How to Laser-Focus on the Wildly Important With Author Chris McChesney

This is for BiggerPockets Podcast show 328.

Congratulations. You could be busy all day long and not be a step closer to your goal. If you just follow your tendencies, your tendencies and often your emotions are not your best friends.

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Brandon: What’s going on everyone? Today wait that’s not how I intro these things. What’s going on everyone?

David: So excited.

Brandon: How do I start these podcasts? Oh wait.

David: With your name and my name.

Brandon: Here we go. What’s going on everyone? This is Brandon Turner, host of the BiggerPockets Podcast and that’s how I do it. Here with my cohost Mr. David Greene. David Greene, what’s up buddy? It’s been a while since we recorded one of these like two weeks.

David: Yes, you’ve lost like 25 pounds in the meantime. You also it’s been so long you forgot how to do the intro.

Brandon: I know.

David: That was like our fourth take trying to get that out.

Brandon: Yes, that was funny. All right well we figured it out so no I’m just so pumped up from today’s show. Okay listen I want to say something important here. I say this a lot that today was one of my favorite shows ever.

I say that a lot because every time I get done with recording a show it’s like one of my favorite shows. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this is not one of my favorite shows. It is my favorite show we’ve recorded.

At least like as long as I can remember like I mean like I am obsessed with this show, with this concept, with the book that the author is coming on and talking about today. I mean David is obsessed a good word? Is there another word like just like aptly obsessed.

David: You’re totally bought in. You’re a believer in it. Yes.

Brandon: I’m totally bought in. There you are.

David: You’re a biggest supporter.

David: I’m a disciple 4 D EX now like it’s going to sound like they’re paying me money to tell them to tell you to go read this book, but I swear like this is just because this concept 4 D EX has completely changed how I operate my entire life. Think of it like an operating system. Like if you have, you install Windows on your computer, the computer is like your, you as a person right, but the thing that runs your computer is the operating system, Windows, or you know Mac has their own version like Yosemite or whatever it’s called. Anyway, this is the operating system, how I function.

I mean this is how I was able to lose like 40 pounds like over the past you know year it’s like the same concepts. How I was able to double my cash flow over the last three or four months in my rental business. How I’m buying a bunch of properties this year. How I improve my marriage, my spiritual life, how we’re potty training, and teethbrush training my daughter.

All of my entire life is built on this framework. Even before I knew what this framework was this just kind of put words to it so anyway don’t mind my super excited fan girling this entire episode. Life changes stuff, at least it was for me. I hope it is for you as well so. Anyway, well before we get to the interview, which I’m excited to bring to you let’s first get to today’s Quick Tip.

David: Quick Tip.

Brandon: All right, today’s quick tip nice and simple. Did you know that BiggerPockets has a YouTube page. That’s right, a YouTube channel and there’s a ton of stuff going on over there. Like I produce a ton of content. David produces content. In fact, one of the recent pieces of content I put out there it’s called How to Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck.

We might even take it and throw it up here on a podcast episode soon because people really seem to like this thing. Another one, the most powerful word in the English language, check that out. Working on a lot of good stuff there and again we’re getting David’s face up there as well so you know check it out, BiggerPockets.com/Youtube or Youtube.com/BiggerPockets. Either one is going to get you there and that is today’s Quick Tip.

David: Quick Tip.

Brandon: Cool. Oh by the way when you go to the YouTube do me a favor and click that little subscribe button on the YouTube page. That definitely helps our YouTube channel grow. All right well, we got to get to today’s show. Like I said, I’m super pumped about today’s show, but before we get there let’s get to today’s show sponsor. All right guys, we did a whole show about this topic. The big three roadblocks for new investors.

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Alright and with that, we got no more further introduction here other than I’ll say this make sure you leave ratings and reviews for this show, the BiggerPocket Podcast if you like it. If you’re enjoying it, if you think this is powerful it definitely helps us reach more people so just head over to iTunes or whatever your listening to this on, Google Play, Stitch, or whatever, but leave a rating and review. It just totally helps us out. All right now that’s said it’s time to get to the interview. Today’s guest is Chris McChesney.

Chris is a co-author of a book called The Four Disciplines of Execution. He’s also a consultant. He’s a speaker. He does a lot of keynote stuff, but like I said this book The Four Disciplines of Execution is definitely the best business book I’ve read in at least in the past like decade, maybe of my entire life. I mean I put it up there with Rich Dad, Poor Dad and other books like that. It just blew my mind so again like I said earlier I have been looking forward to this interview since like the day I read this book.

I’m pumped and you’ll definitely hear it today. It is a long interview, but I highly encourage you to listen to the entire thing even if it takes like a couple trips. You know a couple commutes to work or a couple different gym sessions. Listen to the whole thing. It just gets better and better and better as it builds and each step of the four disciplines builds upon the previous so we’re super lucky to have Chris today so with that let’s get to the interview.

All right Chris, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast man. Really good to have you.

Chris: Whew. I’m excited to be here.

Brandon: All right good good. All right so have been probably hearing me like use the word Four Disciplines of Execution or 4 D EX. I’ve given multiple speeches over the last like six months where I talk about this. Probably every other podcast I mentioned it to say I’m obsessed would be putting it lightly. As soon as I read this book. Actually true story, how I found this book. I was at storytime with my daughter and my wife and my wife at the library and we were like doing little kid storytime and like my daughter was doing I don’t know some drawing after the storytime and I was wandering around the library.

I haven’t been to the library in like a couple of years and how I used to be obsessed and anyway I’m walking to the business section and there was this book called The Four Disciplines of Execution. I started thinking you know I’m really good at ideas and I know that my biggest problem in life is execution, getting things done. I was like oh there’s a book called Four Disciplines of Execution.

Well you know instead of reading the back I’m like yes, this is pretty interesting. I got the book from the library. I read the entire thing in like a day and then I turn around I got to the end and started it over and read the whole thing again. I have now read it five or six times now.

Chris: Oh my God.

Brandon: Yes, that’s how obsessed I was because like this is it’s like it was like the missing piece to what like I didn’t have and that was my ability to sometimes execute so anyway.

Chris: I’ll tell you, the you know I know the makeup of your audience and the number of entrepreneurs and I’ve always been an entrepreneur that got stuck in a corporate environment.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I am not, I’ll tell you I hope no one chooses not to listen after this, but I’m not inherently good at this stuff. Like I didn’t fall in love with the solution. I fell in love with a problem.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: This has been like Ritalin for me. That ADD, ADHD.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Ship tends to run pretty strong in the entrepreneurial world. We are idea people.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I probably needed this as much as anybody.

Brandon: That’s awesome. I actually think that’s like the falling in love with a problem is the best way to like you know.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Figure out the solution to things and being able to work through it. Let’s go through, I mean I’m going to go through. I want to go through and spend some time obviously on each of the four disciplines, but before we kind of get into that so there’s this guy named Derek Sivers. He’s in a Ted talk. He’s been on a bunch of podcasts, but Derek Sivers is like an author/thought leader.

He has this quote that I use all the time. It says, if more information was the answer then we would all be billionaires with sixpack abs. Right and I love that quote because like it just shows that information alone is not what we need. Like people listening to this podcast might say well this isn’t directly about how to buy a rental property or how to flip a house.

Why should I listen to this? Because all the people just want the information. Like I told you earlier before we started recording all I did in the beginning was read real estate investing books. I wish I would have started reading books like this earlier on.

Can you talk about why like why is information not enough? Why is just knowing how to do something not enough? I mean if we know how to invest why aren’t more people investing like what’s that difference?

Chris: It’s so funny, but for the—an hour ago I’m on the phone with a guy who is in these peer groups inside of the animal hospital world. Okay so small business.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: All over. They’ve got a couple thousand members in the little groups of 20 and he’s talking about give me the answers. Like let’s figure out what the leads are. Let’s figure out what the lags are and then let’s publish them. Like just get them out to everybody.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I said that’s a great idea. I said you have teenagers. He said, “Yes.” I say, “While you’re at it you and your wife sit down for an hour and write all of your best life lessons. Put it in memo form and then just give it to the kids.”

Brandon: Yes, you’re done.

Chris: You’re going to save a ton of time. He’s like, “Oh all right all right.” Like learning learning is like a really complex thing and we see that we get frustrated in our own lives. Like things things that I thought I knew I didn’t know and so yes it’s a layered process I guess.

Brandon: Yes. It is. Yes and I struggle a lot with like this idea where I know I should do things and I know that like. Here’s a good, real estate example right so I know that I should go and analyze some deals or I should go do this, but then I just kind of like I’ll look back and be like wow I haven’t done anything in like three weeks or I haven’t done anything in a month. Like the most important thing in my life like financial independence or wealth or some of the most important things in my life I’ll go weeks or months without working on them. But I’m so busy. Right I’m so busy and there’s this line in the book.

I’m going to read you this. You said, “The real enemy of execution is your day job.” We call it the whirlwind so I want to preface that because this is the problem.

Chris: That’s the jump off point right there, Brandon. That’s the whole, the whole thing, the whole thing lives inside that little dichotomy you just explained.

Brandon: Yes, explain that. Talk about that.

Chris: Here’s how I like to think about it. I think everybody and maybe there are some exceptions out there, but to my knowledge everybody has a generic universal human flaw. We don’t think it’s a big deal and the flaw manifests itself as a tendency to move to urgency instead of importance. I want you to think about that some people have a hard time with that distinction.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Urgency is anything that requires immediate attention. Importance is just the relative impact and we know that this exists. I’m—maybe I’m work. It’s almost what you said Brandon. I’m working on the biggest project of the year. I got to have three hours of concentrated time. Why did I just open that email? What is wrong?

Brandon: Yes yes.

Chris: With me, but here’s the thing. We don’t think that’s a big deal because we can override the tendency. Right oh how did it get to be four. Right oh but it’s okay I’ll override.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: We don’t think it’s a big deal until we realize that every goal and the effort associated with every goal we set in the moment. Those activities will never feel as urgent as the day job. What we call the whirlwind. They say the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. Like the whole conversation starts by sort of delineating in your mind, in every entrepreneur, every person can do this. Day job, whirlwind, right it’s got this frenetic energy to it, which is life support. Everything I have to do to maintain the operation. That has an inherent advantage that it always feels urgent.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If you just sort of understand that you’re not crazy, you’re human and you then start to recognize all right I got to deal with this situation and I got to respect the problem. The problem is I have an internal built in default that takes me the urgency. I knew I should have done this research three weeks ago. Now I got to make a decision. I don’t have the research. How did I get myself in this mess? That’s the jumping off point for all of this work is that that one problem between urgency and importance.

Brandon: Yes, that’s fantastic and when we same day job like we’re referring to right like not just necessarily like the 9-to-5 you have, but it’s just like.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: It’s all of the things that have to get done in life that’s not the most important. Like the one thing.

Chris: It’s life support. Yes.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I got to get the kids. I can’t get the kids out of the house because I got to get their shoes on.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: We lost one of the damn shoes.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: And you know the computer just broke and da da da da. It’s just getting through the survival part and you know Peter Drucker, the management guru said that work it’s like kind of like a gas. It will fill the available time allotted.

Brandon: Yes, yes. It’s full.

Chris: You can be congratulations. You could be busy all day long and not be a step closer to your goal. If you just follow your tendencies, your tendencies and often your emotions are not your best friends.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: One of the things we’re doing with four disciplines is we’re initiating tendency override.

Brandon: I want that.

Chris: You got to break. You got to break tendencies at everyone of these discipline levels and it not if you know it’s not that hard.

Brandon:  I would say that some of the best books. I don’t always say this, but I’ll say this. Some of the best books out there are the ones that have put words to like the feelings that I had that I knew existed. Like this a reality right?

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: That book Rich Dad, Poor Dad changed a lot of people’s lives.

Chris: Yes, right.

Brandon: Right because it like put words to what we all felt. Like there was something there and it was like oh now I get it. Cash flow or you know wealth, financial freedom, and like this book what it did for me is that with that term the whirlwind like I identified because like I was like well how do I get this stuff done? I’m so busy and what I love is that it takes this concept of like look you’re going to be busy. Like we’re not, like you’re not saying like you know there’s books that I love like the one thing or essentialism.

Those are books that I love or any book on like you need to focus. Great. You need to focus. Like I know that. The problem is I can’t. Like I can’t not take my daughter to the beach. I can’t not go and jog in the morning. Those are part of my life that I have to do so I can’t have one thing only that I focus on and so what I love about this it’s like defining. Look you’re going to have a whirlwind. That’s fine. Let’s manage it. Let’s make sure that at least of piece of your day we can pull out of the whirlwind.

Chris: That’s it.

Brandon: To move things forward right.

Chris: You said it just right. Every leader, every business owner, every thoughtful person that’s trying to get ahead.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Those two things. These two things they don’t like each other. The first thing they know is I absolutely have to focus or I’m never going to excel. They know that and the other thing they know there’s 20 things that need my immediate attention right now.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Both those things are real and they don’t get along. You’re right. You need a framework or a mechanism to say, “Okay. All right, I have to respect the day job. If I ignore the whirlwind I die today.”

