Taking Massive Action: Stop Studying the Business and Start Producing
You bought the course. You watched the training twice. You can recite the comp plan, you know the script by heart, and you’ve read enough success stories to practically write your own. And you still haven’t put yourself in front of a single stranger who might actually buy something.
That’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a sequencing problem, and Dave Wood watched it wreck people constantly before it almost wrecked him. As someone who’s ever felt like the professional student of their own business, buying every webinar, opening every email, never quite arriving at the part where you sell something, you already know the shape of this trap. This lesson from the Classic Masters Course is built entirely around breaking it.
Why does getting ready always feel like progress, even when it isn’t?
Dave tells this one from the bottom, not the top. Before any of what he’s known for now, he was working out of a room in his mom’s house with no ventilation in it, he says, bad enough that he’d have to come out occasionally for air. No advertising budget. No fallback plan, because by his own account he’d already been fired from enough jobs and failed at enough attempts that there was nowhere left to retreat to. He had to make it work, and knowing that changed what he was willing to do about it.
What he actually did first was about as unglamorous as it gets. He went on Craigslist, pulled job applications, and started cold calling people off the list. He calls it the most awful strategy he’s ever used, and it still got him fifteen people into his business. Not fifteen leaders. Fifteen people, from raw volume and a phone, because he was moving instead of waiting to feel ready.
Then came the webinar that fell apart in real time. He couldn’t figure out how to mute the room, everyone was breathing into their microphones at once, and midway through his pitch a prospect accused him outright of running a scam. He hung up on the man by accident trying to fix it, the whole call collapsed, and that was the moment he decided he was done building a business this way, one reluctant phone call at a time, hoping the person on the other end wouldn’t hang up on him first.
What happened when Dave stopped explaining and started producing something people could find on their own?
The turn came the same night, at dinner with an old team from a nutritional company he’d worked years earlier. A woman from that team spent the meal telling him how relieved she was to be free of network marketing, how she’d been chasing money and God had shown her a better way. Then, at five thirty the next morning, the same woman called him, breathless, about a new deal she’d just joined. Not network marketing, she insisted. You just get three, and they get three, and they get three. It was the same structure she’d renounced twelve hours earlier, dressed up in different language.
That contradiction is worth sitting with, because it’s the same trap in a different costume. People don’t actually object to the mechanics of building a business. They object to feeling like they’re selling something, so they keep hunting for a version that doesn’t feel that way, and they call the hunting itself progress. Dave went the opposite direction. That same night he turned a camera on, recorded a blunt video calling out a company he’d just left, and put it on YouTube. No script polish, a stained shirt, nothing rehearsed. It got seen four thousand times in eight hours.
He’d spent years in network marketing passing out videos by hand, fifty a month if he was disciplined about it. One unrehearsed video, posted once, outperformed that entire manual grind in a single evening, without him talking to a single person to make it happen. Shortly after, he found a crude, low-production video from another marketer named Adam Chandler and thought, if this guy can get rich making videos like this, so can I. He didn’t research the offer behind it. He clicked through, put in his email, and bought before he’d even scrolled back up to see what he’d bought. “But here’s the thing. Because I got in in a way that I believed I could do, I just believed it would work.” He wasn’t chasing certainty. He was acting on the strength of two small, real data points, fifteen Craigslist recruits and four thousand video views, and that was enough belief to move on.
Why do most people study for six months instead of acting for six days?
Here’s the part of the lesson that actually explains the gap between people who produce and people who don’t. Dave is upfront that he was a bad student growing up, the kind who skipped school and failed classes. He frames that as an accidental advantage, because when he got into this business, he skipped the instinct most people can’t shake: the urge to learn everything before doing anything.
Most people don’t skip that instinct. They get into a business and the first move is always the same: study it, and quietly postpone the one activity that actually produces income until they feel sufficiently prepared, a feeling that conveniently never arrives on schedule. That shows up as a specific, repeatable list of substitutes:
- Watching every training available before making a single piece of content or a single call.
- Attending every webinar in the niche, including the ones covering material already covered twice.
- Reading every book on the subject instead of testing the one idea from the first book.
- Waiting for a better script, a certification, or a feeling of readiness that never actually arrives.
But what I did was I said, well, I got in through a video. So I just turned the camera on and started making videos and putting them on YouTube and trying to get people to my website. Now, what happened was I started getting some leads. Right? I mean, pretty much right away. Not a ton, but I was getting a few a day just because I was working doing directly what we tell people to do is just taking action. Right? Now, most people will not just take action and try to sell stuff. They’ll do everything in their power to avoid it. Right? Everything in their power. They’ll spend six months learning, being on every webinar.
