How to become “dirt rich” with Mark Podolsky

Hello and welcome back to the Be Well, Do Well podcast.

Since then, he's completed over 5,500 land deals and helped others do the same.

Mark Podolsky is the best selling author of Dirt Rich and the host of the Art of Passive Income podcast.

And today we're gonna have a conversation about talent, mindset, purpose, and a whole lot more.

Mark, welcome to the show.

Amin.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm honored.

Oh, thank you.

I appreciate that.

Can you give us a little bit of background on what you were doing in your transition to what you're doing now?

I wouldn't get the Sunday Blues, anticipating Monday coming around.

I'd get the Friday blues, anticipating the weekend going by really fast and having to be at work on Monday.

So my firm hires this guy.

He's telling me that as a side hustle, he's buying up raw land, penny's on the dollar, he's flipping them online and he's making a 300% return on his investment.

And I'm looking at companies all day long at a great company.

Has 15% EBITDA margins or free cash flow.

Average companies, 10%.

I'm looking at companies all day long, less than 10%, so of course I don't believe him.

I've got three grand saved up for car repairs.

I go to New Mexico with him.

I do exactly what he tells me to do.

I buy 10 half acre parcels and average price of $300 each.

They all sell.

The next week for an average price of $1,200 each.

It worked.

And I made over $90,000 on that one auction.

So I go to my wife and she's pregnant at the time.

I said, honey, I'm gonna quit my job.

I become a full-time land investor.

And she's like, absolutely not.

So I said, okay, okay.

Okay.

So it took 18 months for the land investing income to exceed the investment banking income, and then I quit.

And I've been doing it full-time ever since.

That's amazing.

You and I didn't realize that, but you and I share a similar journey there as well because I started my entrepreneurial journey when my wife was pregnant with our first child.

And I went to her and I said, honey, I'm going to leave my day job as a professional engineer and I'm gonna start this business.

Fortunately she said, Okay, let's talk about it rather than not at all.

Right.

And that's how it began.

And for me, mindset was a huge thing.

When I went into it.

I knew it was gonna be challenging, and I knew that there was gonna be that overlap of, your income is gonna drop, you're gonna have to catch up and do other things.

But also the things you do as a employee are very different from what you do as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, I think that's interesting because what I find is that when you are not working for a company.

All that energy that you can now just focus for yourself and your business, it really is amazing to watch.

So, , oftentimes when people are quitting a job, they see everything they're losing.

They're not seeing all the things they're gaining with the autonomy and the energy and the purpose and the drive that's gonna go towards their thing and not their company's.

Yeah exactly, and I totally agree with that.

It's if you can channel that and you can use that effectively and productively, you can really make big gains.

And mindset for me was a big thing is like, okay, I know that there's huge potential here, like you mentioned, right?

You're single digit gains versus, multiple digit gains.

And that potential of doing that is really what drove me.

Did you find that you were really excited initially and then it kind of faded or have you kind of maintained this energy and enthusiasm since you begun.

Well, I would say for me, I mean, we're going back so many years now.

You're right.

So it's hard to kind of remember I'm the kind of person, I have a lot of focus.

So if we were gonna look at it from a track and field perspective, I'm the mile runner, not the sprinter, or I'm more geared towards say, a marathon and an endurance.

Okay.

Than I am a sprint.

So for whatever reason, I've never been really distracted with shiny object syndrome.

I mean, I like looking at other things.

, but nothing has really gotten me off track.

So to be able to do the same thing I've been doing for 22 years now, just kinda goes to show it.

But I had a person the other day asked me, what, what do I hate most about my business?

I literally couldn't answer the question.

I'm like, no one's ever asked me that.

I, I love everything I do.

That's, amazing.

And that's rare.

I think a lot of people go into business, they enjoy it initially, and then all of a sudden they become a slave to their own business.

So, kudos to you for finding the thing that you really enjoy and that really, feeds you, you somewhere on your website I was reading and, you mentioned work smart, not hard.