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If I ignore the goal you know I’m going to die tomorrow and what are the—I worked for Franklin Covey, Stephen Covey. If you know Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Right I was a groupie of his in the early 90s right.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I worked for him for four months before they realized they didn’t hire me. They literally, I got called into HR. It was like an episode of Seinfeld only they didn’t fire me. Like Kramer got fired right, but.

Brandon: That’s funny.

Chris: I was so taken with him and it was this one idea. Covey believed that the real magic was in principles. Best practices were kind of a dime a dozen, but if you could find a principle. It was like a law of nature and would have universal application and it would always be relevant. This guy, he had this ability to not only understand what the principles were, but how to apply them and so I think in our subconscious is we over the last 20 years as we’ve been developing this methodology.

We took a Stephen Covey approach to say okay where is the principle? Like if this contradiction exists and I’m always going to lose to the urgency and that it’s in nature. What are the principles for overcoming that? They are universal and apply to everyone so that was kind of the. That’s kind of the foundation.

Brandon: Okay. Perfect yes and I think that’s so important. Again because you can go through weeks or months of your life and not have had made any impact on like the important thing. Like the actual goals you have and so.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: No one is going to define the problem. This is what and I think we all know it exists. Like you said.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: Everybody knows.

Chris: Right. Right.

Brandon: We should focus and we can’t always so let’s maybe shift then and go talk about the four disciplines. I mean like.

Chris: Sure.

Brandon: Go one by one through them and I got a ton of questions for each of them.

Chris: Yes, yes.

Brandon: Like I literally have been forward to the and you’re like from the first time I read this book I’m like I totally got to get this guy. I’m going to have him on the podcast. I’m going to unload all of my questions and anyway yes. Let’s go through the four disciplines on how we overcome this whirlwind. How do we pull that point in this? Number one, let’s go through the first one.

Chris: All right, the first one is focus on the wildly important. I don’t even know that I’m in love with what the names and what we called them.

Brandon: Sure.

Chris: What this is about is really the delineation in my mind. This is about delineating between the day job and the plus one. The one thing you’re going to get. When Marriott rolled this out one of their leaders said you know to a group that was piloting it.

You know hey in Marriott if you want to keep your job manage the whirlwind. You’ll always have a job. You want to get promoted give me one more. Give me a plus one and you think about it for a small business owner. Hey if you want to stay employed, if you want to survive, you want to pay your mortgage manage your day job.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You’ll survive.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You want to grow. You want to hit your goals. You got to do a plus one and so discipline one, focus on the wildly important is sort of understanding what’s the target. That I’m going to apply a disproportionate amount of energy to or I’m going to apply a treatment to.

The four disciplines are treatment. You apply to a target. Now I say that and you cut me off whenever you want to jump in, Brandon. You cut me off.

Brandon: Sure, sure.

Chris: Let me just put one quick caveat that I wish we would have emphasized more in the book. Don’t go big.

Brandon: Oh what do you mean?

Chris: Don’t go okay well my goal is revenue this year. Don’t go super big. You can have that as a goal, but that’s not the target we’re looking for in discipline one. Because if the big goal represents the sum totality of all of your work then you haven’t narrowed your focus.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You just gave it a label. You cheated. The way to think about this I think is to say look if profitability or revenue this year or number of deals or whatever the macro objective is if that’s the title of the book then the first discipline is identifying what’s the critical chapter that’s going to make that possible. Right, there’s a whole variety of things and that’s where our focus gets so diluted so in addition to the day job right in addition to the 80% I got to maintain what’s the thing I’m going to zero in on then I’m going to apply disproportionate focus against.

I’m already focusing on all the things that drive total deals or net revenue across the top. Go down one level of abstraction to what’s the critical chapter right? I’m trying to bring on new people. If I could get every new associate to pay for themselves the the first year I am unstoppable.

Right I want to make sure that every deal I turn has a net return within a certain amount of time. I’ve got there are some component that if that component was achieved it would have a profound effect on the big objective. Then finally, last piece of this one one is it cannot stay a concept.

Brandon: What do you mean?

Chris: Lead the world in space exploration was a concept. Right.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Doing smarter deals is a concept.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Right put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely home is a target. Targets have three components. They have a starting line. They have a finish line and they have a deadline and they have to be stated in a numeric.

Very difficult to execute on a concept. If you’re frustrated, you might be trying to execute and to you it’s a very real thing. It’s very tangible, but can you put it in a single metric. Like putting a man on the moon and returning him safely home by the end of the decade that didn’t meet all the criteria for leading the world in space exploration, but it didn’t matter. Because once we had that, we crushed them.

David: Chris, it sounds like what you’re talking about is the lead measures, lag measures is that where you’re going with this?

Chris: I will, but not just yet.

David: Okay.

Chris: Although a lot, there is some cause and effect in what I’m talking about so we’re still in the world of lag measures right now, but our starting point has to be a subset or we haven’t narrowed the focus so the lag, I’m just talking about the lag, David. And it’s got to be very very specific and this, this is defining because it’s an what we call X to Y by when or you know pick your terminology starting line, finish line, deadline, and it’s a subcomponent. Right right it is a metric on its own. It is a measure and that we call the lag measure of execution.

Brandon: Yes. Like if you were to say from you know 200 pounds to 180 pounds by February 3rd.

Chris: Perfect.

Brandon: From X to Y.

Chris: Now right. Which is so different and that’s a target. Lose weight is a concept. Perfect Brandon.

Brandon: Yes and I know a lot of people have this target or a vision of like I want we’ll call it financial independence. I want to have more money coming in from my business or my investments than what I spend every month. A ton of people that listen to the show have that concept.

Chris: That’s fine. I had to put a default goal.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Concept.

Brandon: Yes and they have this concept, but like I’m always encouraging people and David here as always encouraging people like what does that look like? Like what is that what’s that number look like? When are you going to get there? And so, but I want to take that.

Let’s just say okay fine. We’re going to take the concept of financial freedom. Is it okay just to have a wildly important goal like your wig. As you kind of called it in the book, a wig. Is it okay to have a wig of okay good. I want $10,000 a month by 2025. Like is it okay to have a wig that big and far away or should people focus setting smaller.

Chris: It’s a really good question. The designation of wig is just a—it’s a construct we invented that means wildly important goal. You can have other goals, other objectives, other things that you want to go after. We use that terminology wig to mean this is the target where we’re going to apply muscle.

We’re going to apply treatment and so because that’s what that designation means it’s not helpful if it’s too long. Like I can have a purpose statement. I can have a future objective. Call it what you want out there. It could be just as meaningful, but wig designates I’m going to apply these set of disciplines. I’m going to put this muscle against that so for that reason we want it to be inside a year and we want it to be a subcomponent of macro big picture objectives and getting people.

David: Right.

Chris: To think small is superhard for some reason they always want to go up top. I was can I give a little example?

Brandon: Yes please, please.

Chris: Yes. Alright so we’re working with. Again a bunch of different groups of people to do different stuff and one was a small accounting firm and they had as their wig like everybody does revenue this year. They said okay, you can do that, but all your activities lead up to that. I said is there a subcomponent of revenue that’s really valuable? Like to your audience I would say is there a type of investment that really rings. Or is it the Bachman Turner overdrive concept that any love is good love.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I took what I can get. No no.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Or is it then he said no no no advisory revenue. Like there’s a type of client that we get. Right in your world there’s a type of investment.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: And wow, when we get one of those it really rings the bell. What they did is they instead of having it macro revenue they went down and they said, “Increase advisory revenue from X to Y by when.” When they did that wow the lead measures came alive. The rest of the process came alive, but for whatever reason it’s not a natural jump.

Brandon: Yes. Well let me give you a couple examples like I’ve given and please if I get these wrong correct me please. A couple things that I’ve been talking lately about so we have a thing called a 90 day challenge. I do it at BiggerPockets every like three or four months. It’s like a, you call it a webinar, a class, whatever. We even wrote a journal around it called The 90 days of Intention Journal.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: It’s basically like let’s set a goal of like a 90 day goal and it could be again. It’s not the five year I want to retire you know in some week.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: I’m going to buy a property in the next 90 days or I’m going to make I’m going to it couldn’t be like I’m going to I don’t know I was going to say like make an X amount of offers in the next you know whatever it is. That’s more a lead measure. We’ll get there. Anyway so like.

Chris: No, not. Wait we’ll get into that, yes. We’ll get into that. I tell you what I like about what you said is that it feels like a sprint and not a marathon.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If I can see the finish line like we somehow default into these annual goals and sometimes I like 90 days. As a matter fact we got a team in Australia. They started running 90 day wigs with their clients.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: To see if they can get more energy out of sprints and now the bad, the challenge is you got to reinvent it a little more quickly. You know there’s some logistics, but I really. I’m taken by these short, fast, and we’re going to get into game theory. How human beings respond to this gaming notion.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Building a game for myself all of the sudden I have all this energy. I don’t even know where it came from.

Brandon: Yes. Yes, I’m a huge fan of like that 90 day or there’s a book called A 12-week Year. It’s similar.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: It’s like you shorten this up because I mean like otherwise it’s like oh well 12 months from now great I’ll—you know I’m going to buy one property this year. It goes to that—the Peter Drucker or the Parkinson’s law firm right.

Chris: Yes, yes, yes.

Brandon: If you got a year to buy a rental property, you got a year to flip a house. Guess what? It’s going to take you a year, a couple of years ago I set a goal to buy 12 units in a year. I was like I’m going to buy 12 units this year. On like December 21st.

I added them up and I had 11. I was like well shoot so I mean I did it. I went and I had nine days or whatever to buy another property. I bought one, but like I could have done it in 90 days probably. It’s like we fill whatever time we have.

Chris: Yes, go back to the initial problem. The initial problem was the urgency fixation.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Well we in four disciplines. We don’t overcome the urgency fixation by fixing it. We trick the brain.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: We trick the brain into thinking that the important stuff is urgent and so when you start with a compact goal you’re already a step ahead.

Brandon: Yes, I love that. Okay so let’s talk about one more thing before we move on to this one too. That is an analogy you use in the book about battles, winning the war.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Right you mentioned a second ago about like the goal should support the macro.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Can you touch on them?

Chris: Yes, yes. Okay so David, a second ago you asked about lead lag measures and truth be told from the biggest objectives in your life all down to what you’re going to do before noon are all made up the same stuff. Like it’s all the same. They’re just targets at high to low levels. Well we had to create some language to work with this.

The wig we’ve been talking about that target that we’re going to apply the four disciplines to, we’ve got to sometimes they’re so big like the space shot that you have to break that target down into sub targets to get your hands on it without blowing the focus. By spreading it, by multiplying targets so for instance, with the NASA and this is where we got the construct from. In NASA, put a man on the moon and return him safely home by the end of the decade. If that was the war, there was a NASA engineer who asked the question what are the fewest battles necessary to win the war?

We think this goes back to West Point. We think this is rooted in sort of military psychology. If somebody knows, let me know because we’ve been trying to find the source of this. NASA came up with three battles. This just opened my whole brain.

They said navigation, propulsion, and life support. Now there’s other stuff that had to happen to get to the moon, but if you could win those three battles right the moon is not standing still. Navigation right. He’s like shooting a bullet with a bullet. Propulsion, we got to get to 25,000 miles an hour or we’re not going anywhere and we do not know how to keep an astronaut alive in space for more than a day.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If we could do those three things, we could do the impossible, but then all the functions within NASA were able to line up against those three objectives. Everybody had their day job plus one. You might say if you’re an independent contractor, if you’re a business man or an entrepreneur you might say, “Hey for where I’m going to go I got a war.” Right and this thing is really going to come down to three battles or you know. That’s some hard mental math by the way. What are the fewest battles necessary to win the war?

This year I’m going to bring this down until it’s habit. Next year, we’re going to move on to client acquisition. I’m not even going to worry about you know some cost of turnaround and various other things. I’m going to get this part of my operation right.

Like that’s the battle I’m on today. I’m going to take that issue to intensive care until I got it locked and I’m going to move to the next. If you’ve ever worked with a really great operator like in the corporate world we see these, these characters who show up, who have this unbelievable knack for turning around broken businesses. Sometimes they call them turn around. They like do the four disciplines without the language. Like what you were talking about Brandon.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: They like get it bone deep, but that pattern of I’m going to maintain everything. I’m going to put energy here so that’s just that war battle thing is just a way to break a big goal down to the one thing we’re going to go at for now.

Brandon: Perfect. Perfect. All right so a couple quick examples of real estate related.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: In my own personal life so I have a kind of a vision or a goal you know long-term. I want to have thousand units in the next three to four years. We’ll call it three years.

Chris: Oh right on.