That’s the whole diagnosis in one breath. The training was never the danger. The danger is treating training as a substitute for contact with the market, indefinitely, because studying feels productive and it’s also completely safe. Nobody can reject you on a webinar you’re only watching. Nobody can call you a scam for reading a book. Action is where the actual risk lives, and risk is exactly what “getting ready” lets you avoid while still feeling like you’re moving forward.
Dave describes this type from the other side of an email list too: the people who open every message, click every link, buy every product, and never once do anything with what they bought. They’re not lazy in the way that looks like laziness. They’re busy, constantly, consuming. It’s just consumption pointed away from the one activity that would actually change their income, and it can run for years without anyone, including the person doing it, noticing the difference between motion and progress.
Why is the jump from zero to your first real month the hardest thing you’ll ever do in this business?
Dave draws a specific comparison from his own history, going from stuck at ten thousand dollars a month up toward fifty, against the climb before that, getting from nothing to that first ten thousand dollars a month at all. He’s clear it’s a personal marker from his own path, not a promise about anyone else’s timeline, but the shape of the comparison holds regardless of the exact numbers involved. As he puts it, “the hardest work that you’re ever going to do is not going from $10,000 to $100,000 to half a million a month. It’s going from zero to $10,000 a month. Right? Because you’ve got to act when you don’t know it will work for sure.” Every stage after the first one gets easier, not harder, because you’re compounding proof you already have instead of manufacturing proof from nothing.
The reason that first stretch is brutal isn’t effort. It’s uncertainty. You’re acting without knowing it will work, and training is exactly what lets you avoid feeling that. But more study can’t resolve it, because it isn’t a knowledge gap. Nobody gets proof before they act. Proof is what acting produces.
This is also what makes the whole thing survivable rather than terrifying: your circumstances right now don’t lock in your future. The turn can happen in a moment, on the far side of action, never on the far side of one more course.
What does this actually ask you to do differently this week?
None of this is an argument against training. It’s an argument against training as a hiding place. The lesson isn’t to never learn anything again. It’s to stop letting learning be the thing you do instead of selling, because those are two different activities wearing the same outfit, and only one of them pays you.
Pick the one action you’ve been circling for weeks, the video you haven’t recorded, the list you haven’t called, the post you haven’t published, and do it before you consume one more piece of training. Not because the training is worthless, but because you already have more of it than you’re using. The gap in your business right now almost certainly isn’t information. It’s contact, and contact only happens when you stop preparing to make it and actually make it.
This is one story out of a full lesson in the Classic Masters Course, where Dave breaks down exactly how he moved through every phase of that early period, the specific shifts that took him from broke and hiding in his mom’s house to full-time production, and what changed each time he got stuck again further up the ladder. If you’re new to it, the entire Classic Masters Course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
Stop studying the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Go make contact with one more person than you did yesterday, and let that be the whole assignment.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
It's the masters of the universe, of course. I was going to dress like He-Man, but I didn't have a sword. So a funny story about He-Man. My brother and I, this is a few years back. We were in, where were we at?
San Francisco, was it? No, Los Angeles. We were in Los Angeles, and it was Halloween. And we went to this big Halloween party. Well, little did we know that this was like the, I think this was like the gay hangout or something.
Well, I was really skinny. I was eating raw foods. And he was all buff because he's eating meat six times a day and doing the body for life thing or whatever. And so I dressed like Skeletor, and he dressed like He-Man. Right?
His butt got grabbed 250 times over the next few hours. Just funny. Just a He-Man story. He was jaded after about four hours going like this. But he just, you know, he kind of looked the part.
Hello? Hello? Okay. I go over here. Anyways, guys, what I want to do actually tonight is I want to walk through just a couple things that happened to me at different phases in my business.
Okay? And I don't know how long I'm going to take. I might take a half an hour. I might take eight. No, I'm kidding.
It won't be eight. But I want to talk about breakthroughs you have at different times. Okay? And how I've taken certain concepts and moved from one level to another. Because just like Dave was saying, there's a lot of different people in this room.
Chuck Marshall, you know, he makes money doing nothing. And so does Tracy, you know. And then there's some people in the room that were like me when I started, who, you know, you live in a van. And he came here and he was going to sleep here. Where is he?