And the other thing I really liked about your website is that you are a self-proclaimed ambitiously lazy geek.

So let's start with that first ambitiously lazy geek.

There's a lot in there.

What does that mean to you?

So ambitiously, lazy geek means to me that I don't scale.

So I want to put in the people, the processes, the systems.

Other people's money.

So the three levers of, of leverage extensively, right?

other people's time, software and automation and other people's money so that I can live my best life and the business can grow.

So that's really what I mean by being ambitiously lazy, where instead of thinking to myself, how am I going to do this?

I think to myself, who can I get to do this?

And I take it even one step further.

I can then just vox my chief problem solver, who can she find to go and do this?

All right, so you're not the bottleneck then

Yeah.

I'm never the bottleneck now and I've really am just thinking like the CEO.

And when did that happen for you?

Was that a transition that happened, like right day one, you, got your first land parcel and you're like, this is gonna be a business, I need to think like a CEO Or was there something along the way, like a spectrum, a transition that happened for you?

So for years and years, it was sort of my biggest mistake.

I would just flip land for cash,

Right.

And I was making a lot of money doing it.

So I go to meet with my first mentor Ori.

And Ori sold this company for $360 million, and so we're having coffee and we're talking.

I'm kind of humble bragging to him, and I mentioned I'm an entrepreneur.

He's like, stop.

He's like, don't insult me.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

He's like, don't call yourself an entrepreneur.

I'm like, why?

He's like, well, You are doing all the the tasks.

He's like, it feels like you own a business, but you just create another job for yourself.

He's like, if you die tomorrow, what happens to your so-called business?

Who's finding the deals?

Who's selling the deals?

I'm like, oh, he's like an entrepreneur builds something bigger than themselves.

And so his example was when Steve Jobs died, apple didn't miss a beat, so he helped me think about the world in that way and start creating the systems and processes.

And I was terrible.

I mean, if I didn't have him pushing me to do it, I had Superman syndrome.

I thought, oh, no one's gonna care as much as me.

No one's going to do it as well as me.

No, they all do it better than me.

They all care just as much as me.

And when you let go, was that difficult for you or did you start to see that this is actually been working.

No, I would complain to Ori all the time.

He's like, we have to let go.

It's like you're not gonna be able to grow.

Yeah.

I, I think that's what holds a lot of businesses back, right?

Is not being able to let go of that.

I know in the past, I, myself and many of the businesses that we work with exactly the same problem.

Now, coming back to the working smart, not hard.

What does that entail?

Is that, like you said, other people's time, other people's money, energy, or do you use, you said software as well, I'm more intrigued on the software side of it.

Yeah, so we created two pieces of software that automate the business.

90%.

So there's software on the front end that runs the business, and there's software on the back end that manages the notes.

Okay.

Can you talk a little bit about the front end?

Is that a marketing type software?

It's not marketing software, it's more automation software.

Okay.

Where when you're buying a piece of property or looking for a piece of property, you have to upload a mailing list of property owners and that will automate that piece of it.

And then you can have a virtual assistant in for your due diligence and then every step of the process, all the way to contracts.

So it always takes me 20 minutes.

In contracts and paperwork.

Now it takes literally less than a second.

It's like, oh, one button press.

That's amazing.

And to get to that point, there was a lot of, I'm assuming manual first.

And then you learn what can be automated.

Standardize it first, automate it, and then outsource that.

Exactly.

I mean, it's the best time ever to be alive and to be an entrepreneur because there's so much global talent and just about any problem can be solved way more cheaply than we could in the past.

Interesting.

Do you, I'm curious, do you have, young kids or kids of your own?

So I have three kids and I'm an empty nester now.

My oldest is 22.

Okay.

My, and so I've got two in college and one that's a, a senior in high school.

But yeah, she's with me.

She's with her friends.

Yeah.

Gymnastic.