Brandon: A thousand years right. That’s a pretty big thing so I shrunk that down and said, “Hey I have a hundred units right now.” By the end of 2019, which is nine months from when we’re recording this roughly. I’m going to have 200 units so I’m going to from 100 units to 200 units by 2019. Now obviously I’m not going to go.

I mean like people will be like well yes, but you could buy a bunch of bad units. Well I know that. I’m going to buy a hundred you know cash flowing at my metrics unit, but anyway.

Chris: Yes, yes you can have an asterisk. You can have a contingent.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: That says you know I’m going to have 200 qualifying units and qualifying means da da da.

Brandon: Yes, yes. Right so, but yes the idea so that’s my personal thing. Now I took that, that war for the year is going to have I’m going to double my units right. Then I broke that down when I went the 90 days so I said, “Hey in the next 90 days my goal is actually in the 90 days is to double my cash flow.”

Between January 1st and the end of March I was going to double my cash flow and I was going to do so by so as again from like from X amount to cash flow to Y amount and that sounds ridiculous, but I had a lot of holes in my bucket basically. I had a lot of cash flow leaking out all over because.

Chris: Okay. Okay. Okay.

Brandon: We know why I just lost a lot so anyway so the older one. Go ahead.

Chris: This was something you could actually act on.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: With about 80% influence over 90 day period of time.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You have to bring that down. Yes and a lot of times a wig is a project. That’s most like a—that little sub battle was a project. You could put that to bed in 90 days and until you do that you’re going to have a whole bunch of problems down the road or unless you do that.

Brandon: Yes and so then I brought my team in right now, my team essentially is made up of like myself, my wife, who manages the kind of the rental properties side of things and then Ryan Murdoch who has been on the podcast before he’s a buddy of mine. Lives out here in Hawaii near me and Ryan, I basically put him in charge of vacancy. In other words, so his battle to fight the war was hey.

Chris: It is.

Brandon: We’ve got we’re at 85% vacancy or occupancy right now so figure 85% of our units were filled, 15% were just empty right.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: I knew that if we could just fix that problem and so I gave that to Ryan. I said, “Ryan you’re like you know we kind of worked it together, but his goal was from an 85% occupancy to 95% occupancy within what it was like three months right.” Guess what. He nailed it. Last week actually we just ended our first 90 days.

Chris: Isn’t that crazy?

Brandon: Yes, 95%.

Chris: Just that degree of focus and there’s no new information. It’s like.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: When you started the podcast with Brandon when you said if it was just information.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Because people always look at this and go I already knew that.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Yes, we know you knew it. It’s your ability to apply energy and.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Really yes so keep going. You got this.

Brandon: Yes, wait a minute.

Chris: Because everything you said sounds right now pitch perfect to me.

Brandon: Okay got it.

Chris: What I’m hearing when you say this is you’re taking a big idea and it’s like you’re translating it into a new language.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I got a son who’s doing service work in a slum in Argentina right now. Right.

Brandon: Wow.

Chris: Like for the first year this kid was so frustrated with the language and the minute the language started to come on man he—they love him down there. He’s just doing all kinds of amazing stuff, but the language was brutal and I love what you just said because I can hear you’re moving from one language. It’s subtle, but it’s you’re moving to the language of targets.

If your strategy, if your plan feels conceptual, you’re going to really struggle. When you got it down to that focus and you got it down to that target, yes now now all the sudden for whatever reason things start to happen. It starts to move.

Brandon: That makes sense. Yes so that’s what we did. We moved from the 85% up to 95%. That was—I mean it was like because I have a hundred units. That’s like ten years.

Chris: That’s a hard down.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You’re getting pretty close to the full one. We talked about that.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: That last—those last few miles is killer.

Brandon: Yes, it is. We did it, but if you think about it that’s 10 units that we now, that filled at an average of $600 a month. You know of more income coming in. That’s like grand every month in extra income that we’re making.

Like that was a huge chunk of my goal to double to fix the holes in my bucket and double my. Anyway so we I don’t know if I can quote. I actually got to review my numbers still we’re either just there at the double cash flow number or just below, but neither way like.

Chris: I’m really glad you’re saying this Brandon because people don’t realize how available these goals are.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It is not a question and it’s not a question of will power or just effort. It really is—will power has got about a three week half-life on it.

Brandon: Yes, yes, yes.

Chris: It just disappears. We don’t even know where the heck it went.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Right, but if you can initiate a process that applies deliberate focus and they can come out of very specific targets. That’s the other thing I like about your example was a very specific target, very what you said. If we really could do that one thing.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I like tight. I like specific and I like ripple effects. You gave me both.

Brandon: Perfect. Perfect.

Chris: I would’ve told you if I didn’t like it.

Brandon: Okay good. Let’s talk about how we did that because I mean we, we completely worked within the 4 D EX framework to get here. That’s number one was let’s just summarize up. It’s to set a wildly important goal so it could be hey from no rental units to one rental unit in the next X you know by this day right.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: Or it could be hey I’m going to go from. I mean I’ll tell you my wig just so everyone knows it. My wig for the next 90 day my kind of sprint is to go from basically right now I have zero mobile home parks. I’m trying to buy a mobile home park because I have one and I love it. I’m going to go from right now I have zero under contract to having one under contract. It’s not a big shift, but I just want to have in the next 90 days a property under contract, a large mobile home park so.

Chris: I love that.

Brandon: But now I’ve got my new wig so again everyone’s got their own their wig, but that’s what we’re talking about when we say the wildly important right.

Chris: Let me add one more spin on that.

Brandon: Please.

Chris: These goals and by the way this is the part of the book everybody likes to skip. Everybody likes to say oh well I know what my goal is.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Let me get to how I do it.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: The guy I learned this from who’s been dead ten years. Jim Stewart, he was a Conico oil operator. He was a student of Deming and Durand like the total quality, the Japanese stuff. This is where he came out of. Jim would stay on the goal part so much longer than I wanted to. He’d drive me bat crazy, but when the target’s really good. Oh it’s like go slow to go fast. Here’s the last caveat I put on that Brandon. Sometimes the wigs take a couple different flavors. Sometimes they’re performance based and sometimes they’re transformational.

Brandon: What do you mean by that?

Chris: Perform and transform. In other words, going into a new market it’s a little bit transformational for you. I’m going to extend beyond our existing.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Portfolio and this is going to change our business. Like I got to go somewhere new. We’re working with a pharmaceutical company that said that said yes we can hit our sales goal and it’s our 1st foot in the grave. We have got to pivot right now. Like they had to go transformational.

Performance is like the first example you gave where occupancy it’s always going to be a deal. We know there’s a big bang return if we can hit it. Don’t think it has to be one or the other. You got a lot of flexibility for your operation of where you want to put the muscle.

Brandon: Perfect. Perfect. All right.

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Moving on. Number two, let’s go to discipline number two. Act on a lead measures and again I’ll throw some examples of how we were able to pull off later, but first can you explain what you mean by that?

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Everybody. Okay so David now back to kind of what you asked earlier because it’s a little confusing because there is a breakdown of the lags. By the way, for every body don’t let the terminology throw you. Lagging metrics are just a results measure.

It’s any outcome, it’s a result. Okay and we call them lags because by the time the results happened, the result’s over. It’s in the rearview mirror. It’s lagging metric. Okay, lead measures are the thing we can measure that we can do. I got to be able to act on a lead measure. The easiest way to get this is to actually use a weight loss analogy. I can.

Brandon: Sure.

Chris: I can explain it contextually for four days and until I use weight loss nobody knows what I’m talking about. Here it is. You gave me the lag Brandon a minute ago. I’m going to go from 200 pounds to a 180 pounds by this point in time.

That’s my lag measure. I got a target. That’s discipline one. Discipline two and everybody knows where I’m going right now. Discipline two are the things I can do and that’s of course diet and exercise.

Right, but they have to be in measurement form. Right, I’m going to run X number of miles per week. I’m going to I’m going to maintain calories below a certain level. It has to be a measurable thing. Those are the leads, the lag is the output.

Now here’s what’s behind that example. Lead measures have two characteristics. Like if you don’t remember anything else in the podcast. Lock your brain on this one idea. They’re predictive and they’re influencable.

This seems to be the golden rule of execution. This is the—this is first principle stuff right here and it’s the definition of leverage. Let me just break this down. Improving calorie burn and reducing calorie input are both predictive metrics right. If calorie burn goes up and calorie input goes down, weight goes down. That’s the—everybody get the predictive part.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: The influencable part and David this gets back to your question, this is what separates a lead from a lag. A lead measure, I can act directly on. Something I can do. It’s directly influencable.

Think about the way a lever. If you rock, if a wildly important goal was a rock, that was too heavy to move right. The lead measure is like a lever and if you think about what are the characteristics of a lever, well the rock doesn’t move, but if I get out there on that lever that thing moves. It’s influencable and when the lever moves it’s predictive.

The rock moves, somebody literally said, “We’re in a seminar.” Somebody said to us, “Oh you’re just describing the principles of leverage.” We were like, “Oh my gosh we can write a book now.” Because like we knew what we knew focus.

We knew engagement, when knew— a bunch. We didn’t know what the heck this, the lead measure was and it is the principle of limit. Here’s the other thing. This has a gigantic psychological impact on whether you stay in the game or not.

Having something that is both predictive and influencable, the brain interprets as a winnable game. People do not hang around in a game where they don’t feel it’s winnable. Human beings cannot stand futility. I’m guessing there are people that had the high expectations and went into this you know run into the real estate market with all kinds of expectations and they spun their wheels and what got them was the futility. They couldn’t, they did all this activity.

They were responding to all this stuff and the dots weren’t connecting. Like they didn’t have any leverage and either that’s because the lever wasn’t the right lever. They weren’t pulling a lever at all or they have too big of a rock identified. We can talk about those things. These are the, Brandon these are sort of the mental tools you use for breaking this stuff down. Sorry that was too long of an explanation.

Brandon: No, it was good. Looks up David. Yes, I want to actually throw this at you David. This is something that you actually taught me years ago based on what I think you learned from like Gary Keller.

This idea of like let’s say you want to be a real estate agent. Right so David here is a real estate agent and a really good one. David taught me like it’s not about like I want to be a top real estate agent. I’m going to put up a goal on my wall since I’m a top real estate agent.

It’s like what do top real estate agents actually do? It’s number of phone calls so David can I just throw this at you? Like what are you like how do lead measures or this concept apply to being like a real estate agent or an investor.

Chris: Right.

David: That’s a really good question because there’s similarities between those two worlds and that’s why I like doing them. What it comes down to is if you want to sell a lot of the houses or if you want to get a lot of off market deals, you do the same thing. You talk about what you want to as many people as you can.

Chris: Yes.

David: You’re the Johnny Appleseed out there throwing your seed, wanting everybody to hear “I buy real estate” because you want them in their minds to associate you with real estate. When they hear about a deal, they hear about someone who’s moving. They hear about someone who said they want to buy a house. They need to immediately think David Greene, if I’m going to end up getting that business. It doesn’t matter if I say I want to be the top selling agent in the Bay Area.

What matters is that I say I need to talk to at least X amount of people every day about real estate and in my talks with them my leverage that makes that talk productive as how well they like me when they walk away. Do they walk away like man that guy was cool. I want to help him out. I care about his goals as much as he cares about his goals. Then we the tool that we used to use that is just a database and a CRM so I add people to my database and I talk to people in my database.

It’s really those two things that make you a real estate agent. You add people, you talk to people. As you continue to do that your phone just starts to ring, like those are I guess your lag measures right like you start.

Chris: Yes, that’s it man.

David: These goals that are coming in right.

Chris: That’s it.

David: The problem is when new agents join and it’s very hard to be a real estate agent. I have people come to me all the time and say what are you doing to sell so many houses? I’ll say you have to talk to people all the time and you have to have something interesting to talk about. You have to have something helpful.

You have to add value. You have to care and immediately they’re like, “Oh that’s just going to be too hard. I don’t want to do that. I’ll just check my email every day and see if anything came in or I’ll work on my website right.” Then I think what you’re saying Chris happens is the futility starts to like they do it for a couple months and nothing comes in and they’re like well screw it what’s the point?

Chris: A minute ago I said that in the corporate world we have these stone cold operators and they do the principles even though they don’t have words for them. Right David just gave that’s who David is.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Can I just pause on David’s leads for just a second. Let me just camp here for a second because and by the way I love the term subconscious competency. It’s when you’re crazy good at something and you don’t even know you’re good at it.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You just gave me a whole bunch of stuff inside the world of lead measures that you may or may not even realize you just said so the talking to people he didn’t just have a quantitative component to it. He had a qualitative component to it. See that’s a good lever. Right there. That he knows if he just talks to people it doesn’t move the rock.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: He knows if he talks to them and they leave thinking I like that guy. It’s a little unfair David because you have cool factor so you know a little bit of cheating so that’s how I go with it right.

David: If you could work that into your lever. Then work in there right.