Here. Over here? Yeah, yeah. There's a guy who's going to sleep on the beach. He actually showed up because, you know, he called us and he's like, dude, just like, you know, somehow I'm going to come up with the money.
I'll sleep on the beach. It's cool. And, you know, he showed up outside. Yeah. Yeah.
It's like a hammock. You know what I'm saying? So, I mean, people are in different phases in their business here. And the goal this weekend is really simple. It's to help you get from wherever you are to what's next as fast as possible.
Because how many of you know there's kind of always a next? Right? There's always a next. Now, sometimes next is, you know, like me or like Matt, where you're completely broke. Right?
And it takes everything that you do. You've got to just get going. Right? Or maybe you don't even got anything to get going. Right?
Maybe you're passing out, you know, naked pictures of women in Vegas, you know, like John Wells was up there before, you know, he got started in power. You've got to sell your television, you know, to get in. Right? Or maybe you've got to put it on a credit card. Right?
Or maybe you get dinged for your last 40 bucks by a cop for sleeping in a van in Hawaii. Right? And you've got to call your mom and say, you know, I need to start a business. Can I have a couple hundred bucks? You know, I need to get a computer and a couple other things.
Right? So sometimes you're there. Right? And sometimes you're in a spot where you get stuck and it's awful. You know what I'm saying?
And it sucks. You know, I remember I started working, working, working, working in the beginning. You know? And it's supposed to, you know, it's supposed to like grow. You know what I mean?
It just kind of like went $30,000, $45,000, $30,000, $45,000. And it just drove me crazy. You know what I mean? I couldn't get more than this. My income was stuck.
Right? Now some of you guys are like, well, that's not a bad place to be stuck. Stuck is stuck. Right? You know what I mean?
And it's like you're doing the same work. Right? Because you've got to act when you don't know it will work for sure. Right? You've heard the story.
I mean, you've met, you know, John Wells. And you met Lawrence. And you're like, well, you know, he kind of looks funny too. You know? You know, but the truth is you don't know if it will work for sure.
Right? It's the hardest thing you ever do. And you don't know who to listen to sometimes. You know, you've got, you know, people selling stuff. And, you know, half of them are making money.
And half of them live in their mom's basement. You know? And sometimes you feel like you don't know what to do. Right? So for me, I've been through virtually all of it.
Right? Virtually all of it. First breakthrough I had was in 2009. And 2009, you know, I was going to call this the grind. But I'm going to call it actually the flow.
Right? Because it just sounds better. And the grind sounds like it's terrible. It wasn't really terrible. But I got started, you know.
You know, I was working in my mom's house, you know. Graduated from the van and, you know, worked in a room with no ventilation in it. You know what I mean? Would come out occasionally for air. It smelled real bad in there after a while.
You know? But I just got started. But here's the thing. When I got started, I had no money. No advertising budget.
How many of you have been there? Maybe you're there right now, right? Doesn't matter. Right? I had to make money.
Now, here's the difference between where I was then and where I'd ever been in the past. Here's the difference. Is I knew I had to make it work. I had to make it work. There's no back.
There's no out for me. I'd been fired from too many jobs. I was married. Right? I basically failed at everything in my adult life.
Right? I was never really successful at anything in my life other than, you know, I was like a black belt in karate when I was a teenager. You know? It was my grand achievement, you know, that I ever had in my life. I failed at everything.
Right? So it was like I'd failed at everything. I'd failed in network marketing for years. My mom was trying to get me to go back to school, which I also failed at. Right?
But I knew it would work. And here's why I knew it would work. Because I was, you know, on Craigslist and trying to recruit people, you know, by getting job applications and calling people on the phone. Most awful strategy ever. I got like 15 guys in, you know.
And then one day I was doing a webinar. And I'm bad with technology. Right? Some people think you've got to be a tech guy to be good on the internet. I hear it all the time.
And it's like, guys, you've never heard me talk. Right? I mean, I was doing a webinar and I couldn't figure out how to mute everybody out. You know, you don't want to go to a meeting like everybody's talking at the same time. You know what I mean?
And I couldn't afford to go to a webinar, which was like 100 bucks a month. And going to a meeting was like 50. And I, you know, borrowed some money. Ashley was working, you know, a hostessing job. And she gave me 50 bucks so I could get this go-to-meeting thing.
And I got the dollar trial and then I'd cancel it and get another dollar trial the next month. Right? And so I'm talking and everybody's kind of like breathing in the background so I can't mute anybody out. Right? Well, in the middle of this presentation, I'm pacing back and forth, you know, like yelling and screaming about how rich they're going to be.