Yeah.

And that entrepreneurship and, the idea that, like you said, we live in such an important and fortunate time right now.

I have younger kids, they're eight and 10, and they ask me sometimes they're like, oh, how did you do this when you were young?

And I walked to the library, I opened an encyclopedia, I took notes on paper, and then I went home.

Hopefully the paper was still legible, right.

And, They don't understand that.

They can't fathom that, well, you didn't have the internet, you didn't have a cell phone to call home.

And like you said, the technology drives your business right now, 90% of that is automated.

Is that something that you've passed on to your kids so that when they get to a certain point that they're also gonna be thinking like a CEO regardless of what they do in life?

Yeah.

I talk to them a lot about this idea of solo economic dependency, which means if they're personally not working , they're not making any.

And think about somebody with a W2 job, a solopreneur, a freelancer, even rich people.

, doctors, lawyers.

Let's just pick on the dentists.

If the dentist's hands aren't the patient's mouth right, the dentist isn't generating any revenue.

So I have these conversations with the kids and say to them, if you want to be wealthy, and I'm talking now, traditional, capitalistic, western wealth.

Where they've solved their money problems and they've solved their time problems.

Let's just define it by that, because really our wealth assets could be way deeper than just that.

But we'll just keep it for that for now, is how can you get, how can you find things that people want at scale?

How can you solve a problem for other people they can't solve for themselves and do it at scale?

And that's, that's how you build a business.

Yeah, , that's very simply put.

Yes, that's exactly how you build a business.

That's wonderful.

Now, when it comes to family and kids, especially younger kids, Making time for them versus making time for yourself versus your business.

Right.

That idea of work life balance that I constantly say doesn't exist.

Right.

Do you have some kind of wellness routine that you have for yourself to kind of bring you back when you find that you're maybe starting to get a little ungrounded?

Yeah.

I have a great routine, I think, so I theme my days, so Monday and Friday are what I call my terminal days.

So I pretend if this is my last day on.

Because I don't know, my last day is gonna be, and we're not even entitled to the next breath.

It feels like we are, but we're not.

Yeah.

So Monday and Friday, I don't take phone calls.

I typically won't have podcasts.

It'll just be a day of I'll meditate, I'll work out, I'll spend time with my loved ones and just think and read and enjoy my life.

Tuesdays are my podcast days.

Wednesdays are my team meeting days.

Thursdays are my client meeting days.

And Friday again is, another thinking day or terminal day.

Oh, I love that.

So three day work week, probably working pretty intensely focused on those three days that you have and then your, your terminal days don't like calling them terminal days.

It sounds very morbid, but I love the idea that you live it as if it is really your last day.

Yeah.

I think it's life enhancing.

I love the idea.

Yeah.

Of, this finite time and this because then every moment becomes more precious and I don't take it anything for granted.

That's amazing.

Did something happen, and feel free to be as open as you want to, as you're comfortable with, but did something happen in your life that brought that realization that, I need to live like this?

Well, through the years I've lost people close to me.

I remember when I was a teenager, my sister, lost her best friend in a tragic car accident and I can close my eyes and I can still hear the screams from my sister and my mom getting that phone call that my sister's best friend was gone, and I must have been 16 at the time.

And then speaking of my sister, I lost her to covid.

And so to not be able to go to the hospital to not be able to say the things to her.

That you want to say to your loved one and you want to leave nothing unsaid is a great lesson for me now, and I'm one of those people that, if I'm talking to a friend or a family member or team member, I have no problem telling you the things I wanna tell you that I wanna leave nothing unsaid.

So they always get uncomfortable.

I'm like, I love you.

They're like, okay . But yeah, I wanna leave nothing unsaid.

No, that's beautiful.

Thank you for sharing that.

What, do you see as your legacy when you're gone?

So I think my legacy is really just what are my values and ultimately in three generations, no one's gonna remember me.

