From $0 To $1,000,000 in 5 Years: 4 Steps To Gain Millionaire Net Worth With Brandon and David

Brandon:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 432.

Speaker 2:
You’re listening to BiggerPockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you’re here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you’re in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com, your home for real estate investing online.

Brandon:
What is going on everyone? It’s Brandon Turner, host of the BiggerPockets Podcast. Happy new year, David Green. How you doing man? Welcome to the new year.

David:
Thank you very much. This is probably the best start I’ve ever had to a year since I started tracking it. I have a lot of momentum and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about what I want the next year to look like and I’ve made up my mind, so I’m pretty clear on that. Now I just have to go get really good at doing it.

Brandon:
There you go. Well, that brings us to today’s show because today’s show is about how to do all those things and more. Specifically, David and I sat for a long time and we talked about what do we want the first episode of 2021 to be about? Because this is always usually the most listened to episode of the entire year. People love the episode, the first of the year.
We’re like, “Well, how can we actually really give some good, valuable content for real estate investors listening to the show today.” We brainstormed for a long time, we took a bunch of notes. We came up with a ton of ideas and the result is today’s episode. I’m excited to dig into the concepts we got.
Basically, these are four traits and we really struggle with the word traits because they’re not like something you’re born with. It’s not like you have a trait of being tall or handsome if you’re David. The trait is something that you develop or it’s a, skill is the wrong word, steps is maybe a better word, but you’ll see what we’re talking about when we get into it. But before we get there, let’s get to today’s [crosstalk 00:01:46]-

David:
Quick tip.

Brandon:
… quick tip. David, what’s today’s quick tip?

David:
Today’s quick tip is be consciously aware of raising your standards at anything you want to have a better result in. Just stuff that I’ve learned about human life is we all tend to say, when something good comes my way, then I will give a better effort. It can be anything. But good things tend to come to people that have gone the other way.
If you’re single and you don’t want to be single, don’t say I will dress better when there’s a special somebody in my life. Start dressing better right now, raise your standard in that area and watch what you’ll attract.

Brandon:
Let’s get into today’s episode. Again, today is not an interview style episode. It is a, well that’s a David and I interviewing each other in a way. We’re brainstorming ideas and concepts that have helped us become successful. Things that we’re currently working on to become more successful, things that we’ve seen other people become successful.
Specifically, I’m going to throw out the word millionaire here. I’m going to throw that word into the conversation, millionaire. When we say millionaire, I don’t literally mean you have $1 million net worth email. Even though that is a goal for many people, when I say millionaire, what I’m referring to is financial independence, financial freedom. That freedom from worry, and for most people, a million dollar net worth would get you pretty close to that if not over the limit there. When I say millionaire, David, what comes to mind for you? What are we talking about?

David:
Well, typically when I think of that word, I have a negative response to it. [crosstalk 00:03:13] I think about people that are, they think they’re better than others. They’re out of touch. They don’t understand what it’s like for the everyday person. They live a different life. Maybe they’re privileged. It’s definitely not something that I would say in today’s society is necessarily respected like it wasn’t one point.

Brandon:
But today’s show, we want to focus on the truth about becoming a millionaire, becoming financially independent or successful or wealthy, whatever you want to call it. Specifically, because this is a real estate podcast, we’re going to talk about how this applies to real estate investors. That said really, I think all four things we’re talking about today that we are going to outline really could apply to anybody in any field. But we’re going to make the examples about real estate investing today because that’s what this show is.
Let’s first start by talking about if, so what a millionaire is not. I thought maybe we’d start there, David. What is a millionaire not? When we’re talking about that phrase today, what are some of the things that a millionaire is not?

David:
I would say millionaire is not a jerk.

Brandon:
You could be.

David:
You can be wealthy financially. You also be a jerk and not be a millionaire.

Brandon:
Exactly, yes, exactly.

David:
It’s not like once you hit a net worth of a million dollars or you hit success, now you just turn into a jerk like a werewolf at midnight. I would say a millionaire is not someone who is better than other people or has more value than other people. That’s another thing I definitely don’t think so. I don’t think that a millionaire develops inherent value when they hit that number. What I’m saying is they don’t actually become a different kind of person. You stay the same person you were regardless of your bank account. What are some things that you would say Brandon, a millionaire is not?