Chris: Got cool factor right. Seriously, if he knows like he knows when he’s hit that trigger so he’s very deliberate. Like he’s talking to people, but he wants, he doesn’t he’s not just a robot like he wants him to have a good experience and the other thing you said was added value. They got to like you and they got to add value. This is what makes right. In football a first down is not somewhere between eight and 12 yards. It’s 10 freaking yards.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Nine yards and 11 inches, you’re punting. Right and people that are good at this, they know when they got a first down. Football teams, football teams don’t work on getting in the end zone. 90% of the time they’re working on the next first down.

Brandon: Yes, yes.

Chris: Right, you’ve played football and you were trying to get in the end zone in every play. It would become futile very quickly. David was able to change his brain so the game wasn’t touchdowns. The game was first downs and now that’s a rock he could get leverage behind. Now that was his one lead.

His other lead was database. You just like diet and exercised. He’s working one lever on these human connections, but his other lever he wants to see see this is the other thing he’s done. He’s translated it to data. He’s got a number in his head of how many people he wants to talk to and he has a number in his mind of how many people he is going to add to his data. Am I talking out of turn or is that?

Brandon: It’s good.

David: No, that’s a 100% right and that’s what that’s what you have to do and the agents who don’t do that it doesn’t matter how fancy your website is or how nice your LinkedIn profile is or how many people you just hand a business card to and just cross your fingers and think maybe they’re going to get bored one day and call you and say can you be my real estate agent? It’s about the impact that you make on people and you have to put yourself out there. You have to be vulnerable. You have to have a heart that cares. You have to study your craft so you know what you’re talking about.

Chris: Right.

David: Lever is not.

Chris: It drives a whole bunch of other behavior.

David: Yes, yes. That’s exactly right.

Chris: When the lead start to go down, the lead isn’t the end all, but the lead focuses a bunch of other stuff that you do. You’re like look I haven’t said anything interesting to anybody in a month. Like I got to go figure out what’s going on in the market. My pitch is getting stale man. Whatever.

Brandon: Taking this to a real estate investor like a lot of people listening to the show right they were saying like people couldn’t be all the time. I can’t find any deals right now. I hear that all the time. I can’t find any deals. The first thing I always ask them how many offers did you make this week? The answer is always the same, none.

Well like how do you expect to get your lag measure of buying a property or whatever if you don’t do a lead measure and make an offer or how many deals did you analyze this week. That’s a lead measure. Hey I sat down and analyzed X amount of deals, five deals. Well good like now you’re moving towards something. How many meet ups did you go to this week? How many people did you take out to lunch this week? Those are all lead measures that if we do them they should get us the results down the road. Right?

Chris: Can we pivot and talk about why that doesn’t happen?

Brandon: Please.

Chris: Because there’s people listening to this going are you freaking kidding me? Diet and exercise to lose weight? Like why the heck am I listening to this show?

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Oh and David, you’re a lot better so you were saying I should add people and talk to people. You guys are freaking genius. Like there’s people out there right now that think we’re all just smoking pot.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: A little crazy, but what you got to do is you got to understand the psychology behind Brandon, what you just talked about. You know there was this famous cartoon in World War II. Oh Pogo, I think it was. We have seen the enemy and it is us. If you don’t understand that you’re the problem, you’re not going anywhere.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: And to recognize that there are these inherent things that make this harder than it is. Let me tell you that I’ve seen in sales, part of the problem with this Brandon and I’m going to go to you—down to your example now.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: There were some deals that landed in these people’s lap. There was bluebirds. Those felt good and they closed them. Now the bluebirds aren’t there anymore and now right now there’s this other muscle that the people that have been in the business had been successful and really grown and they’re not used to that other muscle because I didn’t have—I only had to work this hard to get a bluebird. I have to work this hard to get my next deal and the brain. Here’s the other thing.

I’m going to talk about some brain problems with acting against the urgent. While I’m out doing anything that drives my goal I am now not doing something in the whirlwind that needs to be done right now. Like you say that like why haven’t you made those offers? Brandon, that’s a none urgent activity so it’s not just that I have to act on something that’s none urgent.

It means I have to stop doing. I got three things that want my attention right now and the minute I pull away from those I start to itch. Here’s one. The most strategic work you do will feel like you’re wasting time.

Brandon: Ooh that’s good.

Chris: The most strategic work you do in the moment, your brain. This is why I say you to initiate tendency override. Now David, that’s not happening for him because he knows to cha ching cha ching. Like he sees through the Matrix.

Like he knows—doesn’t look like I’m making money. I’m making money right now. You’re like Brian Reagan. Right now, I’m making money right? No, so that idea that this really and this is why we like to tell people you’re going to hate discipline one because you don’t get to chase every rabbit.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Double down on one rabbit right—one target. Discipline two, you’re going to hate that because everybody knows, everybody can stand on the scale so think about let’s go with step. I’m going to give a couple if it’s alright. You stop me.

I’m going to give you a couple of reasons so the first one is the urgency thing. The second one people fixate on lag data because the lag’s what I want.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I want the business. I want the money. I want the weightloss. I don’t even like diet and exercise.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I don’t even like talking to new people. I don’t even right—I don’t even like the mechanics of—first on the day. Right so that’s the first thing. Second thing, lag data is easy to track. Like all you have to do is stand on a scale.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I get lag data. Lead data right if you’re wearing an Apple Watch, if you’re wearing a FitBit. Right that’s a billion dollar industry helping you track lead data.

Brandon: Yes, how many steps have I taken today? Yes.

Chris: Those two things and then I got the, this is the coup de grace.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: I’ve only been on this one for a little while, but I think this is big. I always blank on the word for a second, but it’s going to come to me. Come on. Confirmation bias.

Brandon: Okay, there you go. Nicely done.

David: It would have taken me a minute to figure out that’s where you we’re going with it.

Chris: Yes, yes.

David: Confirmation bias is very powerful powerful.

Chris: Yes, it is. It’s why political you know dogma is the way. Everything I see confirms that the liberals are crazy. Everything the liberal sees confirms that the conservatives right. Well we all just see this. Well watch how confirmation bias shows up. We’ll do weightloss.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I stand on the scale. Looking at the lag. We call lag measures oh crap measures by the way.

Brandon: Yes, yes. I love that.

Chris: Either oh cool or oh crap right. We stand on the scale and here’s what goes through the person’s mind. I think maybe this needs a new battery. I don’t think this is right.

Because why? Confirmation bias is kicking in because look. I didn’t eat dessert one time last week and I know I worked out. You know my body doesn’t respond you know like my metabolism is different. It doesn’t.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: The calorie I think doesn’t quite work with my body. I have a different metabolism than everybody else. Let me tell you what’s really happening. We remember what we want to remember and we don’t even know this is happening.

We’re not doing this consciously so we think this is why everybody that you know that’s lost more than 40 pounds and everybody knows somebody that’s lost 40 pounds. This is I would be email Brandon and David if you know somebody that’s lost more than 40 pounds that wasn’t counting.

Brandon: Yes, I actually know you want to hear as true story? I just lost—I have lost 40 pounds in the last eight months now.

Chris: Dude.

Brandon: So 40 pounds right and you know how I did it?

Chris: You were counting.

Brandon: I track every single meal that I eat. I track every single workout that I do.

Chris: It’s a pain in the butt.

Brandon: It is. It is a pain right, but and then you.

Chris: Why was that necessary?

Brandon: Yes, I had to otherwise like otherwise I just I don’t pay attention to on it on a daily basis. I just kind of ignore it and I don’t know what’s actually—I don’t know. I just don’t do anything. Like when I don’t track my stuff I just don’t do it.

Chris: Yes and you might right—you might know a ton about weight loss and exercise. It’s like you said at the beginning. It’s not annoying. It’s the doing.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: And for whatever reason if we don’t track we lie to ourselves.

Brandon: I signed up for this thing it’s called My Body Tutor. I’m not like a paid spokes. I’m writing for them. I love them right, but basically every single day and this actually lines up perfectly with 4 D Ex as well because at least it’s the next one. Everyday I record my food, what I ate. What I worked out and I track that stuff then I have basically a scorecard.

The entire app is basically a scorecard, which we’ll get to and then I have an accountability guy like a personal trainer who looks over my meals and holds me accountable to my goals every week. It’s like it’s basically.

Chris: That where you got the whole package. Yes. You got the whole 4 D Ex in an app.

Brandon: Yes and to go to the bias thing you mentioned it’s funny I get on the scale the other day after a couple days of just doing really bad. I had friends here. I was eating out. I look at my weight. I was up like five pounds in like oh in like a week right and I was like.

Chris: It’s like unfair.

Brandon: Yes. It’s unfair. You know what I said to myself? I go well I did have a couple burgers and they have a lot of salt so I think the salt just retained water right now so it’s probably just water right. That exact bias.

Chris: Dwell on self deception that goes on.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It’s unbelievable.

Brandon: Yes, it wasn’t that I just screwed up and I went off my system. It was water. It was.

Chris: Again, just like we said tendency override, you’re not going. What we’re asking, the level of focus we’re talking about in discipline one, you’re not going to like it. It won’t feel good.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Putting energy against the lead measure in the moment will not feel good. You’re going to feel like you’re wasting time.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You can’t believe you’re tracking it.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: The ugly mirror.

Brandon: I got a true story on this. Actually this is perfect example so my lead measure right now to go to lead measure. My leg measure now for this next quarter of my life, for the next 90 day sprint I’m doing is to go is to basically get a mobile home park under contract. That’s what I want to get under.

Chris: Right, right, right. The leads on that.

Brandon: Right so my leads on that is going to be analyzing deals. I said I want to analyze in-depth two mobile home parks every single week because I know that if I analyze two a week like really into something.

Chris: You will find something.

Brandon: I’m going to find something right. If I’m consistent with that and persistent with that I’m going to get it. Last week, I set this goal. I’m going to analyze two parks in depth this week. Okay so if your Saturday comes up, Saturday morning comes up.

My friends are visiting, we’re going surfing. We’re going to the beach to go surf. It’s like 9:30 and they’re like all right we’re all ready to go and I go shoot. I did not analyze my second deal this week.

Chris: Love this.

Brandon: I went outside and I analyzed. I spent an hour—about an hour digging into this deal that was sent to me, running the numbers, really going. My wife came out and she’s like Brandon, everyone is ready to go. I was like I know, but I have to do this. I felt so not only did I feel bad, but I just felt like I was wasting time because I knew this deal wasn’t going to work out. I knew that this wasn’t the deal that I was going to end up buying so everything told me I’m wasting time. I should just go out and go do the fun that I wanted to. I’m like the point was not to get that deal. The point was to be true to what I committed to.

Chris: Yes, yes.

Brandon: It’s my evening.

Chris: I’m going to have to have a recording of this show guys. Listen what you just articulated we may do like a video vignette. We’ll send you a check.

Brandon: Yes, yes.

Chris: Unless we forget or right. Go do it, but seriously what you just described was the dilemma of discipline too.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You know let me go back to my mentor Stephen Covey. He was a big deal to us. He was on Oprah once. We were like Oprah.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: So excited. He’s on Oprah and he’s doing all this and you know how they give the mic to the audience members and they gave the mic to this kid. I don’t know if somebody put him up to it, but you got this little kid and he says he’s probably I don’t know. He says, “What could a young person do to be more effective?” Covey had the most profound, I’ve never forgotten it. He said, just this one thing. It was basically forget everything else I said dude. Just do one thing. Make and keep a promise to yourself.

Brandon: Oh I love that.

Chris: That’s what he told this. This little 11 year old kid like I like I want to know where that kid is right now. Like I want to find that kid because I just like that went right through me. Like a person who can, what did they say? Like a person who can lead himself is greater than a person that can lead a city.

You’re not going to like it, but the fact that you stayed on that and here’s the other thing. Strategy is no good without execution because when you don’t get the result you don’t know if it’s strategy or execution so anyway sorry. I’m going to rant, but yes that was a great example and I think people get what that feels like. You’re going to play the bet oh and by the way sometimes the bet doesn’t work.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: These are good. We used to freak out about this. This is it’s called scientific method. Like scientific method is just a fancy name for guessing. It’s just really is just really well documented guessing.

That’s scientific method. That’s like all breakthroughs are the byproduct of this trial and error machine and the discipline one, discipline two things so right now you know David you got a lead, lag scenario that’s working. Brandon you got a lead lag scenario that’s working and folks hear this. It’s not just the behavior. They’re measuring both sides.

They’re measuring the input and the output. Focusing on one or the other it unravels for some reason. They got to be tethered right, but that you know that idea that you know we’re going to put delivered effort against something that’s going to move the outcome. You know it creates attention.

Brandon: That’s perfect. All right.

What’s going on everyone? It’s Brandon. Once again, quick break from this podcast to invite you to this week’s webinar. How a newbie, meaning a new real estate investor can start building wealth  through real estate because look when you’re beginning to invest in real estate it can feel overwhelming right. Where do you go? What should you do?

