There’s another version of “I’m not an expert” that’s harder to argue with, because it feels more honest: I didn’t learn this properly, I just muddled through it myself, getting it wrong a few times, until it worked. That’s not real expertise, is it?
Here’s why it’s the opposite of a weakness.
What nobody was teaching
In the late 1990s I worked out a way of buying a property, refurbishing it, adding value, and then using the financial system to pull most of my money back out again, so I could go and do it all again, effectively using the same sum of money each time. It’s got a name now: BRR, buy-refurbish-refinance. At the time, it didn’t have a name at all, because nobody was teaching it.
The only property training that existed back then was people selling off-plan flats. Nobody was walking through how to actually build a portfolio this way, because as far as I could tell, nobody outside my own head was doing it yet.
So I worked it out myself. By trial and error. Over about four years. Some of it worked first time. Some of it didn’t — deals where the refinance fell through, where I had to sell as a flip instead of keeping it. It took real time, real money, and a fair number of mistakes before the method actually held up.
Why that’s not a weaker kind of knowledge
It would be easy to tell that story and feel slightly embarrassed by it — no course, no mentor, no textbook, just years of getting it wrong until it started going right. But think about what that actually means: everything I learned got tested against real money and real outcomes, repeatedly, before I trusted it enough to tell anyone else about it.
Formal training teaches you what’s supposed to work. Trial and error teaches you what actually does — including all the ways it quietly doesn’t, which is usually the part a course leaves out, and the bit the students really need to know.
If nobody was teaching it when you learned it, that’s not evidence you don’t really know it. It’s evidence that you had to find out the hard way too, which is a more expensive and more reliable teacher than any course.
If this is you
A lot of people reading this will have a version of this exact story — not necessarily property, but some skill or way of working that you built yourself because nobody handed you a manual for it. No certificate. No formal course. Just years of doing it, adjusting, and eventually getting it right often enough to trust it.
That’s not the part of your story to downplay before you teach anyone else. It’s the actual credibility. Nobody taught you, so you know it in a way no one else can. Your experience is your experience, and it’s priceless, especially to someone who doesn’t have the time or energy to go through the years of trial and error you’ve already been through.
Where this goes next
If I can do it, you can do it. That’s not a throwaway line — it’s the whole point. The knowledge that comes from learning how to do it right is the “gold” that people want.