Brandon:
Based on the people that I know… For a little bit context, by the way everyone. Just FYI, so David and I are both millionaires. We both have a net worth greater than a million dollars and we hang out with a lot of millionaires out here in Maui. They’re constantly people are coming to visit me who have a million dollar net worth or greater. We’re part of several different masterminds and tribes and groups that are made up of a lot of millionaires.
This is not just us saying what a millionaire should be or shouldn’t be, this is what we see in the world associating with so many millionaires. We’ve interviewed hundreds of millionaires on this podcast, so this is what we’ve seen. One thing that I’ve noticed many times, I would say almost every one of the millionaires that I know did not start that way. They were not raised rich. They didn’t start rich.
Now, some people do start rich and they keep their money. Some people start rich and they lose all their money. But most of the millionaires I know started with a bunch of student loan debt, a bunch of credit card debt, didn’t know what they were doing, trying to build something, but they had some of the traits we’re going to talk about today.
I would say number one, or I guess number three or four, whatever number you said, they are not born with it. I honestly say that they’re not naturally gifted. I know so many millionaires who don’t have high IQs. They don’t have some unnatural giftedness to focus where everyone else in the world is like trying to do 10 things at once.
They’re still sucked into Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat. They still have all the same weaknesses that everyone else has. They just have the things we’re going to talk about today. Then last thing I have is they weren’t just lucky in almost every case. I don’t know any lottery winners at all. I don’t know anybody who got in just at the right time at the right place on some business IPO and made tons of money.
That’s not actually as common as people might think. I think, and I’d love to get your thoughts on this, I think people like to assume that all millionaires were lucky because it takes the pressure off themselves to perform and to do the four things we’re going to talk about today. What do you think on that?

David:
Yes. That’s a huge component of it. If anyone’s having a problem with this, I would challenge you by saying, would you have a problem with the principal Brandon is discussing if it wasn’t about money? If this was about a fitness, how to have, what’s a healthy body fat? Like 10% or 12%, something like that. I have no idea. I don’t even want to know what mine is.
Because the minute somebody would say, hey, this is how you have to have a 10% body fat, there is all these objections that come to mind if you’re not super into fitness about how. Well of course it must be nice to have time all day to do nothing but work out or whatever the case would be. It must be nice to have perfect jeans where you can be able to do something like it.
You have to understand that when we talk about being a millionaire, what we’re talking about is being very good at something that matters to you. Whether that’s fitness, whether that’s money, that could just be developing a great personality. It could be being a great friend, it could be building a great non-profit. You’re not always tracking your success in those areas and money but there are fitness millionaires, so to speak.
That’s something that I like to just make sure we highlight because there’s people out there that would be completely on board if someone was teaching them how to be more fit, but recoil at the thought of, oh, well, just because I don’t have a million dollars doesn’t mean that I don’t matter. That’s not what this is about.
This is about people that have mastered certain traits that led to them having a lot of success. Because on this podcast, most of you listening want to have more success financially and you want to do it through real estate, we are going to share with you what we have learned those people do, and maybe even some stories about how we’ve seen this put into action.

Brandon:
I love it. With that said, let’s jump into these four traits or the four steps or the four things that millionaires all seem to have in common, of the millionaires that we know and how you can apply those to your life starting now. I’m going to even make a bold claim here. I would say, if you accomplish these four things, you add these to your life, I would say barring some completely crazy unfortunate series of events, which would be like a nuclear bomb goes off in your country and throws your guys into economic upheaval, whatever, barring anything like crazy.
I believe anybody who accomplishes these four things will become a millionaire in five years or less. I really believe that. Five years or less, I believe if you really applied this stuff, you can become a millionaire. Maybe six or seven if you’re a little bit slow at it. That’s fine. But there’s no chance at becoming successful after following these four things.
They’re pretty general in their titles. You’re going to be like, yeah, I already know that. But then we’re going to dive into each one and give you guys some specifics on how that applies to you and how in 2021 and beyond, you can implement this into your life so you can get that level of success as well. Without further ado, let’s get into the thing. Number one, David, what do you got?

David:
Number one, millionaires are decisive. Now I know Brandon, you have some really good content to share on this that I literally watched in your life when we sat on your Lanai one day and you just said, “You know what, I’m sick of it. I’m just going to go to mobile home parks because I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” That led to Open Door Capital so that’s a steal of your shine. I know that’s where you’re going to go.
What I want to say about this is that I have watched my own personality and other people’s personalities become more decisive as we became more successful. It was like watching your muscles get bigger when you lift more weights. I would say that’s how important being decisive is because I recognize the need to be decisive when I got into situations where I had more success and I wanted to get more than that.
This is incredibly important. If you’re somebody who isn’t decisive or you’ve struggled with decisiveness, it’s very important to take that on. Brandon, why don’t we talk a little bit about what it means to you to be decisive?