And the wealth that I've accumulated, it's pretty meaningless, but what could live beyond me are my values.

And so just this idea of what makes for a good life, a flourishing life, and putting that down, memorializing that, talking to my children about that, living that and embodying that.

I think that's my legacy.

Amazing.

I love that you've written books.

You've, you have your own podcast as well.

Those are the digital assets that we'll live on.

And, we don't have, I think about my legacy, or sorry, my heritage.

I don't have really any documentations, pictures, videos of my great-great-grandparents.

We may have stories.

Verbal stories, which probably have been changed along the timeline, but the fact that you've got these books and all that, I think that's a great way to also pass that information on, that your grandkids, great grandkids will look back and be like, Hey, this is family.

Yeah.

The Plot Thickens.

And working on a third book, Life Rich, so have this series and Life Rich will actually be more towards what we're discussing, which are, what makes a rich life.

What does make a rich life for you?

Well, I think what makes a rich life are the things that transcend money.

So a fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love are gonna be so those pillars.

And then from there I think creating a life for yourself where you can work when you want, where you want, with whom you want.

Total time, location, freedom, as well as psychological freedom.

, Just this idea of realizing you are not your thoughts and having total equanimity in any moment is I think the goal.

Yeah, you're the first of all the guests that we've done so far that have you used the word equanimity?

So that's awesome.

A hundred points for you on that one.

All right.

Yeah, for those that don't know, can you explain equanimity what that means?

Yeah.

Equanimity just means staying very peaceful in the moment.

It doesn't necessarily mean that if you're attacking me, I take the attack.

It means that I don't have to psychologically be disturbed by it.

Think of an example where, well, let's not take an attack, but let's just take an example where if you and I were playing football

and I get tackled, well, that's fun.

I got tackled playing football where if I was on a walk and someone runs into me and I get knocked to the ground, now I'm disturbed.

I'm, Hey, hey, I'm all off kilter, but equanimity would be, oh, okay.

That happen everything's kind of comes and goes.

It's, a very Buddhist.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

one of my favorite books actually on this topic is called the Diamond Cutter.

Are you familiar with that book?

I'm not.

Tell me.

Oh, it's amazing.

It's the Buddhist principles taught by the Buddha, but put into modern context from a business standpoint.

And so, Geshe Michael Roach, I think his name is.

he's a westerner, so Caucasian from, North America, New York, and went and became a monk.

And I think he was the first to get the title of Geshe, which takes, decades.

I think it ta takes 10 plus years to become that level of, of a monk and his, , I don't know what they call him, but his mentor, his monk mentor, told him, we'll go back and use these principles in a business sense and see how they make a difference.

So what you described there, getting tackled in football versus on the street, they refer to that as emptiness, that the situation looks the same from an outsider, but it's the meaning you put on it that defines how your respond or react to it

Yeah, Absolutely.

So our reactions are what we can't control.

And it's just the stories we tell ourselves.

. And so I like the idea of a duck.

If you watch a duck, they just seem very peaceful and calm.

, But then they're fiercely paddling under the water.

And I think of that with my business life.

Can I be calm in every moment, but really be working hard and intensely and in a focused way to hopefully make an impact.

Absolutely.

Now that's one of my favorite books.

Do you have any favorite books that you have that you either read often or would recommend?

I really love this book, the Second Mountain, by David Brooks.

Okay.

And the first mountain is egoic.

You get raised by your family and you wanna get a good education, a good job, the house, the cars, the trips, and you go up this mountain and you get to the top.

And it feels empty.

you achieved it all.

And then you go to the second mountain, which is more purpose-driven.

So it's purpose, it's community, it's faith and spirituality, it's intimacy and love.

And this is a much harder mountain to climb, but it's other focused and way more meaningful.

The second mountain.

The second mountain.

Okay.

I'm gonna have to look that up.

It reminds me of this app that I downloaded.

It's called, fabulous and the Fabulous Journey.

So they take you on a journey and part of it is meditation.