What should you buy? I don’t want to make any mistakes right? That’s why this is a must attend event. Look if you have fewer than five properties do not miss this.

You’re going to learn the different strategies and niches you can take. Some of the common mistakes that investors make, some of the best and worse strategies for new investors and a whole lot more. We’re even going to be looking for a real life deal on the market together and we’re going to run the numbers and find out how much we should pay for it and how much we’ll make if we buy it. It’s going to be ton of fun, super helpful.

Again if you have less than five properties you better be there, BiggerPockets.com/NewbieWebinar. Again, BiggerPockets.com/newbie, N-E-W-B-I-E webinar. I’ll see you there.

One more thing before we move on to number three. Actually I’m going to do something kind of fun here so our senior producer of a podcast. His name is Kevin. Many of you have heard Kevin before on the podcast. I mean we brought him on once before. Hey Kevin, are you there?

Kevin: Yes sir.

Brandon: All right Kevin, Kevin you and I run this 4 D Ex methodology through BiggerPockets. They’re actually our podcast itself is on 4 D Ex as well. I’m wondering like can you walk through, you don’t have to tell the exact like necessarily the wig that we have. I mean you can. It’s a podcast growth right, but like you’re leading my. What are our lead measures for this podcast growing?

Kevin: Yes, our lead measures are producing a certain amount of social media clips to put them out there and raise awareness about the show. They are how many titles we brainstorm.

Brandon: Yes.

Kevin: We come up with so we can come up with language that people will click on. A lot of times it’s like the 8th title that we can up with.

Chris: Over there or machine right there. Beautiful.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: That’s a good one. Sometimes it’s how many people that we reach out to to try to get Brandon or David on interviews on big platforms so like. On big podcasts so maybe their audience discovers us. This is probably three off top measures.

Brandon: Yes, that’s perfect and that oh I brought him in to show you. Like that we do this in almost I mean I do this in every area of my life, but specifically and Kevin like has been doing an awesome job and our podcast is growing. Like you know significantly because again like all these lead measures are I mean hopefully producing the results. I actually wanted to lead into the next little question here before we go. I know I’m spending forever on this one, but I really think like this is like probably the most.

Chris: Yes, it’s the heart of the hearts.

Kevin: Yes, yes, it really is right. Getting these lead these measures so what if—how do you know that the lead is working?

Brandon: Yes, thank you Kevin. Like Kevin for example you know he’s doing the titles right. We’re testing different titles for the podcast and it’s I mean we’ve been seeing dramatic increases because the titles are getting better. How do you know and what do you do if you get a title, I mean a lead measure is not working.

Chris: Yes, that’s a great. It’s a classic question so just breaking it down for everybody so you’ve set up, you’ve set up your bet. That’s what these feel like. I’m betting that if I do these leads I’m going to get this lag. We got it framed okay now let’s say the lead starts to move, but the lag doesn’t move.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You’re pulling the lever, but the rock’s not moving.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Right. Maybe we’re bending the pool right. It’s actually four things that we look for. The first thing is that you’ve actually collected the data wrong. You thought you were moving the lead, but you’re really not actually doing anything more than you were doing before. Maybe you got lazy on the definitions. Right, you’re counting stuff that really should be counted.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You know and you got sort of an artificial factor so you really haven’t tested whether the true behavior gets the result. It’s a counterfeit. That’s the first place you look.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: The second place you look is what we call lethal dosage so conceptually let’s say that exercise and diet reduce weight, but you calibrate your game where you’re going to burn an extra 50 calories a week and you’re going to cut calorie input by 20 calories a day. You’re not losing any weight at all.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You did not so we don’t get to cheat the laws of physics. Right in leverage you have to move a lever a long way to move a rock a little way and that’s some bad. I mean if you’ve ever been on a treadmill where it counts calories it’s the biggest ripoff in the world.

Brandon: I know.

Chris: Just had the hardest 45 minutes of your life and you burned off.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Snickers bar.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Like who comes up with these rules? Right?

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Like David with the people and the like if we knew how many people. People say that I would do anything to have your success. Yes, I don’t know you’d talk to as many people as David’s talked to. I’m not sure you’d really do anything.

Brandon: Yes. Yes

Chris: I’m just I’m not softening it for you. You got to move that lever so a second one sorry tangent.

Brandon: Please.

Chris: First one is we don’t really have the behavior so we haven’t really tested it. Second one is lethal dosage. We calibrated it wrong. We think we’re getting our leads, but we’re not. We’re just playing with the lever.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Third one is time and space. Right. The results in behavior are not closely connected in time and space sometimes right so maybe David’s got to talk to people for three months before it starts coming back. Right you got to give those people enough of an opportunity before they know someone that needs to sell or they need to sell. There’s a natural delay in the cycle and you got to have the faith to play the bet out. All three of those things can happen to good measures and yet we’re not moving the lag.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: The fourth one, you’ve always believed something drove something else and it really doesn’t. Like if you found out that you know what this social media stuff that we’re doing, this one part.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I mean I know social media, but like this one part it hasn’t gotten us a thing.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Like that’s so great to know because these myths will it live on in organizations for decades. These sacred cows. Kill the sacred cow.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If it’s not producing. Move on. That’s kind of a good thing when you thought it was a bad thing. Those four things.

Brandon: That’s good. One of the things that’s great about real estate is that like in when you’re in a business let’s say you’re going to launch a brand new business. It has nothing to do with the real estate. There’s not a lot of precedent before you necessarily.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: To know what works and what doesn’t, but with real estate there is like.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: We know.

Chris: You know the numbers.

Brandon: We know. We know like David and I sit here and talk to investors every week. We’ve done 300 and some episodes now right. We know that certain things are going to give you the results you want. If you make offers consistently, if you’re analyzing deals consistently.

If you’re sending out mass amounts of direct mail marketing. I’m not saying that everything’s guaranteed to work, but these things do work because we see them working over and over. It’s the same. I mean like I mean you could take every show we’ve ever done. There’s probably like 20 ideas.

Chris: Yes, right.

Brandon: Like they just keep working. Right.

Chris: You know a lot. You have a lot of choices whether you have.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Confirmed cause and effect relationships.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Maybe there’s just as many people out there going oh that doesn’t work in my market.

Brandon: Yes, yes. There are right.

Chris: Is that confirmation. Well I tried that. Yes, I tried that. That doesn’t work for me.

Brandon: Yes, yes. I get that all the time. I tried analyzing deals. It didn’t work for me. I’m like you analyzed like three properties.

Chris: I know.

Brandon: Like I analyzed three a day. Right. It’s part of that confirmation bias where they’re looking for something to justify that it’s hopeless.

Chris: Yes, yes.

David: They say they want it. Achieve a goal, but they don’t. What they really want us to let themselves off the hook to not have to achieve that goal. Right. Like Brandon’s just lost a ton of weight and he keeps saying to me not that I’m telling the entire world I need to lose weight, but it definitely wouldn’t have hurt me right.

David, you need get on my fitness pal and you need to do this thing. I believe a hundred percent in my heart if I called a dude and I was like I ate a gummy bear today and he says well was that a good healthy eating choice David? It would start to irritate me enough that I wouldn’t it that gummy bear so I don’t have to talk to this dope telling me I shouldn’t do it right and the reason I’m not.

Chris: That’s the cool factor I was talking about. This is why you want to be his friend. Well the reason I’m not doing it is just because I don’t want that goal bad enough. It’s that simple. I know it would work, but I know I’m not willing to pay the price. I’m not justifying it.

Chris: You’re being honest with yourself.

David: That’s exactly what I’m getting at. That’s it. I’m not more willpower than other people. I’m just more honest with myself where I recognize yes it would work.

I don’t want to do it. I don’t want it that bad. When I want it bad enough I will totally do that right and if more people I feel like took that approach they would get frustrated a lot less and they’d waste a lot of time. If they just said, “Yes, I want to be wealthy, but I don’t want to have to change very much about myself to get there.” Or I don’t want to have the faith it takes to do the same thing over and over and wait for it to come down because reality is like you just said Chris I could talk to someone. I could make a great first impression, but it maybe nine months before they find someone.

Chris: Right.

David: Who wants to sell their house. That means they got to keep talking to them. If I talk to them five times and in that time nobody came along, but I don’t do it the sixth time all five were for nothing. Now forget about me and it will go to somebody else right.

You got to commit. I mean like that’s where the power is is in the consistency and the commitment of doing the same thing. Brandon struggled with this this method he came up with for a while before it became a habit to where he was eating healthy all the time.

Chris: You have to be.

David: He would start, he would fail. He would start, he would fail. He would start, he would fail, but every time he got a little bit stronger, the muscle got a little bit better.

Chris: He is a muscle.

David: Yes.

Brandon: Yes.

David: That’s exactly right and you have to take that approach when you start these things. It’s like you can’t expect to be in great shape the first time you go to the gym. In fact, it’s not going to change anything. You’re just going to be sore and miserable and hate it. If you stop, you did that for nothing. If you continue going that’s where you start to get those results.

Chris: I got to jump on this. This is what David is saying this is another reason to go small. Even if the outcome doesn’t wow you. If you develop the capacity to act on none urgent strategic bets, you have just moved away from the pack because nine out of ten people can do it. The one in ten that can is kind of a genetic fluke and you just separated yourself. Even if the result if the result, it’s worth it just to build the discipline. I got one other peace on this so back to Dr. Covey. He’s like in my brain. His macro principle was this idea. If you think the problem is out there that very thought is the problem.

Brandon: Ooh yes.

Chris: Right if you’re blaming it on your demographic, if you’re blaming it on anything you just gave it away. That’s really not. The fact that you thought that. That’s the problem. I teach a—they got me teaching a Sunday school class and this is 17 and 18-year-olds. Like usually don’t won’t go to church right, but.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I got 20 of them and they’re coming and like I don’t want to blow this right, but this is one of the ideas that I worked with them on. I said look if there’s some part of your life that you’re it’s really hurting you right now. If you cannot play the victim even if it feels really unjust even if it feels really unfair. If you can just try and identify a principle that maybe you’re out of whack with like that will change your whole life.

Like you know people don’t listen to me. Well what’s the principle of influence? You got to first be influenced in order to have influence. If David talks to people and they don’t respond to him maybe he’s not maybe it’s because he’s not interested in them. If he was interested in them they would be interested in him so there was the part. He wasn’t it wasn’t unfair.

They weren’t being mean. He was violating a principle. He didn’t realize it, but that thought of saying when something goes wrong and it’s so prevalent. Sorry I’m going to get on my soapbox. It’s everybody’s looking to out victimize everybody else right now. It’s like we have the victim freaking Olympics going on right now on a grand crazy media fueled scale. It’s so harmful. Can we just say you know and I’m not saying there aren’t people that have really bad things happen to them. I don’t want to go there, but for my own life.

David: Yes.

Chris: When it starts to stink I go—I can go victim as fast as anybody if I can just stop and say all right Chris you know you’re screwing up. Can you find it?

David: Well I’ve never heard Brandon say it’s not my fault because they put additives in fast food that makes me want to keep going back. It’s not my fault.

Chris: It’s McDonald’s man.

David: It’s McDonald’s fault. It’s not my fault I’m just so busy. I don’t have time to go get healthy food. It’s everybody else’s fault because I’m so busy right. Like those people they say fat and they don’t want to get skinny. They want someone to blame so that they can stay the way they are right. Like that’s why I was saying confirmation bias is so powerful.

Chris: It’s so powerful. Confirmation bias will feed that all day long because it’s it doesn’t create cognitive dissidents. Finding a dissidence is when I know I’m screwing up and I don’t like that feeling and you got to if you want to be an achiever you got to like eat that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner like.

Brandon: So good.

Chris: Like keep a cognitive. Like I know something and I’m not doing it and I’m not going to justify.

Brandon: Yes.

David: That’s what you get every time you call your my fitness pal buddy and he says why did to eat that gummy bear and I’m not supposed to. It’s not part of my goal.

Chris: I hate that.

David: I don’t like how this feels and eventually your brain will move you away from it because it doesn’t like that feeling and you’ll go toward success and well I think what we’re saying is that same principle applies to any goal that you have whether it’s buying real estate or flipping houses or be more successful.

Brandon: Yes.

David: At your job or losing weight.

Brandon: Well and.

Chris: Hold that and don’t lose this point.

Brandon: Go ahead.

Chris: Go small. It’s what we got on this rant.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Because the benefit of just learning the discipline even if it doesn’t get you much the first round is a game changer. Sorry Brandon.

Brandon: No, it’s good and I will say this. Like David you just said and I’ll emphasize it here. This isn’t just about I hope people will understand this isn’t just about business.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: Isn’t different real estate investing. Like I mean this is kind of all areas of life right like these four disciplines apply to everything. In fact like honest—like I had—I have a goal. I want to be a better husband and father. That’s kind of a lame. That’s a concept right. That’s not really a goal. It’s not right.