Brandon:
I think so many people struggle with what’s the right choice? You guys have heard me say this before on the podcast. I’ve told this analogy a number of times, that people think that there’s gold hidden on a beach somewhere. They’re out there with a metal detector trying to find it. They think that by not making a decision because they don’t know the perfect answer for them, they don’t know exactly what type of real estate to get into, or exactly what market to get into, they don’t really know those questions, or how am I going to do this thing?
They can’t see the entire beach, every hidden item so now they’re looking and they’re thinking they’re going to find some hidden gold. But the fact is we are not at a beach looking for hidden gold. We are artists. We are at a gigantic paint, like easel. We have a blank canvas in front of us and we have a bunch of paint. You can paint whatever you want.
Once you realize that the world is a giant painting and you can paint whenever you want, it allows you to make those decisions that ultimately, they matter but they don’t matter as much as you might think. People are like, “I just don’t know if I should house hacker or do a flip first.” Look, it doesn’t really matter. It’s more important to be decisive and then do the rest of the other three traits that we’re going to talk about today and go in on it. Because you could always correct course later.
Let’s say you spent two years of your life working on one thing and you’re like, wow, that… and he did everything we’re going to talk about today. And it didn’t get you to where you wanted to get to for some reason, which I think would be almost impossible not to, but just in case. Again, something civilization changes. Okay, that was a couple years of your life. At least you’re dedicated towards something.
There’s this great quote from Mark Cuban who said, “The great thing about entrepreneurship is you only have to be right once.” In other words, if you just go all in on something and really master these four things we’re talking about today, you’re going to get there. But it begins with decisiveness, which means begins with making a commitment to I’m doing this and I’ve decided what I’m going to do. I’m going to go.
Now in real estate, one of the ways I encourage people to be decisive is something known as the crystal clear criteria, the CCC. There’s a big component of my new book that’s coming out later this year in 2021. It’s going to be called The Multi-Family Millionaire. I’m not selling it now or anything like that, but it’s a big piece of that book where we talk about this crystal clear criteria and that is, to be crystal clear, be decisive.
I would give yourself on these five things, give yourself a week to decide and then no more time. Give yourself a deadline. Number one, location. Where are you going to invest? Number two, what property type are you going to buy? Number three, what condition are you going to buy it in? Number four, what price range are you going to buy it in? Number five, what makes it a good deal? I call that profitability. What would make it a good deal? I’ll add number six here because this isn’t just for multifamily or rental property owners, is what strategy are you going to employ?
Those six things, so what strategy, the price range, the profitability, the condition, the location and the property type. If you were decisive and you made your decision on that in your real estate journey, is there any doubt going forward that you’re going to succeed? At least if you start there, you make a clear decision, now you can get people around you to help you. Now you can tell other people what you’re looking at. They can however find it for you. Now you can cater your marketing toward that thing. Now I’m hugging the mic, so David, what are you thinking?

David:
No, that was really good stuff. Here’s the point I want to make. There are in retrospect, some decisions that are better than other decisions. Like the decision to get into the .com during the .com bust would have been a bad decision. We acknowledge that there are certain paths that looking back will be better than others.
Here’s the point I want to make. I have never in my life ever met a human being that said, “I really couldn’t decide what to do, so I sat around waiting for the right choice to become obvious and then a million dollars found me.” Has never happened.
What has happened is I know people that have said, “I didn’t know what to do so I got a degree and became a CPA. As a CPA, I started to recognize my high net worth clients are all owned real estate. I knew I wanted to own real estate but I wasn’t sure what to do so I just went to a meetup. At a meetup I sat next to a person that was really nice to me and they invested in duplexes, so I started buying duplexes and I watched my net worth increase. Then I came across a person that buys both the family and I knew, oh, multi-family is the perfect thing.”
So decisiveness leads to the data that you usually need to make the right decision and that’s what Brandon and I are really, really getting at. Is you can’t go wrong if you start moving. You can maybe go less right than if you picked a different path but movement is what you need to get into, and that’s a great segue into our second trait that we should cover. Brandon, if you’d like to us to share what that is.

Brandon:
That was a really good segue. But before we get there, there’s one thing that has popped in my head. I want to make a quick, quick tip for everyone on decisiveness and I’m going to move to the number two. That is, sorry to take away your amazing transition there. That is decisiveness, you’ve mentioned it’s muscle, it’s a skill that you develop. Start practicing it on the small things. What I mean by that is next time you go out to a dinner, for example.

David:
So good.