Part of it is just tidying up your home and they, and they use that analogy of a mountain like you, you pass the first mountain and now you've got these other peaks to go through.

So I love the analogy.

I'm definitely gonna take a look at that book.

Yeah.

You'll love it.

Are there any, productivity hacks that you have when it comes to helping you get through the day when you're just feeling a little frazzled?

Well, I think the best productivity happen, hack when I'm frazzled is a walk for sure.

But, or breathing and, or, taking 20 minutes just to meditate, watch my breath, and, and watch the thoughts and the stories, and ask myself, is this really that important?

Right.

it's kind of silly when you think about it, but, so that's what I do.

But as far as like technology, because I'm very geeky.

, Every day I look at Zapier and I think, well, if I'm doing something, how can I automate what I'm doing?

And then there's some things that don't scale.

So I love actually calling customers and surprising them because no one does that anymore.

So there are some things I just like to do that are, that personal touch and that personal connection, that wow factor and do that.

Yeah.

I think most people are surprised cuz they didn't realize their phones actually take calls still

.

I love that.

I love that.

One last question for you is there something that your friends would be genuinely surprised to learn about you that they don't already know?

I'm pretty open with my friends.

What would they be genuinely surprised to learn about me.

I probably, that I'm starting to listen to country music now a little bit.

Okay.

That would be shocking to them.

Yeah.

Because I've always been into rap.

Okay.

And then suddenly I got introduced to country and there's this great song by Dirt , and I'm like, oh my gosh, I, this is kind of country and I kind of like it.

Right.

So I've got more friends who are telling me, oh, listen to this, listen to that, and sort of listen to kind of liking country music these days.

They're going from rap to country.

That's-

Yeah,

that's a big change.

Don't, I'm not letting go of my rap.

Okay.

Okay.

But I'm sort of, embracing country music now and starting to see the value in it.

I wouldn't have taken you for rap, but is there certain artists that you really like?

Well, Jay Cole is a favorite, early Kanye.

Yeah.

I think is brilliant.

I even liked his gospel album.

I wouldn't wanna hang out with the guy, but I think his music is great.

what other, Chance The Rapper, Coloring Book I think is amazing.

That's awesome.

I'm gonna put all these in the show.

Yeah.

Kendrick Lamar.

He's a genius.

So these are all thinking rappers.

These are where their lyrics are really thought-provoking, and you can tell they're not just spitting bars and,

Yeah.

So you know your rap.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So these rappers have sort of transcended that typical model of money, sex and violence in rap.

Are talking about deeper issues.

Yeah.

Very cool.

I'm more of an electronic music and I see it the same way.

There's those DJs that will just play music that's top 40.

It sounds good.

And then there's the others that you can tell there taking you through this journey.

It's like transcendence, like you said, right?

They, actually think about it and how the feeling evokes in it.

So that's amazing.

Totally off script.

Wasn't planning on talking about music, but rap.

I think I'm gonna have to look at some of the, recommendations you have there.

I have to check out your electronic.

I'll send you some links for sure.

Okay.

So what are you working on now that's got you really fired up that you'd like to share with us?

So I'm finishing Dirt Rich 2 and I'm pretty fired up about, Then starting Life Rich.

I'm really excited about, the passive income mastermind group that, I'm a board member on with Sheron Svaa that we both are, are friends with.

. So, I've been able to help people all along the economic spectrum, but now to help rich people become wealthy is exciting to me as well.

I love that rich people become wealthy.

That's quotable for sure.

That's amazing.

And if somebody wanted to, learn more about you or get ahold of you, where can they do that.

I think the best place to go is thelandgeek.com, thelandgeek.com.

Awesome.

We'll put that in the show link as well.

And, Mark, I really appreciate your time today, your energy, and it's been really cool getting to know you a little bit more.

I'm gonna go listen to some rap after this call and, , thanks again.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Amin.

I appreciate it.