Chris: There you go. You got it.

Brandon: I looked at it. I’m like what does that look like so I actually said a lead—essentially a lead measure, but I mean and you could call it leader or you know like a—what is that small.

Chris: It’s something you’re going to act on. Yes.

Brandon: Yes, basically I went from.

Chris: Oh yes.

Brandon: I said if I go from—I was averaging according to screen time on my phone or I was—or the mobile app moment. I was averaging four to five hours a day on my phone.

Chris: I won’t look at that. I got to go there.

Brandon: Yes, it’s scary right.

Chris: That’s a painful time. I have not opened that door yet.

Brandon: Yes, yes.

Chris: That’s.

Brandon: It’s scary right. I said if I want to be a better husband and father how can I track that and I said you know what? If I’m spending less time on my phone that’s more time present with my family when I’m in person with them. I’m not just on my phone right.

I set a goal. Drop from so from four hours a day to one hour a day of screen time in my first 90 days. I did it. Like I dropped in fact I even bought like so drastic action bought an Apple watch. I mean an Apple watch so I could text and call my phone if I had to and I leave my phone at home. Like that this applies to everything. I mean like I.

Chris: You know what I love and we got the term you know applying a disproportionate amount of effort.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Brandon gets the concept of overkill. Stock and all. Like he gets that if, he gets the if then. Like if he could actually do it it would have a big like it’s like this to this. Like if he could do that thing sorry listening audience. Right small thing with big impact.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: He’s not afraid to bring it, buy a watch. I mean if there is a target and it’s worthy get the target. Whatever it takes it’s right if it’s really worth it get the target and I love that you’re not afraid to bring a little overkill into this.

Brandon: Well I’m a huge believer of like in like in taking massive action. I mean I’ll always have that right. I mean I literally moved—well one of the reasons I moved to Hawaii.

Chris: That’s why you like this material. I know.

Brandon: Yes, that’s exactly yes you can tell why love the stuff right.

David: If there’s one thing Brandon does well this is exactly what it is.

Chris: This is his go to move.

Brandon: No I moved. I wanted to get in shape right so and I want to spend more time with my family. I moved to Hawaii. For those two reasons. I say it’s because of the weather, but I moved to Hawaii because I knew it would force me to get in shape and spend more time with my family.

Chris: Yes, because he has a bias for action you have the ability to move to Hawaii.

Brandon: I guess yes.

Chris: The rest of us would love to move to Hawaii.

Brandon: It’s pretty fun here. Okay so this actually leads to the third this point I want to go into because one other area that I’m doing the four disciplines in is in potty training. Also in teeth brushing not for myself.

David: Good because it’s about time you got potty trained, Brandon. This has been something that you brought about.

Chris: You’ve created a monster. David, how do I apologize to his kids? If I was toilet training at gunpoint and.

Brandon: Oh good.

Chris: Let me tell you. No amount of therapy is going to make that okay.

Brandon: My daughter literally has a big yellow scorecard in her room that every day.

Chris: Best idea ever.

Brandon: We’ll go brushing teeth every time she brushes her teeth she gets to put a sticker on her scoreboard on her and she’s two, but like this solved our problem of how to get her to brush her teeth. Now we’re applying it now to potty training, but it solved our problem. The scorecard was the biggest difference. I mean like it was overnight. We added a scorecard. She stopped crying instead of brushing her teeth. As soon as she was tracking it on a very simple way so let’s talk about that next. That’s the third discipline.

Chris: This one for me is keep a compelling scoreboard and folks I’ve been doing this for I’ve been teaching this material and modifying it for 17 years and I can’t beat the example you just got. I’ve got, I’m sitting on a thousand examples. I don’t have anything better than that. As a matter fact that’s my new go to.

Brandon: That’s funny.

Chris: Story right there. That is—here’s the principle. The principle is people play differently when they’re keeping score.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: What I didn’t know until 60 seconds ago was that that actually is in play with a two-year-old.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Like you can hear a gym—kids playing basketball on a gym and you can tell whether they’re keeping score just based on the sound the sneakers are making.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: That’s all you need to know. Like it is a profound, if what we’re trying to do is drive human energy and human creativity towards a target you got to go live. You got to have a scoreboard. You got to have a visual. Nobody will ever, nobody will ever call you into a room and be like you got to get it.

You got to see this game. This is amazing. You go running into the room and you’re like what’s the score and they’re like. I don’t know, but they seem very excited. I thought you’d like to see it.

They’re all running around right. No, like they know the score. On our team we have a little you know ours is called executive overviews and it’s how many times did we get in front of a leadership team and for free? We’ll do it for free and just kick this concept around for a couple of hours and half of them do pilots. Right, but that changes everything in our world. The joke is can we call you at 2 o’clock in the morning.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Get you out of a deep sleep and ask you how are you doing on your lead measures?

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If you know out of a stupor if you can say, “Ah I’ve got six. I’m two behind. I’m supposed to be at eight right now.” Like and that’s it. You got to know not only what the goal, you got to know where you are. You got to be able to tell if you’re winning or losing and that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Like creating the scoreboard in a way that you don’t just know where what your number is, but you know where you should be by this time. That one little dynamic seems to create tension that makes the whole process sort of sort of come alive and then here’s the big one. The big idea behind this is this idea of a winnable game. One of the things, if you ask me say what’s the most profound insight from 17 years on one problem. It’s the overwhelming impact on morale and engagement that is created by a winnable game.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Even if you’re having the heck beat out of you in every other aspect of your business. This is we’re not saying let’s make work fun. We’re not saying it’s going to be easy like you could be in a death spiral financially or just over your head operationally or you could be you could be just getting body blows, but if you somewhere in the middle of that chaos. If you can we have so many stories on this, but it’s not intuitive. If somewhere in the middle of that chaos you can create a winnable game even if it’s only 15%-20% of your energy and you can tell hey on this one critical strategic area high-stakes by the way.

It’s no good to have a winnable game if it doesn’t matter. You know along with predictive and influencable for lead measures—whatever the game is—high-stakes and winnable. The scoreboard really manifests that like a physical right now are we winning or losing. We know that people can tolerate an enormous amount of pain in order to get to a goal. If one part of their life—and if you’re leading a team this is doubly important.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: If you’re leading a team ask yourself a question. Do the people who work for me feel like they’re playing a winnable. Like I get a guy who books conferences. You guys don’t know Nick right from working with. Nick’s job is like yours David.

He doesn’t see the fruits of his effort for months, sometimes years in advance and so you know we got to work through what’s a target you can win at this month. Like take it down and that’s what the scoreboard should be a picture of, but for whatever reason we need that. We need to have that connection.

David: Well it.

Brandon: Yes.

David: Combats what you said earlier, which is the futility when it overwhelms you and you feel like.

Brandon: Totally.

David: Right this is a way of like manipulating a game so that you don’t feel like your efforts are futile. You’re winning these small battles even if they’re not necessarily fruitful. They won’t be till later right because.

Chris: Right.

David: Because in reality it’s like turning a Jack-in-the-Box. You’re just sitting there da dun ta dun tadada. You don’t know when it’s going to pop.

Chris: It’s going to pop and you know the faith.

David: She’s burning it.

Chris: Yes.

David: I noticed I just did this myself. I went out for a hike after church yesterday and I really did not want to go. What I did was I set on my timer and I did like three miles or so as fast as I could do it. Now I had a goal. Like the next time I go hiking I will be running and walking on the uphill parks trying to beat that time. Right and so it creates this sense of urgency so when I get started to get tired.

Chris: You’ll kill yourself for that even though it doesn’t make any sense.

David: That’s exactly. Yes. It’s the same exercise.

Chris: You’ll do it.

David: But I’ll stay motivated because if I can beat my time from the time before.

Brandon: Yes.

David: I feel like I’m making progress and that tricks my brain into thinking this is worth it and now that hike doesn’t seem like ugh I have to go hiking. It’s like oh I’m going to beat that time from last time.

Chris: Yes, yes.

David: That little shot of dopamine that you get with.

Brandon: The score.

David: Yes.

Chris: I picked up slalom waterskiing. I’m like like I’m into this thing. It’s not as cool as surfing Brandon. I get it. We’re on lakes. There’s a boat. I know.

Brandon: That’s great.

Chris: Still kind of cool right and I got it down to lag and lead measures. My goal by the end of the year is six balls at 33 miles an hour at 22 off the rope and my lead measures are and David. It’s the ability to run four times a week at three miles in 20 minutes so that I have enough energy when I get out there to actually improve and then I got to be on the water twice a week during the summer.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: David, to your point when I’m on that treadmill like right now the best I’ve gotten in 20 minutes is 2.8 miles and I got to—my goal—my lead measure’s to get that at three miles and I’m—it’s ridiculous how much energy I will put into something.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Oh the last last thing on this. Last thing on this. Sometimes people have an allergic reaction to the word game, G-A-M-E and they think it introduces sort of a frivolity or a level of maybe it’s not that important and I think nothing could be further from the truth. You want to get unbridled human engagement energy and creativity introduce a game.

Brandon: Oh. I’ll take it.

Chris: That couple that you thought was normal until you had him over for game night and it was a couple.

David: Yes. I’m like that. I can’t like I used to go to the gym and watch guys playing basketball and be like, “Oh I’ll just get a little sweat before I go lift weights right.” The minute I stepped on the court and my team went down.

Brandon: Yes.

David: By a point some monster comes out of me and I’m like. I got like you know like guys that are this—they just suck. They have no idea what they’re doing on my team and I’m sitting there trying to coach them up. Like I just turn into this incredibly productive machine because I cannot stand losing and I would end up getting a really really good workout right.

Chris: Right, right more than.

David: I announced it.

Chris: More than you would do right and any.

David: If I had just yes.

Chris: Analogy yes you will push yourself in the context of the game.

David: That’s what it comes down to.

Chris: Quarter than you would you know you’d tell people if you don’t quick smoking cigarettes you’re going to die. They don’t stop.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: They keep smoking. Like logic for some reason.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Is not a great driver of human behavior.

David: No, you got to get your emotions involved in it. Information makes you think, but emotion it makes you act. What we’re describing our ways that you get your emotion behind you.

Chris: Yes.

David: Right.

Chris: By the way leaders when you start one of these you’re going to have to turn the Jack-in-the-Box prank. I got a new metaphor. For a while before you start getting some pops. Before your team starts believing.

That’s why you’re the leader. You’re the leader because you believe and you can stay with it longer than they can so am I creating a high-stakes winnable game? The last one on this so my nine-year-old. She’s a little soccer player and if you’ve ever gone out and if you’ve ever done this right they’re not supposed to keep score. Every kid knows it’s five nothing.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: All the other kids and it’s all good parents can do from not killing each other. Right? You get these parents and this cracks me up because these parents are screaming at each other it’s just a game.

Brandon: That’s a good point.

Chris: No, no, no the reason we’re all screaming at each other.

Brandon: Is because it’s a game.

Chris: Is because it’s a game.

David: Yes.

Chris: Not just a game.

Brandon: Oh it’s so good.

David: Yes.

Brandon: Okay let’s talk about. Let’s talk about the look of a scorecard because that now a lot of people are saying oh cool. You know duh keep track of your numbers right. I got loads of spreadsheets all over my computer.

Chris: Yes, thank you.

Brandon: I can pull up 20 different spreadsheets that show you exactly how many deals I analyze and how many you know property I had made an offer on so what’s the big deal? I got scorecards up the wazoo.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: What’s wrong with that?

Chris: Yes, every one of these disciplines has a counter intuitive element. Right discipline one I got to say no to some good ideas. I hate that. Discipline two I’m going to track lead measures. The one for discipline three is on exactly what you’re talking about. You’re going to create a player’s scoreboard not a coach’s scoreboard.

The scoreboard you use for understanding your overall operation is a coach’s scoreboard. It looks like a spreadsheet. Some of you have very advanced models. Others are simple, but it’s a lot of data and it’s meant for a broadview.

When you identify a wildly important goal, you’re taking something on that operation and you’re sort of taking it to intensive care and that requires a scoreboard that looks and feels exactly like a player’s scoreboard. Just think about that contrast is all you need to know. At halftime at a basketball game Coach I’m going to give you a bunch of data. You’re going to know turnovers. You’re going to know shop percentage. You’re going to have a whole bunch of business, a whole bunch of data to analyze the operation and you need that, but that ain’t this. This is a lag and a lead or two and it’s a bet.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: That’s all you want to see. Goals, shots on goals. Oh football. Remember first down is the lead measure? The networks know this. They don’t even know they know this. They give you two pieces of information on a football game. They give you score and they give you down and distance.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It’s 14 to seven right. Third and five. I don’t even need to know who’s playing. Somebody needs a first down.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Right you got me. I’m hooked. Just from those two pieces of data, if you want to engage the team, same thing. Simple, I mean like on our online version we just show like a lag measure moving along a bar and it goes regular green based on the input. It knows where you need to be. Regular green, based on the input.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: The lags or the leads are the same. You could just like look at it and go all right I’m still green on my lag measure, but my leads have now one’s red and one’s yellow right. Like a month ago they were both green and I’m slipping.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It’s the ugly mirror and all right so what am I going to do this week to move that lead, get that lead moving again.