Brandon:
Rather than sitting there going for 15 minutes, I’m not sure what the right meal is to eat, just look down and give yourself 10 seconds to decide what you’re going to eat for that meal. I’m going to have this chicken right here, and make the choice and go with it. Or as a guy named [Rameet Stacey 00:15:12], he’s been on the BiggerPockets money podcast a couple of times. Let me say he’s a personal finance guru.
He says order both. He’s like if every time you’re indecisive about food, instead you just ordered both those things. You’d pay an extra couple hundred a year in food, but you’d always know what the better food option was than when you were indecisive. I thought that was really good and I’m sure applies somewhat to other areas of life.
But anyway, the point being practice in small areas. Practice, where do you want to go tonight on a date, you tell your wife or your husband. And they say, I don’t know, where do you want to go. You say, I propose we go to here. And just make the decision, and people will be like, okay. Because people follow people who are decisive. That’s why when I was like, “I’m doing mobile home parks.” All of a sudden people followed me. Because I was just decisive, people like that.
Then I raised a bunch of money. I think we raised over $20 million now or something like that in three funds and we’re continuing. We’re going up to $30 million raised here in the next few months. Opened Dore Capital is thriving largely because I was decisive about what I was doing and how I was going to get there. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get there, but this is the point that my coach, Jason Jury is my performance coach. Jason made a few weeks ago on the podcast or a few months ago now.
He said rather than trying to plan and know exactly what you’re doing, I think it was decide, commit, plan, was his order. Not plan, then commit then decide what you’re going to do. It’s like decide and commit to it and then make your plan. You’ll figure it out as you go. But it’s more important that you make the decision.
This is the final quote I’ll say. You’ve heard it before. It is more important that you decide than what you decide. If you just remember that, it’s more important that you make a decision than what decision you make, you’re going to be well on your way towards becoming a millionaire through whatever means you want to become.
Now, back to your transition. We talked about once you’re decisive and you start making good decisions, then you make another good decision, you make another good one, that leads to a trait or… we struggle well to find the word for this. I don’t even know what this would be. But the word that we put here that we came up with is momentum.
Momentum is one of the most powerful forces. Maybe force is a good word. These are like four forces. I don’t know. But momentum is one of those powerful forces in the entire world. An example of that would be a train. If you imagine a train, the amount of work and effort and steam and whatever, that it takes to get the train moving one mile an hour. It’s a lot, it’s a tremendous amount, moves very slow.
You walk next to a train. My great, great grandma in a wheelchair, she’s not alive anymore, but if she was, she could wheel next to a train when it’s first starting and she could kick its butt in a race. But then it gets going a little bit faster and a little faster and a little faster and it builds that momentum.
Pretty soon, the thing’s going 80, 90, 100 miles an hour and there’s no way a car could even catch up to the thing at some point. And it uses less energy to get there because it’s just got this momentum. I feel a ton of momentum in my life right now. You might be thinking, well sure Brandon and sure David, you guys got a ton of momentum in your life. But the fact is we built momentum from the beginning. Now David, how do we do that? I just talked for an hour straight so you turn.

David:
No dude, you got to talk about that more. Because honestly, this is to me, the most important thing that I want people to understand for all of 2021. Is if you are having trouble making progress, it’s because you don’t have momentum. I would challenge almost anybody to come to me and say, David, I’m having trouble getting past this hurdle. I’d say that’s because you’re crashing into it with two miles an hour of speed and a tricycle.
If you had a train going 95 miles an hour, that obstacle would not be standing in your path. A lot of what you and I are even doing in our businesses right now isn’t so much planning the details of how we are going to execute what we have planned in the future. It is building the momentum, then once we’ve got it, we can come up with the plan pretty easily and when you have so much momentum, it tends to be a great plan.

Brandon:
Could you explain what you mean by momentum fr the people? We know what momentum means in the general world of physics, but give an example of momentum for a real estate investor.

David:
Okay, so let’s say you’re a real estate investor. If you don’t know how to analyze the deal and you cannot be decisive about which direction you want to go in, you don’t know what criteria you have. You don’t know if it will even cash flow or not. You don’t know what houses in that area are worth. If I bring you a deal, there’s no way you can have a confident approach to telling me if you want to buy it or not which means you can’t be decisive.
There’s a lot of information you have to gather about the market, about real estate investing in general to build up momentum, to get to that fork in the road to be able to burst through is it yes or is it no. It’s okay. It is very hard to be able to move forward. When you know the market really well, you know the criteria, you know how long houses are on the market, you have knowledge, you can make a decision pretty quickly.
As you continue to make these decisions quickly, this is what happened for me in Florida. I was making decisions fast. Wholesalers and agents were coming to me and saying, “Hey, I got a deal before it hits the market. Do you want it?” Because I would tell them yes or no in a three-minute period of time. If I bought it, I was going to buy it. I wasn’t jerking them around.
It became so much easier for me to get the best deals faster because I made decisions quicker. Then I was able to do that because I had all the pieces in place. I had a strong team. My contractor got bored to me very quickly, my home inspector got out there to see houses the next day. My lender responded to me right away. Why? Because I didn’t jerk them around. Because I had been consistent in doing deals with them. I had built some momentum with each of those people.
All of those came together to create one big force that someone could drop a deal right in front of me and I can say yes or no decisively and then take action on closing on that property and managing it with much less effort than everybody else around me. That gave me an advantage. Now that momentum could easily be translated into other areas of life as well. What if I wanted to start a construction company?
Well, I’m already rehabbing three to five houses a month. I could start them working on my own deals as I start analyzing other people’s deals and saying, “Hey, we can do your rehab for you.” A lot of the skills that go running into a business are developed as a real estate investor, running your own business.
It’s so much easier for me to start a construction company with that background than someone who’s trying to start from scratch, that’s leaving their CPA job, that has no idea how this works. Those are some very simple conceptual ideas of how momentum in one area can help you in another. But I really think the best example is your kite analogy, if you wouldn’t mind sharing that.

