@Stephen White
There's nothing wrong or misguided on investing money on your education. I have personally paid a lot of people to learn how to do what they do. In a few days, I plan on paying a guy at least three hundred bucks for two hours of his time to learn to do something he knows well and I don't. A remarkably bright guy I met on Bigger Pockets came to my property for five hours yesterday to help me change windows. He spent much that time asking me questions about the local market and my business model. Now granted, I consider myself an interesting guy, but I'm not THAT interesting, no, not by a long shot.
How much is your real estate education worth? Potentially millions. But with that out of the way, how do you decide what to spend on? I have two simple tests.
When real estate education is general, introductory, calls itself a "system," and costs a lot of money, it's always a scam. On the other hand, you're going to meet people here who will teach you how to do very specific, more advanced things for large amounts of money who are worth learning from. Getting to know a local mentor IRL, someone who understands a local market and already has the kind of local network @Terrell Garren has laid out above, can be absolutely priceless. So perversely, because these things are of such high value, anyone in a large market who's trying to sell them to you and other investors, one-size-fits-all with a payment plan, is invariably a con artist.
Once you get the general/specific question out of the way, you only have one more question to ask. Is this guy selling me a spoon, a clock, or both?
The majority of people in America today are very poorly equipped by our educational system to teach themselves anything useful -- they come out of school miserable autonomous learners or self-learners. They practically pride themselves on not being able to learn anything at all out of a book, from a series of pictures, from a video. Somebody has to show them. A gigantic majority, even, expects to be spoon-fed their knowledge. They are incredibly uncertainty-averse, and this is part of their larger problem of being extremely risk-averse.
These same people seem functionally incapable of significant analysis and synthesis through research. They cannot gather information from a good-sized array of disparate source material and break it down to create a model of understanding that they then test out, first hesitantly and then with growing confidence. They have itty-bitty comfort zones and stepping out of them without someone right by their side induces in them what can only be understood as absolute terror. Their minds, such that they are, shut down. The people I'm talking about are not learning disabled in human psychology's understand of learning disorders, they just suck at self-learning. They need their spoon!
The people who are already in this business largely let the gurus prey on the spoon-beggars, I also believe, because they in turn know how important it is in this business to be able to figure things out on your own. People just don't seem to get anywhere in real estate if they're not good at self-learning.
Now the gurus also have a second main approach to their uncertainty-averse prey. They promise to SAVE YOU TIME. The pitch for this always goes the same way: "Sure, you can learn it by yourself, but I can give you the royal road to glory, a secret pathway! Pay me for five days and I'll teach you more than you'll ever be able to learn in five weeks/months/years!" Here, these gurus are preying on the self-importance of potential targets who cannot stand doing anything unguided where they might waste what they consider to be their incredibly important time, or, in the lingo beloved by BS artists, "not put their time toward its best and highest use."
Hold on there, Ace! Baby steps first, learn to crawl before you walk, make measured progress, accept inevitable defeat and come back stronger, control what you can and learn to avoid trying to control what you can't...you can tell the suckers who fall hard for the time pitch the same things over and over again, but, well, they're SUCKERS. They can't resist the temptation of the golden time lure. It makes them feel important, good, confident, special. They bite and bite hard, every time. "Why am I in the slow lane? Juice me up and I'm off to the stars...I'm not a sucker, I'M A WINNER!!!"
Specific or general, begging for the spoon or dreaming of racing the clock? It's not a particularly complicated pair of questions to ask yourself when faced with a proposition to pay for real estate education. But it might save you tens of thousands of dollars.