Brandon: Yes, I love it. The simplicity is so important too. Like I want to be able to look in five seconds at a scorecard and know are you winning or losing and are you doing what you say you’re going to be doing? Those two things right. Like that you want to.

Chris: That’s it.

Brandon: Track. Yes and if I can tell that so like Ryan who’s on my real estate team. Who’s helping me—like you build up our portfolio. I mean he’s got this big fat number. It just says percentage. What’s our occupancy percentage? 94.5%, great. We are not at 95%. We’re almost there, but it’s a whole lot better and we have a little graph, a very simple graph.

Chris: There you go.

Brandon: Just shows there to there and here’s where we should be and we’re just below you know an hour over 95 and now we’re like 95 point whatever, but like we’re there. Like super simple like. It’s really great look at it right. I just love that idea of like again the scale and then how many times did I work out? I mean I know right now like I worked out four times in the past week.

Great. That’s my lead measure and my weight. It’s what was 173 last time I checked. Right so like I just know like this is my scorecard and now it’s really really simple so again complex—I was actually looking at BiggerPockets is like the actual BiggerPockets corporation like their financial scorecard. It’s literally like millions of pieces of information.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: It’s absurd like everywhere right? I don’t care. All I care about for my BiggerPockets role number of pro-annual members. I can tell you. I’m not going to say it, but I can tell you exactly the number of pro-annual members we have as of this morning. Because that is my like simple scorecard that I got.

Chris: That’s where the disproportionate energy has got to go.

Brandon: Yes and I know that.

Chris: We see through. Execution does not like complexity. The two best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency, but that’s easier said than done. You had to work to get to that level of simplicity and transparency. Simple doesn’t mean easy.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Simple can be hard.

Brandon: Yes. Yes so for real estate investors out there find a way to create that scoreboard. I mean it could be as simple as a big whiteboard even right.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Like my goal was five deals to analyze this week. I did three right? I’m losing right now and like or my cash flow number is this. This is where I want it to get to. It’s just keep that simple. Keep it. I mean in fact I built this new office that I have like the shut office. It’s like a C shed I call it. In here, like I specifically wired it so I can put a TV in the corner. That TV, I’m going to hook it up to this little computer that you can buy like USB style computer. It’s like four inches.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: I’m going to have it permanently wired to show my occupancy level of my rental properties. On the wall always and I might have like you know alternate it so it like switches between BiggerPockets goals, real estate goals, weight goals, but like I want it all times. I can look up in the corner of my room and in my little nine inch TV or whatever it’s going to be. It’s going to show what my scorecard is at all times. Because like once you know the score, just like in a basketball game and you see that you’re down by three points.

I mean have you guys ever watched a football game right where like I used to be able to see the Seahawks. I was a huge Seahawks fan for a while. If they were losing at the end I mean if they were I mean any team is like this right. If you’re down two points-five points, whatever at the end of the game it’s amazing that lag like that drive how they catch every ball.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Energy and they like it’s just. That’s the most fun part of a game is when you’re down one score and they got to get down that field. It’s the best play of the game. It always is right because they know the score. It’s there. They’re so close to it so anyway, scorecard.

Chris: The other thing you’re hearing and as you’re listening to Brandon and this is like for me guys this is like cheating. Thank you so much. Like this is so great.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: Like you’re bringing all the examples, but what you’re hearing is he’s creating a high-stakes game. It’s got to be winnable. It’s got to be high-stakes and nobody likes preseason because it doesn’t have any there’s no.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It doesn’t have any accountability. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose and you can hear him. He is trying to trick himself into a high-stakes game mentality and it’s not hard to push yourself when you’re playing a high-stakes game.

Brandon: That’s also why I shorten the goals to 90 days instead of a year or five years.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Out.

Chris: Urgency.

Brandon: The urgency, yes.

Chris: Got it.

Brandon: Get that going. All right so let’s recap real quick. Number one was to set that wildly important you know focus on the wildly important.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Number two, focus on the lead measures you know identifying. Focus on those lead measures. Three have that scorecard that you’re tracking that on a regular basis. Let’s go, what’s number four?

Chris: Right so think about one, two, and three as a formula for setting up the game. Four, is how you play the game. Okay so just those two things and if you set it up right it should feel like high-stakes winnable game. Sometimes you have to play it awhile before it gets that feeling, but that’s what you’re going for. Discipline four, now and we’re pretty prescriptive about this. We’re saying all right there’s some magic to the period of time known as the week.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Our whole lives work on this cadence and also the nature of the activities that help our lead measures sometimes have to be blocked and scheduled. Right like I got to find the properties. You know I’m out of perspective properties to do research on. I got to go pull this or I got to talk to somebody or you know what my research is coming up really short because I don’t have this information and I got to go get that information.

What do I have to do this week to increase the likelihood. I’m going to keep my lead measures going. The primary bet is that the leads move the lag, but the goal is weekly cadence is a meeting every week and you have to find someone. If you’re a sole proprietor, if you’re an individual entrepreneur it won’t work being self.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Accountable. I’m sorry. This is what we found I mean maybe you’re the fluke exception. Let us know. We’d like to study you without harming you, but for everybody else you got to have somebody to probably this is why Weight Watchers does this. This is why you got call that. It’s like these are universal truths right.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: What this looks like is every week I make a couple of commitments to put you’ve heard the expression force against leverage.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Like the scoreboard shows me the leverage play against the rock, but now I got to put muscle against it. Even though I got 50 things I got to do this week. Remember we said I know I got to focus, but I also know I got like.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: 80% of my life is whirlwind.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I don’t even know where this is going to come from. I’m going to squeeze in a couple of commitments. All right if I’m David I am going to find three interesting anecdotes about the market to share this week, fresh anecdotes. That will never be urgent, but because I made the commitment and Brandon’s my accountability partner.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It just got urgent. Like I just fooled my brain that I got to do that. If I’m Brandon, all right I’ve got to identify some additional perspective properties. I’ve got give me one David or I got to get additional research. Something I can do this week. I’m going to get a help. I’m going to get a helper on this.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: What can I do to hedge the bet? That I’m actually going to get the leads done this week or improve the quality or maybe there’s something and it’s not exactly lined up with the leads, but boy if I could get that done that would move me a long way towards my lag so sometimes I’ll—sometimes on this commitment I won’t be tunnel focused on the leads. I’ll go a little out of bounds on some opportunity.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I’m always putting pressure on the bet and that constant pressure it works. You know Einstein said there were a few prop. See if I can do this without butchering it. There were a few problems that can withstand the constant onslaught of human thought.

Like you bring it every week and this, appointment is locked in. At 9 o’clock on Tuesdays you have to be on this call. Don’t, if you have an accountability partner, don’t make it easy, don’t make it preseason. Make it make it playoffs.

Like all right David, what’s going to be different this week so that you actually get your commitments done? Like give me something or you know that commitment sounds like that was something you were going to do anyways and I just needed something to say on this call.

Brandon: Yes, yes.

Chris: Like I got a point, like a trainer in a gym. Like you’re each other’s trainer. Can you push on them and if you’re a leader and you have a team let the team members lead the meeting. Like you get it started, let them lead the meeting. Let it be a team goal. If you have a team let them pick the lead measures.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You give them options.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Let them pick.

Brandon: Yes. Yes.

Chris: This cadence, if you do the first three disciplines and you don’t do the fourth, the whirlwind owns this whole thing. It’s gone in three weeks I swear it.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: That’s how good your willpower lasts right. That three weeks, that’s what you get. This meeting, if you can hold to that meeting and come with the data from your lead measures, we got organizations that have been running this, some of the best organizations, Wegmans grocery stores in the Northeast and Marriott. We would—some of the best companies in the world have been running this for almost a decade because they hold that meeting. Sorry I was ranting.

Brandon: No that’s great. I really think that. It’s that meeting, that weekly and it’s hole into it because if you start getting relaxed and this is how I have not been the best with. Yes and when I miss a week or two—like here’s what happened. I’ve been traveling. I’m busy, whatever like and I miss my wig with Ryan about my real estate wig right so our real estate thing. Guess what? Vacancy doesn’t move. Occupancy levels don’t move.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Lead measures don’t move.

Chris: It goes so fast.

Brandon: Nothing’s happening.

Chris: It’s so fast. It’s just gone and so like if you don’t have that like that just that structure of this is when we meet. In fact, I just told Ryan the other day. I said Ryan, we’re going to start establishing a day that this happens and if I’m on the flight I’m changing that flight or I’m canceling that flight. This is getting done.

Because like do I commit, am I serious about this or not? Do I really want these goals or not? Am I willing to put some pressure there? I bet you if I miss a flight because I scheduled it the same time as my meeting that will never happen again because like.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: I’m going to. That’s the punishment I take for not taking my own flight.

Chris: See how he’s bringing it. This is he, Brandon’s going to win. Brandon lives in Hawaii everyone. Brandon is going to win because he’s making it a high-stakes winnable game. Like we’ve covered a lot of technical stuff, but I love this expression that when it comes to people, intent counts more than technique.

Even if you can’t remember and it’s got to be true in your business. I mean this is kind of what you’ve done with the podcast. Even if some of the technique is off, if you’ve got the right intent, you tend to make the right decisions and you tend to get the results and this idea that it’s a high-stakes winnable game and not just lipservicing that like he’s canceling flights. He’s giving me so much ammunition by the way.

Right that is really needy stuff and it sends a message to the team. One of our early leaders at Marriott, I mentioned them early on. He was at the Olympics in China, in Beijing and he was calling, we call them wig sessions. That’s what we call this 20 minute meeting. He was calling in at 2 o’clock in the morning Beijing time to be on what do you think that, what message did that send to the team? He’s getting up in the middle of the night beyond this to be on this call.

Brandon: Yes. It’s important.

Chris: last thought that this idea is that you can probably tell if you’re hearing this for the first time. There’s a little bit of pain associated with each discipline. That should lend some credibility to what we’re talking about, but remember that the pain of discipline beats the pain of regret. Jim Rohn, he’s a motivate.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I love that. I got that dual from him.

Brandon: I like him.

Chris: Just remember like in the moment it’s going to stink to follow through on that commitment and we hear people say all the time like and they get to the end of the week just like you did. Just like when you I didn’t go surfing.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: You were at the end of the week and you’re like I’m not going to walk into that meeting and not have my commitments done. Like I’m not going to. Like that that’s pain that you’re feeling right there and you know but in the end right contrast it with this pain. It’s the end of the week and you’re exhausted and you’re going home and it’s late on a Saturday night and you work Saturday too.

You promised yourself you wouldn’t, but you worked Saturday and you’re going home and the sickening realization hit you in the gut and you realize I’m not sure I got anything done. Like that that feeling. Like you have to be a working adult to understand that concept. Like but that feeling right there and it’s a little bit of futility like you put a couple of those weeks back to back and that’s when people start falling out.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Can I see even though there is pain in the moment, the pain in the moment is so worth it compared to that other really crappy I didn’t get anything done. I’m not making any progress. I’m not sure this is working. Like that’s a dark—that’s a dark place.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Sorry, that got heavy right there. I did not mean it to get heavy.

Brandon: No, heavy is good. I mean this is life-changing stuff. I really believe that. I mean we, you know I mentioned earlier we launched this journal a few months ago and we sold out. We don’t even have any more right now, but there are more coming at some point.

Chris: Yes, the 90 day.

Brandon: The 90 day yes, 90 days of Intention Journal. When we launched it based on basically like I mean really based on me reading this book and looking at research and talked with some people I realize the accountability thing was so important so when. We didn’t just launch a journal. We launched the journal combined with these mastermind groups. Now again right at this very moment we don’t have them, we’re not doing it right now because we’re going to relaunch here probably July I think, but when we do we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to launch with mastermind groups because when you’re a real estate investor, you don’t necessarily have a team and a boss that’s going to be meeting with you.

Chris: Now.

Brandon: Even if like.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: Yes, if you’re listening to this and you don’t have that ability right now go on the BiggerPockets forums and meet people. Start connecting, find someone in your area, go to local meetups, and be like, “Hey, can we do this. This weekly wig meeting together?” This is what I want us to do. This is I actually put this in the instructions because and I don’t know if you specifically Chris said this in the book or if I just added it in my head, but basically I require people to use the words like this week I commit to blank. Then when they come back at the meeting they have to say I make my whole team do this. Last week I committed to blank.

Chris: I love this.

Brandon: Right.