Brandon:
When you’re trying to fly a kite, you start running, let’s say you’re on the beach and you’re running with your kite. If you’re standing still and you just throw the kite in the air, nothing happens. But as soon as you start making momentum or running really fast, you throw the kite in the air, it has a better chance of flying. If you’re running really, really, really, really fast that kite has a really good chance of shooting up in the air and staying for awhile.
I use that example, just continually moving forward, continually doing that momentum. The way that I do, let me give you a tangible way that I do that. Is by continually asking myself every single day, what is the most important next step that I have to get accomplished? Most important next step means it’s part of my intention journal that we have a bigger pockets is the means, everyday means.
What is that very next thing that I can do? Even if you’re like, well, I don’t know how to finance a deal, okay. What’s the very next thing you can do about that. What’s the most important next step? Well I guess I could read a book on no and low money and stuff. No, that’s not the most important next step, get more specific.
Well, I need to go to Amazon and buy a book on no and low money down real estate. It’ll be here in three days. Great. Now that’s a tangible step you can do. If you do that, now you’ve got some momentum. Then immediately after you do that go, what’s the next step? What else can I do? You’re just consistently putting little bits of action forward and you’ve been decisive, which were each one of these piggybacks on the previous so we’re being decisive over and over and over and over and we’re just getting momentum. We’re starting to run. We can run through obstacles when they get there because we’re in a lot faster. Anything you want to add on that?

David:
I love your example of the train. When it’s already going 80 miles an hour, it doesn’t take much effort to keep it going there. Really, we hit on this so often in different ways. We have the plane trying to get off the runway example. I think you were going to write a book called Lift at one point.
When you’re trying to get the airplane down the runway to hit a certain speed so it’ll actually go up in the air, it’s burning a massive amount of fuel. It’s going from a dead stop and it has to get moving, and we can all imagine trying to push something from a dead stop up a hill. But when the thing’s already moving, it doesn’t take as much effort to get it going.
Well, as the plane’s trying to take off, if you took your foot off the gas in that minute or whatever the pilots version of the handoff, the throttle, you would crash. The plane wouldn’t make it. But once you hit cruising altitude and you’ve gotten that lift, you can just go to the back of the plane and do whatever the heck you want. Autopilot is going to carry it.
It takes very little effort to keep that thing moving, but you are traveling great distances. The whole point of business is to get that airplane to the point that it’s at cruise control, where you’re making massive progress with little effort, and the worst thing you can do is to stop before you get there.

Brandon:
How did that new person do this? Let’s look at an example of somebody who’s they’re 35 years old, 40 years old. I don’t know, 28 years old, whatever. They got a decent career right now. They’re making, let’s say 80, $90,000 a year. They don’t like their job. They want to get out of it in the next five years. They want to be that millionaire, that financial freedom. They’re just getting started. They haven’t bought any property yet. How do they build momentum? How do they get that train moving when they’re just getting started? What do you think they can do?

David:
Let’s look at the pieces that they’ll need. They want to buy real estate, they’re going to need capital. Can they save capital, can they make capital or can they borrow capital? The first piece that they’re going to have to figure out. They come up with a plan working backwards to do that.
Then they’re going to need a strategy. What market am I going to be in? Am I going for cashflow? Am I going for equity to later turn it into cashflow. Their time horizon will help determine that. Then they’re going to need resources. What people am I going to use? If you’ve got a five-year window of time, that’s a long time to start getting to know people in the industry and finding out who you’re going to want to be on your team.
The first piece I would say is get your budget under control. Know that you are saving a good amount of money and you’re making a good amount of money because you’re going to want that capital to go put into real estate. You should be tracking that and watching it grow. As you’ve built up a good amount of money that you’re saving, it gets easier to save money.
This is what I’ve found. When I’m saving money every single month, like when I was in college, I was saving $500 a week. The longer I save $500 a week, the more fun it became to save. Can I get to 600 this week? Can I save 700 this week? Working overtime wasn’t as hard. I had momentum in that area of life. It became much easier to do.
What was the other piece? Oh, they have to pick their market. Start asking other people, where are you finding success? Where are their properties that are available? As you know what market you’re in, then you’ve got a team in that area and you’re building capital, it’s as simple as recognizing what’s the best opportunity for me. What’s my most important next step and putting properties in contract.
You’ll buy your first one. Don’t buy 10 at one time. Buy a property, manage it, stop and look and see what went well or what didn’t go well. On the next deal, you try to do the things that went well again and you try to avoid the things that didn’t go well. On your third deal, you’re going to be a little bit more refined.
At a certain point, you will recognize this does not take much effort from me to make a good decision. That is the point where your plane is now in cruise control. When you hit that point, that’s when I go completely gangbusters. That’s when you can scale, you can borrow other people’s money, you can start to go really big. Because now that plane is on cruise control and you can get a long distance with very little work.
I would probably the best way that I could describe what that process looks like, where most people that we talked to screw up is that because it takes so long or it takes longer to get that plane off the runway than they thought, they stop all the work that they did was for nothing, the plane crashes and they go try to find another plane.

