This is one long, rambling post-- enjoy it…
If you’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad-- then you know…
Rich Dad’s advice to the average investor: Don’t be average.
The average real estate investor owns four or fewer properties over their lifetime. The average investor is a sole proprietor, or a general partnership, and the fact is most of you are planning to be average, or worse.
Do you know exactly where you want to go-- do you know how your story ends? Do you have the entity that’s right for you? Do you have a team? A network of other active and successful real estate investors? Are you haphazard, scattered, disorganized, and inconsistent?
Until you know exactly who you are, what you want to want, and what you’re willing (and not willing) to do to achieve it. Unless you are disciplined, focused, organized, and consistent, you will not succeed.
So, how do you do it? Start with an objective. My suggestion is to scrap “goal setting” for the time being-- we’ll get to that, but for now I would suggest you picture in your mind the exact life you want in as much detail as possible. Start with something I call your “Ideal Day Essay”.
On your absolute perfect day, what does your life look like. Imagine you just woke up on your perfect day–
WHERE did you wake up?
What surrounds you?-- be very detailed-- Did you wake up between satin sheets, or in a sleeping bag hanging off the side of a mountain?
What are the textures in the space around you, what colors greet you?
What smells do you smell? What’s the air like? Is a warm, humid, salty ocean breeze blowing through your open air palace in the Pacific?
Maybe it’s warm, dry air, with a slight smoke smell from the wood fired stove heating your north woods cabin. Be detailed.
Now that you’re up- what will you do, first? Who will be with you? The idea is to complete this day in as much detailed description as possible. This works, people-- a few of you will do this now, and if you do, I’m convinced you’ll have it.
Now that you’ve written your ideal day essay, write your plan. How is it you’ll accomplish these things? Forget about Rich Dad for just a minute. I don’t want you to compromise a thing, but understand this-- the crew on a yacht, and house sitters in the carribean get the same views as the owners of the properties. You don’t necessarily have to have $100,000,000 to make your perfect dream day come true. There are perfect J.O.B.s for some people. I know some pretty damn miserable rich people that can literally do anything they please at any moment of the day or night. OTOH, I know a guy who is a private chef for a celebrity that you all would recognize. He works hard, his client can be very demanding, but he’d never do anything else. He has read rich dad, and invests in RE passively because he knows he can’t do it forever-- so he’s wise about it. But he is happy with a 1099.
But I digress-- plan it out. How are you going to get to the point where you can live that ideal day-- where your ideal day is the norm for most days-- doesn’t mean you do the same thing. Maybe your idea is having a motorcoach w/ a driver. You wake up in a different place every day, and while you’re sleeping at night, your driver drives the night away to the next stop. The point is – how can you get to the point where your ideal day can happen painlessly as often as you like?
As you’re making your plans, be aware of what you like and do not like to do. Be congnizant of the fact that you may be unwilling to do certain things. It doesn’t mean they don’t need to be done, or that they won’t get done-- it just means that maybe you aren’t the best person to do them. If you like dealing with sellers and negotiating, then you’ll be the birddog. Maybe you can’t stand dealing with sellers, but you’re great with details, and communicating with professional office types-- you’ll submit the short sale packages to the banks, and stay on top of them.
If you really want to invest in real estate, your ultimate goal, however, should NOT be to be a real estate investor. Your goal should be to BUILD A BUSINESS that happens to invest in real estate.
A business starts with an entity. I’m going to be blunt here-- if you’re a sole proprietor, have a general partnership, etc. you’re making a mistake. It’s a beginner mistake, and one some beginners never recover from. Just don’t do it. Create an entity. Get yourself some legal protection (I recommend a Professional Real Estate Multiple Entity Structure, or PREMES-- which I can tell you how to find out about if you’re interested) but the bottom line is that you need to get with an attorney and/or CPA and get an entity structure in place.
Choose ENLIGHTENED professionals who understand what you’re trying to accomplish. Figure out HOW you’re going to accomplish all this, and build a great team arround you for that purpose. Choose your associations deliberately. Join groups like www.wcrt.org or www.ccia-info.com or www.chicagoreiclub.com and make friends and garner team members who are going the same direction.
DOCUMENT everything that you do. From beginning to end, in as much detail as possible, you should be documenting what you do. The reason for this is simple-- you’re creating job descriptions because you won’t always be the one doing everything.
NOW set goals. This is the point where you set your goals, and mark your milestones. I recommend that you take time to set long term (10 years) short term (1 year), and even daily, weekly, and monthly markers. If you consistently miss your daily goals, you won’t hit your weekly goals, if so, you won’t hit your one year and so on.
Be SPECIFIC in your goals, and don’t forget to make certain all the goals you set are in line with what you want, and who you are.
WRITE GOALS DOWN and keep them where you can read them. I recommend reading your goals once each day.
What you’ll probably find out is that you’ll overestimate what you can do in a year, and you’ll underestimate what you can do in ten years.
DO NOT TAKE SHORT CUTS or COMPROMISE in any way.
What you will also discover is that the easy way might not be the right way, but the right way is ALWAYS the easy way.
Neither “Just Do It” nor “figure it all out first” is good advice.
Never stop learning, but understand that at some point you need to stop being a real estate investigator, and start being a real estate investor.
Stay focused, but tweak the plan. Don’t be afraid to change course when you need to. Decide your destination slowly, carefully, and methodically-- but make course changes to get there quickly, and decisively. FINALLY, take Frank McKinney’s advice:
GIVE IT TIME! The number one trait of failures is they quit. Many quit right before they would have seen their efforts pay off. An overnight success takes about 20 years. Hang in there!!!
I hope all this rambling helps. That’s my intent. I’m working on something else right now-- a kind of a workshop based on the general philosophies I’ve expressed here-- I’ll probably come back and tweak this post numerous times-- so if you like it the way it is-- cut and paste it and save it.
Also, this is a discussion board, not a pontification board. Let’s hear what you have to say. I want feedback, contributions, new ideas, etc. on how to succeed.
My main objective is to help people achieve total financial freedom without worry, compromise, or waiting years and years. Basically, you should be free from financial worry, have the freedom to have integrity about who you are-- to live a life congruent with the person that is fundamentally YOU (most people weren’t meant for a life in the cubicle-- it’s a compromise they make), and you need to be free SOON. Two to five years. Maybe you won’t have your dream-- that ideal day in five years, but you should be FREE and freely persuing it in that time frame.
If you’ve read this mess this long-- God bless you. I sincerely hope it helps.