And this company watching old guys in suits talk about nothing. You know, because we have a personal development company that was just really boring. You can't ask anybody that's been in. Lawrence, you were in that. We sat around and watched, you know, Brian Tracy videos.
Right? But you're just talking about how awesome it is. And this guy says, why are you trying to scam us? Right? And, you know, and I was like, well, I'm not.
Right? And he's like, he's trying to scam us, everyone. He's trying to, I spent all day calling, like, people who wanted jobs. Right? And then I got, it took me like 10 hours of work to, you know, get 15 people on this thing.
And I was like, I'm not trying to, and I was hitting buttons all over the place. And then I managed to hit a button that hung up on the guy. I said, it's not a scam. And everybody hung up. Right?
Right? And then I was. And then I was like, I am not doing this in a way where I have to talk to morons all day. Right? So, later that night, went out and I met up with an old team of mine that was in a nutritional company that I was in back in 2006.
I built, you know, a team offline doing meetings and stuff. Some of you guys have done meetings and three-way calls and things like this. This is why I don't have a phone. It's because of that experience. He's laughing.
That laugh is an experienced laugh. Right? And so, I haven't had a phone since that company because I just got jaded from the calls. David, got my grandma on the phone. She's so excited.
She's seen the video. Yeah, I don't understand what this is. Calls like that all day will make you jaded. So, anyway, I don't have a phone and I'm sitting there and I'm like, there's got to be a way. So, we're going out to dinner at this restaurant we used to do meetings up in Fairbanks, Alaska.
I'm in this restaurant and with my team and there's a gal from my team there. Right? And I say her name. She's totally cool. And, you know, if she ever sees this video, she'll know it's her.
And she just went off about how she's so glad that God has saved her from the horrible network marketing business and that she used to chase money. But now, she's very God. She was Christian then, too. And, you know, God told her to do it, you know. So, you know, sometimes people blame God for stuff that they just, you know, change their mind all the time.
Well, God told me to do it. And the next day, it's like, well, he told me not to because I don't feel good today, you know. And I was like, you know, listening to her. And I was like, well, obviously, she's not interested. Network marketing at the moment.
You know what I mean? Because, you know, I was going to tell her about my escape, you know. And I was like, not interested. Right? So, she went off for hours.
Right? Then the next morning, I get a phone call. 5.30 in the morning. And same girl. I just got in this deal.
It's not network marketing. But you get three. And they get three. And they get three. And Saturday Night Drinks is a club.
It's so cool. Right? And I think that was the first time I was like the negative prospect. You know what I mean? I was like, you know, like getting beaten up every day.
And then, you know, just the day before, God had told her not to do it. Right? And then the next morning, God had revealed to her the three by three by three plan that's not network. It's better. Right?
And so I say, I hung up the phone. And then, you know, this company. I'm not going to mention its name because we're recording this. But I put a camera on. And I said, the X company scam, nine reasons why it sucks, was the title of my video I made.
And I had a, you know, a shirt with a stain on it that, you know, I had developed in the van when I was making the video. And I looked crazy. You know? And I was like, let me tell you the first reason why this company sucks. Right?
Well, this company was hot at the time. That video, I put it up on YouTube. It was my first video. I just put a video on YouTube. It got seen like 4,000 times in like eight hours.
And it had like 80 pages of just, you know, people just yelling and screaming about how they want to kill my family because this energy drink saved their life. You know? Haven't you read the scientific research of the vitamins and the energy drink? You know what I mean? And like, you know, most people might not have, you know, wanted to put another video up after that.
But I was looking at that. And I was getting my inbox filling out. I'm making thousands of dollars a month. Don't listen to this guy. He looks like he listens.
He lives in his mom's house. He has a stain on his shirt. And I was like, well, yeah, I do. And, yeah, I do. You know?
But I was looking at this. And I said, holy crap. I just got 4,000 people see a video without talking to anybody. See, I used to have to work. I used to pass videos out.
You know what I mean? I've never passed 4,000 videos out, ever. You know what I mean? In all my years of failing at network marketing. You know, I've passed a lot out.
But not 4,000. You know what I mean? I mean, when I was building that vitamin company a few years later, we used to pass two videos out. We used to pass two videos out. We used to pass two videos out.
We used to pass two videos out a day. You know what I mean? And here, I made a video I put on YouTube, and 4,000 people see it in like, you know, eight hours. Now, that's a little abnormal. That company was hot.