Brandon:
Very common tale. Let’s go into the third thing here, the third step to becoming a millionaire. Because first, to review, you got to be decisive. You got to be good at just making decisions and taking action. Number two is just taking repeated action over and over and over in a related fields. You’re always asking what’s that next step? How do I build more momentum? How do I go faster? How do I do more of this and just continually moving.
That leads us to number three. Once you start taking these little bits of action, you might be taking the wrong action. You might be taking an action that’s not actually helping you get any closer. How would you know that you are on or you’re not? That brings us to the third thing and that is tracking. So tracking in other words is our way of, you could also say analysis or accountability to yourself.
What are you going to do? It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re on a piece of paper with a pencil, but tracking is just keeping track of what you’re doing. That means everything from your budget. How much money exactly are you spending every month and how much are you bringing in. Knowing that will automatically improve your financial position?
It’s the one thing you can do right now to dramatically increase your financial position today and in the future, is just to know exactly what you’re spending and exactly how much you’re bringing in. It’s like magic. As soon as you know that, you will start spending less or comparatively or saving more, just by knowing those things. What else is there in tracking, David?

David:
Budget’s a big one. This applies to more things than just money. Brandon, when you started tracking everything you eat and acting to tell somebody every day, this is what I ate, how much easier did it become to eat better?

Brandon:
A ton easier.

David:
If you’re not tracking something, what you’re indirectly saying is I don’t really care about it. You could say that to me, David, you don’t care about what you eat because you’re not telling anyone that, I wouldn’t be able to argue with you. If you want to be able to save more money, you need to be budgeting and you need to know what’s coming in and what’s going out. What you will inevitably find when you start doing that, is that you start looking for ways to make more money and looking for ways to save more money to increase that spread every month.
Then what I’ve found is that once the desire to save more money hits me, the obstacles that were getting in my way from earning more start to seem less imposing. That scary conversation with your boss that you’ve been putting off because you don’t want them to say, no, you can’t get a raise, doesn’t seem as scary when you’re looking at that shift into a different department where maybe you go from working in operations into sales.
Oh God, but it’s commissioned. I don’t know. Becomes a lot less scary when you’re really driven. Tracking your budget is 100% the first thing. You also want to track the actions that you are taking that are leading to you being successful. I don’t know a millionaire who can’t tell me what they’re doing in their business and how often they do it to get the result they want. It’s just hardwired into their minds.
If you asked a professional bodybuilder, what are you eating, they’ve got it down to a science. This many ounces or grams of this kind of food, and then I do these exercises on this day. Most of them track it in a notebook when they get there. It’s very specific because your brain needs to know how hard you should be pushing. If you say, hey, I can do 10 reps of 200 pounds, it’s very easy. Your goal is to get to either 11 reps or 205 pounds that you could do 10 times.
You have a very clear path that you should walk on. If you’re not tracking, it’s easy to start to believe, while I’m working out, what more am I supposed to be doing? The more specific you can get, I would say the better.

Brandon:
That’s really good. For real estate investors, let’s talk about some of the things you should be tracking. First of all, I would track things like the number of, obviously the number of offers you’re making. How many offers are you making in a given week? Now, if you’re brand new, you’re like, “Well, I haven’t made any offers yet.” Okay well, let’s go work up the funnel a little bit. How many deals did you analyze this week so that you can make an offer on them? Exactly, how many deals did you analyze this week?
If you’re like, well, I didn’t analyze any. I don’t have any deals. Okay well, how many deals are you getting across your desk right now? Somebody might say, well, I’m not getting any. Okay, let’s go up the funnel even further, because we got to diagnose the problem. What are you doing to get leads right now and how much of that did you do last week?
That could be conversations with a real estate agent, that could be emails coming in from that real estate agent, that could be a number of hours spent looking on realtor.com or zillow.com or whatever. It could be the number of Craigslist posts you reached out to of landlords saying, “Hey, I know you’re trying to rent this property, but do you want to sell it? Or do you have anything else that you want to sell?”
Those are tangible tactics that you can do and if you tracked it, you’d probably improve it and set yourself some goals like, hey, I’m going to reach out to 10 landlords every single week. I’m just going to ask them if they want to sell any of their properties. That’s just an off-market strategy you could employ a right now that nobody’s doing, that would land you a deal this year, maybe multiple deals.
If you don’t have time for it, find. Find your unemployed nephew or something like that and be like, hey, you want to do me a favor? You want to make some money? Here, do this strategy, track it. I’m going to check your results. For every deal you bring in, I’m going to give you $10,000 or whatever the thing is. Now all of a sudden, you don’t even have to do the work because tracking enables you to get other people to do the work.
It’s really hard to outsource things if you’re not tracking it, or if they’re not tracking it because how do you know they’re doing the right thing? Again, those are just a few ways that you can in your real estate business right now start tracking your actions to find more deals.

