I Spent $889k on Personal Development.. Is it a Scam or Not? w/ Brian Luebben

**Brian Luebben** (0:00)
Over the last five years, I've spent $889,000 on personal development across coaches, courses, masterminds, events, and agencies. 39 programs in total. Some of them changed my life, and four of them made me want to literally throw up. So in this video, I'm gonna show you every single receipt, how they impacted my income each year, and also I'm going to grade each program A through F, with A being the absolute best return on investment, and F being this sucks, I wish I would have never done this, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. So after watching this video, you'll have a crystal clear understanding on what works, what to avoid, and how it can impact your income, because here's what nobody tells you. The cheapest program I bought in the last five years made me a quarter million dollars, and the most expensive ones almost broke me. Let's get into it. So three quick ground rules before we get started. Number one, I'm not gonna pretend that I can calculate the ROI on each program, so what I'm gonna do is just break down the total spend per year, my business income per year, and my take home income per year, so that you guys can draw your own conclusions from each one of those data points. Rule number two, every program gets a letter grade, A through F, no participation trophies. I'm gonna break down exactly what rocked, what sucked, and why so that you don't waste your hard-earned money.
And number three, at the end, I'm crowning a category champion, the highest overall return on investment across five years. Coaches, courses, masterminds, agencies, or events. One of them is going to surprise you. What made me the most money? Let's get into it. All right guys, so as I'm pulling up my document, we're going the years 2020 through 2025 So for reference, for anybody that's new that doesn't know who I am or why you should listen to me, the years 2018 through 2022, I was employed working a corporate job as a B2B sales rep. So any income that you see there is going to be correlated to my W2 job through my salaries and commissions. 2022, I left that job to go travel full time around the world and launch my own companies. You'll see that reflected here. And then 2022 through today, these last four years, I've been a full-time business owner. So I built four companies, bought four companies, and we're building a hotel. So that's the reference for you guys to understand. And at the very end, I'm going to break down my cumulative income, revenue, and total investment so you can see how it impacted it. So let's start with 2020, our favorite year, right? That year was so much fun. We got to go do so many things outside. So in 2020, in this year, I had just won rep of the year, rookie of the year, president's club, diamond level. I was number eight out of 5,079 corporate sales reps. And so I was on the mountaintop of corporate America and COVID hit, derailed everything. I think that both for myself and for you guys, this was the year that we all realized, oh, wow, this sucks. I should probably do something on my own, especially when we got a taste of working from home. And instead of being in the field, I was like, get me out of here. So in 2020, I spent five grand on one event. And that's the one that started everything for me. So yeah, once COVID hit, I realized that I didn't want to do the corporate thing. And this is the time that I really wanted to learn how to invest on my own. At this point, I had a couple of rental properties, but I had no access to millionaires. And so this was the time where I was just like, dude, I have no mentors, no access. The only people that I was around were my coworkers, friends and family, who, guess what, were also working corporate jobs. So I ended up doing to produce this first event. It's this mastermind group called GoBundance. I cold emailed this guy that I heard on a podcast worth 100 million bucks. And I was like, dude, I love everything that you're talking about. He was talking about health, wealth, all these different things. And so I'll do anything that you hate doing for free. I'll work for you for free. I just need mentorship. And he invited me to this event, which to be in GoBundance, you needed to be a net worth millionaire. And I obviously wasn't at this point. I had two rental properties at this point. And so, and I think I was in my mid 20s. And so, at this rate, I was just like, I hope he responds. And he did. And the response was, I think I sent the email on a Tuesday. And then by Thursday, they were having an event in Colorado while I was working in Atlanta, Georgia. He said, hey, okay, cool. If you're really serious, we're doing this Mastermind event. It's five grand per person. Come on out and you'll have a spot. We'll give you a chance to be here. And so, that's the story of how I called out sick to work on a Tuesday, flew out to Breckenridge, Colorado, on a Thursday, and was around millionaires for the first time. So that room was so cool because I was the smallest fish for the first time in my life. And that's really what got me exposure to the whole world of personal development and Mastermind. And all these guys ended up taking me under their wing. I was the youngest guy there. Everyone else was in their 40s. And they started inviting me back to events. So $5,000 event cost, grade A, absolutely worth it. Yes, that was my first event. Now, this money right here was the most terrified that I've ever been spending anything because I didn't have five grand. And so I put on a credit card and this is maybe millions of dollars, but we'll get into that here shortly. So that's the entire year of 2020 I did that and I was just like, man, I got to get out of here. So in 2020, my total personal development spend was $5,000. I had $0 of business revenue and I had $252,000 of personal income. So my spend percentage of my income was 2%.