And, of course, you know, then it went out of business a few months later. But, you know, and then God told her, never to do network marketing again. You know? Until the pantyhose deal came out. But in any case, in any case, I said, there's got to be a way to sell like this.
So then, I start looking up videos and seeing if anybody else has put it out in network marketing. I was running into a video by a guy named Adam Chandler. I don't know if you guys know Adam. And he was like, this dude, he was like, hi, if you're seeing this, you're probably looking at this company. And, you know, you probably are running around, you know, talking to morons all day.
And here I am, rich on the internet. People call me and just join. It's awesome. Go to my website. It's right below the video.
I'm cool. Later. You know? Hey, he's Adam. He's really shy.
But I was like, you've got to be kidding me. So I go to this website, and I just clicked in. I put my email in, and I just scrolled down to the bottom of the page and hit the buy button. I didn't even look at what it is. So I was like, if this dumb moron can make videos on YouTube and get rich on the internet, I'm going to tear this up.
Any of you guys ever say that? Right? And that's how it starts. But here's the thing. Because I got in a way that I believed I could do, I just believed it would work.
Right? I just believed it would work. Right? Now, here's the thing that you guys have got to realize this week, and this is why I want to emphasize this for a minute. At any moment, your life can turn around.
It doesn't matter where you're at. It doesn't matter where you want to go. In a moment, it can. Right? To get to your first $10,000.
Significant. I mean, it's dramatically easier to get there. And we're going to talk about why and how to do that. Right? But in any case, I believed it would work.
So you know what I did? I bought this thing. And most people, what do they do? They get involved in something, and what do they do first? First, they've got to learn it.
Right? They've got to learn how to do it. So they start to study. Because we grow up. My parents, they said, you've got to study.
Which, of course, I've always been awful at. So, you know, I just kind of had the advantage in this case, you know, because I think I failed every class in 8th grade, you know. Well, I did. You failed every class. The only reason you passed was because Dad told them.
Yeah, they did. They did. I was awful. Awful student, you know. But I would skip school.
Right? So I was bad at school. So I didn't need to study. Right? But what I did was I said, well, I got in through a video.
So I just turned the camera on and started making videos and putting them on YouTube and trying to get people to my website. Now, what happened was I started getting some leads. Right? I mean, pretty much right away. Not a ton, but I was getting a few a day just because I was working doing directly what we tell people to do is just taking action.
Right? Now, most people will not just take action and try to sell stuff. They'll do everything in their power to avoid it. Right? Everything in their power.
They'll spend six months learning, being on every webinar. Right? I mean, Aaron, you've been on the Internet for a million years. Right? Everything.
Ever since Al Gore invented it in 1922. Right? Now, hold on real quick. I'm going to turn this on. Right?
Now, how many people have you had that have literally bought everything you've ever sold and never done a goddamn thing? A lot. Yeah, like what? Just guess. Probably a few hundred.
A few hundred. You know? Maybe more. Everything. Right?
Everything. And they're on every webinar. Every training. Oh, those people? Thousands.
Thousands. Yeah. How did you do to everybody? They think they bought a magic lamp. They do.
Now, real quick, Tracy. How many people do you have who just, they just, you know, they get on every call, every email. They open every email. You know, you check your opens. They're there every time.
And some of them respond. Some of them. Actually. They do. They do.
You know, they email you back and say, you misspelled. Yes. The word there. You used the wrong version of there in that email. Oh, I just wanted to track it.
Because you might have found something out there that I just wanted to warn you. That's right. Because I'm worried. Right? Yeah.
So, you know, you were a construction dispatcher, right? How many people do you have who, you know, they saw a magazine ad. They said, you know, that guy kind of wants, you know, this. And then they kind of get it. And they read your emails.
And they buy everything. Right? Yeah. Yeah. They just, you know, sit around.
And they're looking at everything. And they're like, okay, I'm going to get rid of it. I'm going to school. Yeah. Professional student type.
Yeah. Professional student. Yeah. So, I mean, we're talking, you know, good school. You know, you go to school.
High school. And then they're like, well, then you have to go to college. You know. And then once you go to college, you buy the works. You know.
And of course, how many people do you have on your list that, you know, they open your emails. They send everything. You know. They buy everything. They just forget what I'm doing.
Right? Yeah. Too many. It's too many. So, here's the difference, folks.
It's people who get results where they take action to get sales.
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