David:
Brandon, I could call landlords on Craigslist. That’s not too hard. I’m not too scared to do that. But if I found one that said, yeah, I would sell it to you. And I even knew what I wanted to offer and they took it, I don’t know what to do about buying the property.

Brandon:
You have to give up. If you can’t-

David:
That’s why I don’t do anything. Once I get to that point, I just don’t know what to do.

Brandon:
Well, so a few thoughts on that. Number one, you’re never going to know what to do with the whole way. You’ll never know. If you’re driving down the road and it’s foggy, you can’t see a mile down the road. You don’t always know what’s even 100 feet down the road. The most important thing though is not to pull over. That would be silly, as to pull over on the side of the road and wait for the fog to go away. The fog is not going to go away.
Instead, if you just keep driving and keep asking, well, what does that next step? What is the most important next step? I don’t know what to do next. Okay, well I wonder if I know anybody who would know what to do next? Is there a real estate agent I can talk to? Is there a real estate investor I could talk to? Is there a world’s largest real estate forum that’s 100% free to post on it 24/7 where tens of thousands of people hanging out every single week called BiggerPockets. Could I post the question there? Oh yeah. I guess I could.
Everything has an answer. It’s all there. The only thing that stops people is that lack of decisiveness and that lack of thinking like what’s the most important next step. If you just did those two things, ask what’s next and then be decisive about what you came up with, you’re going to get through any fall, you’re going to bust through any barrier, even if you don’t know the angels out. What do you think on that? What would you add?

David:
I think that’s 1,000% right. I would add to it. Get specific about, okay I don’t know how I’m going to buy the property. Well, you’re going to need money. So ask somebody, like you said. Well, they didn’t know. Well, how many did you ask? Did you track how many people you asked? One of them will say, well, I don’t know. I went to the bank and got a loan.
Can you track how many banks you called and asked them, can I get alone? If they say no, ask why. If they tell you it’s because your income is inconsistent, are you tracking your income? Can you look for ways to make more income? How long do I need consistent income? Six months. Great. You got a six-month runway before that plane is going to get off the ground.
Can you start practicing all the things you’re going to need to be good at during this six months while you’re waiting to get financing? That is exactly how the millionaires we know break things down so that they’re always taking action, and they’re not letting little nos or little hangups break their momentum so they stop moving.

Brandon:
That’s really good. Hey, a couple of the things on tracking that millionaires tend to do well is one, they track their goals. Every single day, a lot of millionaires I know write there goals down every day. Not everyone, but a lot of them do. They have this habit of writing down their goals every day. They track their goals. They track their progress in their goals. Where are they actually at?
If your goal is to make a million dollar net worth, what’s your net worth today? Track that every single day or at least once a week. Track where’s your net worth at right now? By tracking things, they tend to naturally improve, so track your goals. Also, track your habits. I’m a big fan of this. In fact, that journal that we put on a bigger pockets called the intention journal. You don’t need the journal to do this but it’s helpful. But you can do it on a piece of paper.
Take a piece of paper out. If fact, do it right now, everybody. If you’re not driving right now, do me a favor. Let’s do a little practice together. Get out a piece of paper, and then I want you to make, let’s call it five horizontal on top of each other, so five lines going across the page. Now I want you to make, I think it would be seven lines up and down. You’re making a crisscross pattern. You have bunch of little squares.
Now on the far left, left, far left column, because now you have went to columns, the far left column, write down in each square on the far left column, what are some of the habits that would help you get the life you want to get? For example, one of those habits that you want to build in your life might be reading 10 pages a day. You just know if you could just read 10 pages a day, you would be smarter and therefore more successful. So write that down, 10 pages of the day reading.
Maybe one of them is you want to drink a gallon of water a day, write that down. Maybe one of them is you’re going to get up at 5:30 AM every day. Because you know if you just got up a little earlier, that would get you time to focus on your goals every morning, which would then get you time to know what your most important next step is, which gives you time to make those calls that you need to, blah, blah, blah.
Whatever habit you want to develop, write those down on the far left column. Now, the next columns over are for the days of the week, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Then all you need to do is write down in each of those if you did it. Like today was Monday, go through at the end of the day or the next morning, write down, did you do those habits yesterday?
Did I read my 10 pages? No. Put an x. Did you do it? Put a check mark. Then at the end of the week, add it up. This week I did four days where I read my 10 pages. Great, four out of seven. Whatever your goal is. The goal of seven a week, okay, I did four out of seven. The next one down, drink a gallon of water, I did that five days this week. Okay, write that down. Five out of seven.
What are we really doing here? We’re tracking the habits that get us to the result that we want in life. Whether it’s your fitness, whether it’s your real estate, whether it’s your business, whether it’s your relationships. Maybe on my habit tracker, I have date nights with my wife. I have date nights with my daughter, where we go out and do something together. I track that stuff because as soon as I track it, it takes less than 10 seconds every day to do this. I’m just like check or x.
Now at the end of the week, I can add up and what’s really cool is I now have a gamified version of my tracking. I can be like, hey, out of 75 total possible points for the week, I got 58. I wonder if I can get 59 next week. All of a sudden we’re tracking our habits and we’re doing it in a gamified way, where you’re playing a game with yourself, and the more you can get on these, the closer you get towards the version of who you want to be someday. That’s the habit tracking process.

