That's why the military, the airlines, and smart businesses study accidents, incidents, and mistakes. They study the mistakes of others so that they don't repeat them.
Good point Mike.
This is a bit off topic…but so do Everest expedition leaders.
I suppose just as you would go about hiring anyone else, or making a consumer purchase. In other words, you do your due diligence. Your mentor is, after all, hired by you and therefore is an “employee” of your’s.
I would recommend mine. If you’re interested in talking to him, shoot me a PM and I’ll get you some info.
Mike You didn’t answer my question because it dawned on you that I was right. But to answer the question you know that checking driver’s licenses works because it worked in the past. In other words you know it works because you learned from a success, not from a mistake. The mistake was just that…a mistake. If a smart guy never made that mistake but figured it out, then it is just as good as a person that makes mistakes.
You see the common view of the world is that you will make mistakes and mistakes are ok. My view is you should never make a mistake. We should hate mistakes and all that is associated with them more than we hate the IRS. We should strive to be mistake free. We should not tolerate them and cull them from your world.
I have a question about this mentoring idea. I’ve heard speakers at several REI meetings say that you should find a mentor who is successful and then learn from their successes. The mantra seems to be, “Find a successful mentor and then do EXACTLY what he/she did to be successful.”
But I wonder if past successes are really useful in real estate? So many variables are changeable: laws, economic conditions including supply and demand, buyer/seller psychology, etc.
It seems to me like the best mentor would be someone in the trenches RIGHT NOW, someone still being successful under current conditions.
The least effective mentors would be people who mainly make money from selling outdated “how to” information or who made a bunch of money in the past under circumstances that are no longer the same.
It seems to me like the best mentor would be someone in the trenches RIGHT NOW, someone still being successful under current conditions.
Yes, that’s why I always recommend joining your local REIA and making friends with the SUCCESSFUL investors. Your new friends will be happy to mentor you for free.
Topaz you are exactly right. You also need to figure out where in the natural progression of a real estate investor this person is. The natural progression is to be dependent on real estate agents and mortgage brokers for your leads and buy single family house to flip or bird dog to build cash and experience. Next on to the independent stage owning single family houses (up to 10 or 20) and then to the interdependent stage where you form syndicates owning Apartment buildings, and commercial (If someone can figure out how that works) yielding passive cashflow. You want to find someone in your stage or recently out of that stage.
That is why I like the real estate investor’s club as opposed to books and tapes or any course you can buy. What works changes much too fast for a book, but not so fast that you can’t duplicate what someone you meet at one of those meetings is doing.
I started out doing single family rentals and found a way to increase my cash by doing land trusts through a guy I met at the meeting. My original mentor had no idea how to do that. I found a guy that used option ARMs to maximize his cash at one of these meetings also. The people in the trenches are found at these meetings.