started in investing). Only about one in every five hands went up.
I was quite surprised by this. “Why are these people at a seminar on buying 50-plus unit apartments if they’ve never even bought a rental house?” I thought. (I should also note that, at the BPCON, I’ve seen a similar question, and the results are usually the opposite.)
At one point in this conference, the speaker was trying to sell the audience on his quite expensive, one-on-one training programs and mentioned that someone told him she had already attended five of his conferences but hadn’t bought a single property yet. His response was, “You need to get into the training program.” And, of course, pay the hefty fee that came along with that.
Ugh.
This became something of a running (dark) joke between my partners and me. I even tried to (unsuccessfully) coin the term “seminaraholics” for people with this type of very expensive and apparently compulsive behavior: the type who buy book after book, listen to podcast after podcast, attend seminar after seminar, and pay for mentoring program after mentoring program, but never actually act on what they have learned.
Hard work pays off, so they say. And all things being equal, that is absolutely true. Unfortunately, not all work is created equal. Some may be even worse than useless.
Action Faking and “Hustle Culture”
M.J. DeMarco coined the term “action faking” in his book Unscripted: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship. It describes doing things that make you feel like you’re making progress when you’re actually not. As DeMarco puts it:
“For the aspiring entrepreneur who wants to get rich, be his own boss, and blah blah blah, ‘action-faking’ is ordering cards from Vistaprint. Look at that, they say you’re a CEO! Woo hoo, you’re the head honcho of a zero-revenue, zero-customer, zero-asset business!”
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You will also learn so much faster and so much more by doing it. The examples ring true so much better and the lessons are more easily learned once you have felt what it takes personally.