Chris: Let me tell you my co-author Jim Huling is.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Like giving you a hug right now.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: Like that is so great and by the way I’ll tell you these mastermind groups, the group the guy was on with today with the animal hospitals.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: It was a mastermind group. These things, if you are running a business and you’re not part of a mastermind group you don’t—I know it. I don’t have words enough to describe. We’ve worked with enough of them.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I’ve done some entrepreneurial efforts to know that that is yes it’s almost irresponsible not to be part of one.

Brandon: Yes. I agree because like it’s hard to maintain that.

Chris: Blind spots.

Brandon: Yes, it’s hard to maintain that consistent with yourself when you have somebody else I mean like research show I mean I could pull out tons of studies, but like the research shows like adding that accountability piece like just dramatically increases the chance that stuff gets done.

Chris: Well all you got to do is do this. Think about and you know you think about the idea that you had last week where you said oh I wish I knew that.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: I wish I knew that two years ago. Like that we have an idea and we wished we’d had it two years ago. You’re part of the think tank, you’re going to hear this stuff and you know anyways and then like Brandon said, the accountability tension. Somebody said something to Jerry Seinfeld on an interview, the comedian.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: He’s an intense dude. As a matter fact, you’ve been. Do you know when we interview him right? They’d be like like you want to be—like he eats interviewers like.

Brandon: I’d love that.

Chris: He’s like a little brutal with them. Some of makes you uncomfortable, but somebody said something to him about well you don’t have to work anymore and he went at them. He said is that really what you believe? You don’t think I have to—you only say that because you know I have a lot of money. He said this is he says I’m not happy unless I’m–but he went back and redeveloped his whole standup routine. It’s the hardest work you can do. It’s brutally difficult. Life is in that tension. I went oh I hope this is okay to say, but I’d say listen if you’re working and you’re doing this so that one day you don’t have to work. That’s a little bit screwed up.

Brandon: I agree.

Chris: It will be a very hollow victory for you.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: The tension you know and another mentor this guy Roger Merrill, he said that you know the kid that looks at the a grandfathers taken a little kid out with a kite and the kid wants the kite to go higher and higher and higher and finally the kid realizes that what’s holding the kite back is the string, the tension and he says to the grandpa, “Let go of the string.” The grandfather thinks I’m going to teach him a lesson and he let’s go of the string and the tensions gone and the kite comes down. That results tension in our lives even though we curse it and it haunts us sometimes. We’re sort of built for it and happy people are engaged in some good worthy work.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Embrace these disciplines. The point is not to get out of work. Right we should add balance in our lives, but winnable high-stakes games an embrace a little bit of the pain that goes with it.

Brandon: That is fantastic summary of this. Very very cool. I’m glad you mentioned that like it’s not about sitting on the beach doing nothing, no work. I mean I like joke about it. Like I go surfing, but.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: I’ll meet a couple times a week. Yes, just like. Book onto other things. I work my tail off. David Greene here is the hardest worker I’ve ever met. Neither of us have to work necessarily. We could stay in bed all day watching TV. We would be miserable. You can probably just.

Chris: Miserable inside a week. Yes, you’d be splicing your wrist.

Brandon: Yes. Yes, it would be horrible. It’s like I work my tail off in my 20s so that in my 30s I could work even harder.

Chris: Sometimes you get the work you want to do right.

Brandon: It’s something I love.

Chris: Sometimes you get to do the work you want to do.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Right.

Brandon: Yes.

Chris: Sometimes it’s work you don’t want to do and then you get to do finer work, but don’t curse the work.

Brandon: Yes. Yes, it’s so good.

David: That’s exactly right. Yes, and don’t think the goal is to not work. The goal is to get.

Chris: Yes, I know.

David: To do work that you enjoy or that’s rewarding or that you feel is developing you in a way that you’re becoming the kind of person that you were meant to be.

Brandon: Very very good. Alright well those are the four disciplines again. We’re going to jump in the one last quick segment here. It’s going to be a long show.

Chris: Am I on next week? I heard I was a regular. Am I on?

Brandon: Look if you own any kind of property water damage is actually twice as likely as theft and fire damage combined. This is why the Flow by Moen system it’s so great. It helps detect small leaks that end up causing big expensive problems. It’s basically a whole home water monitoring and leak protection system in just one device. It also detects if the water as been left running or if a pipe has burst.

True story, recently in my mobile home park, a pipe burst and I haven’t gotten the bill for it yet, but it’s going to cost hundreds of dollars in extra water. Not to mention it could have caused a lot more damage to one of the homes there. Look the Flow by Moen System can protect against that. It could even shut off the water to protect your property. Some insurance companies are even giving discounts if you have a Flow By Moen installed. Get this because you are a BiggerPockets listener and you’re awesome, you get 15% off of Flow By Moen so go to meetflow.com/BP.

That’s meetflow, FLOW.com/BP and use code BP15. That’s BP15 for 15%. Again go to meet flow, M-E-E-T F-L-O-W.com/BP and use code BP15. We’re going to ask you a series of just four quick question.

Chris: Ooh.

Brandon: Then we’ll close soon.

Chris: Get speed around.

Brandon: Yes, this is the speed round. We call this the world famous.

Famous Four

Now let’s get to the famous four. The same four questions we ask every guest every week to kind of close things up. Number one, we’re going to change in a little bit because normally we ask a favorite real estate related book, but we’re going to go with.

Chris: Yes.

Brandon: Do you have a favorite self-improvement or personal growth book and I’m going to go with besides your own and besides The Seven Habits.

Chris: Thank you. Thank you.

Brandon: Yes, it’s awesome.

Chris: I would have been consternated.

Brandon: Yes, favorite kind of personal growth.

Chris: James Allens is As a Man Thinketh.

Brandon: Okay.

Chris: It was written about 1904 and it is profound on that topic we were talking earlier about how our thinking really affects our lives. This is some heavy. You can read it in an afternoon and it’ll really spin you around. As a Man Thinketh, James Allen it’s and then you know as a man or As a Woman Thinket is the new title so.

Brandon: Is it really?

Chris: PC version of that going on.

Brandon: Okay. Okay.

Chris: Okay what is your favorite business book besides your own. I’m a huge fan of Jim Collins’s original book Built to Last and like Good to Great. Everybody knows him for Good to Great, but I think and I think maybe for your audience you know the whole getting the early DNA of your organization right. I am Built to Last Far and Away his first work Collins and Porras.

Brandon: I’ve not read that one. I mean read Good to Great.

Chris: Everybody’s got Good to Great. Yes, you might like Built to Last even more.

Brandon: I’ll check that out for sure. I’ll add it to my list today. Cool. Alright, number three.

David: Other than slalom waterskiing and raising seven kids what are some of your hobbies?

Chris: That’s you really took a lot off the table.

David: I know I just realized that, but I didn’t really.

Chris: Yes, you really.

David: I’m going to go with that that I.

Chris: You really did. Okay, I got one though. I’m an Air Force Navy fighter plane geek so I like fighter combat simulators and I’m just very into the whole strategy of air combat as a past time.

David: Is your favorite song Highway to the Danger Zone from Top Gun?

Chris: Dude, I could tear up. Like I get. It’s harsh.

David: What would your nickname be?

Chris: Your body is frightened. Your ego is writing checks your body kick. I have blown much.

David: You’re dangerous.

Chris: I know. I almost joined the Navy after watching that. I’d have been scrubbing barnacles like hey when do I get to fly the jets. They’re like it keeps coming.

Brandon: Oh funny. Okay the last question from me.

Chris: More more, yes I love your number.

Brandon: All right the last one for me what sets apart successful business people, successful entrepreneurs, successful real estate investors, successful anybody, achievers from all those who give up, they fail or they just refuse to get started. You had to really boil that down.

Chris: We talked about so many elements today, but I would bet if I’m a betting man, I would bet on the leader who doesn’t quit over the smart leader. Like a person like that falling in love with a problem. That person that will just be a variation and natural selection machine. Somebody that will just stay in a business until they get it right.

Like people mistakes are really okay. They really like—that’s how you progress and somebody that will just keep coming at a problem they win. They always win. That’s when you see by the way I could spend a lot of time with a lot of executives that have risen up the—right. They’re very personally disciplined people and they have, they are relentless. They have no quit in them. That’s who gets there.

David: It’s good.

Brandon: Yes, yes, really good. Really good.

David: All right Chris, this is been fantastic. Can you tell us where people can find out more about you?

Chris: Yes, just go to the FranklinCovey.com website on the web or ChrisMcChesney4Dx.com. Go there as well.

Brandon: All right, we’ll put links to all that.

Chris: Or go to Yahoo or go to Brandon and David’s website show 328.

Brandon: Yes, BiggerPockets.com/Show328. We’ll put links on there.

Chris: 328 and there will be an outline of cities that we’re coming to next year or yes.

Brandon: Perfect.

Chris: Or the next 12-14 months.

Brandon: Perfect.

David: Thanks David.

Brandon: We’ll put it in there. Yes, thank you so much, Chris. This has been just unbelievably good so thank you.

Chris: Thank you.

Brandon: All right and that was our interview with Chris McChesney. Man, that was so much fun. I don’t know, could you tell how much fun I was having there David? I mean I was.

David: That’s the most alive that I’ve seen you in since you were on a wave on a surfboard.

Brandon: Well thanks. That was fun. I mean like it’s great to be able to like ask questions on a topic that you’re just obsessed with. It’s kind of like I mean you’re just obsessed with like what like being awesome and being the best real estate agent in the world right so like imagine sitting down with Gary Keller. This was your Gary Keller. Like to me right?

David: Yes, and you took full advantage of that. I would tell everybody who just got done listening to this. You probably owe it to yourself to listen to this another two or three times. I mean there was a lot of.

Brandon: A lot.

David: Very valuable, potentially life-changing information given in snippets throughout this thing. I know if you listen to this more than once, you’re going to catch stuff that you missed on the first time that has the ability to like significantly improve your life.

Brandon: Yes, totally agreed so yes, go listen to it right now. Anyway, but think you guys for listening to the show. I’m glad you stuck with us this entire time. Make sure you check out the show notes at BiggerPockets.com/Show328 and come hang out and follow BiggerPockets over on all the BiggerPockets social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and all that make sure you’re following David over on his Instagram @DavidGreene24, the number 24 and me over @BeardyBrandon on Instagram. I’m almost at 50,000 followers so.

David: Oh my gosh. I got to catch him. Please subscribe to me and unsubscribe from Brandon. You guys can do me a favor. He is blowing me away right now and I’m too competitive to let that happen.

Brandon: Look at that competitive nature right. The scorecard right. That scorecard.

David: That’s exactly right. I don’t even care about Instagram followers until I know you have more. Then all of the sudden it’s something that matters.

Brandon: Oh my gosh, that’s funny. Well maybe you need to work on your lead measures to get there David. Something.

David: Exactly right. Yes.

Brandon: What are the lead measures for growing your Instagram thing? I think it’s number of more hashtags.

David: Quality posts that.

Brandon: More hashtags yes, it’s like lead measures right. If you can

David: Yes, this works for everything.

Brandon:  It does it works for everything.

David: Yes.

Brandon: If you consistently. I mean let’s like wrap up like before we get out of here. Let’s wrap up kind of what we talked about today. The four disciplines right. Number one set that wildly important goal so for me I have to tell you what it is. My most important goal is to get to 200 rental units this year.

From that quarterly goal is to get something under contract over the next 90 days. A lead measure I’m analyzing a couple deals every single week. At least two deals every single week. I’m also making an offer at least every other week on a mobile home park of at least 50 units or greater. Every single like I’m tracking that very specifically on a very simple scorecard that shows where I’m at, how many leads are—or how many deals have I analyzed and then I’m meeting every single week of my team. I have both like a performance coach and I have Ryan whose on my team and me and Ryan sit down every week and we go through.

Hey, this week you know what. I need some more leads analyzed so this week I commit to reaching out to five brokers or this week I commit to sending direct mail marketing or whatever right. There’s these this commitment and then Ryan has commitments as well that are working towards same thing. Because of like that’s how I ruin my life. That’s the entire framework for everything that I do so if you can help me out with that if anybody knows of any good mobile home parks—50 units or greater somewhere in the United States look me up. Shoot me an email. Send me a message on Instagram, whatever. David anything you’re looking for that the audience can help you out with?

David: Looking for agents to work in my real estate team admins to work on my real estate team and interns who want to learn real estate sales and investing. Basically I’m just looking for little disciples that I can pour into, teach them all the stuff.

Brandon: Nice.

David: I know and then they can go help more people because real estate is powerful and we want to help as many people as we possibly can.

Brandon: Perfect. All right, good deal well. Thank you all for listening. You all I have a great week. Go get your 4 D Ex on and make sure you pick up a copy of the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution. I hope you like it as much as I do.

David: I hope they like it half as much as you because your fanatic.

Brandon: That’s who I’m looking for. A fanatic. I am a fanatic. All right take us out David.

David: This is David Greene for Brandon. No more gummy bears Turner signing off.

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