David:
I’m curious if you are able to check off maybe 35 of the 70 things you want to do. Do you find that that helps you build momentum to making the other 35 easier to do?

Brandon:
Definitely. Yeah definitely. Just the act of writing this stuff down builds momentum. Then by tracking it’s like that… Tracking is a way to build momentum tracking. It’s also a way to be more decisive because now you know exactly what you want, so you can go after it. All four of these things today connect with one other.

David:
Well, here’s what I want you to think about. Has anybody here listening ever been in the situation where they got tired of their room being dirty, so they cleaned up their room and then they thought, you know what, this feels really good. I’m going to go clean out my closet. Then you cleaned out your closet. Then you said, you know what, the kitchen is a mess.
The act of now cleaning up the kitchen is almost exciting. You’re like, I’m going to get after it. I’m going to clean it up. As opposed to when you were watching, dancing with the stars with your feet up, the thought of cleaning your kitchen felt like lifting 1,000 pounds. That describes momentum. That is what tracking can help you do. It can make it, so doing things that at one point felt difficult and laborious now feel lighter and easier.

Brandon:
I do this with laundry actually. My wife will wash all the clothes and she’ll just have three days or three loads worth of laundry on the middle of the floor. Me and my wife, my two kids. There’s a ton of laundry, towels and everything. What I’ll do is, I know that I should do the laundry and fold it for her so she doesn’t have to fold it.
I’ll be sitting there on the floor for a minute, like playing with the kids and I’ll tell myself, I’m just going to fold my socks. That’s all I’m going to do. I’m going to find my socks in this pile. I’m going to fold my socks. Or I’m just going to grab my jiu-jitsu outfit. Just my jiu-jitsu outfit, just because I need that for later, so I’m going to just pull that out of the pile right now.
As soon as I sit down and do my jiu-jitsu clothes and I pull it out of the pile or my socks, and I’m like, well, I’ll just do my shirts as well. My shirts are right there. I’ll just fold those. Let me just get the towels out of the way because then the towels are done. All of a sudden like 20 minutes have passed and the entire pile is done because I built momentum. And so take that-

David:
So good.

Brandon:
That’s a good analogy. Taking that to your, we’re going to call it the laundry principle and we’re going to write a book called the folding laundry principle. You heard it here first folks.

David:
That’s awesome. This works in practical ways too. Are you nervous about analyzing your own deals? Ask someone else if you can analyze theirs. Can I analyze your deals for you? You start doing it and now it seems like second nature, analyzing your own isn’t so bad. I really think this is why a lot of people take the skills they learned at their W2 job and that’s the area of real estate investing that they feel the most comfortable and they already have momentum. They’re comfortable with spreadsheets or they’re comfortable with networking or whatever it is.
That’s another question to ask yourself, is where do I already have some momentum that I could apply into this world and then track that? Because you’re going to be much more excited about what’s going on but promise you, this is what the people that Brandon and I rub elbows with talk about constantly.

Brandon:
Yeah, very much so. Well, let’s move on to number four here. The fourth trait, scale things, step, whatever you want to call it is what we call mastery. When I say mastery, what I’m referring to is the various different activities you do to become world-class, to become an expert. Because in today’s economy, especially in real estate, you cannot be just mediocre, forever and hope to succeed.
Maybe you buy a couple of properties and let them pay off over 30 or 40 years. Yes, you will become successful over 30 or 40 years. But if you want to do this whole millionaire journey in five years, six years, four years, you got to be good. What we mean by mastery, it’s a process of becoming increasingly better. You’re never going to become a master, but mastery is a verb. It’s an action you do. You’re continually finding things you can do to become better and better and better.
Tracking is a piece of that and the other things we talked about today are also a piece of that, like momentum decisions, but mastery really is more than that. In other words, it’s continually asking yourself, what did I do right with it? What did I do wrong with it? How can I improve? People often ask why the BiggerPockets Podcast took off and why do we have over 100 million downloads now.
The short answer is yeah, we were decisive about it. We tracked a lot of stuff. We built momentum. We’ve never missed a single week in eight years of doing this podcast. In fact, today is I think the eighth year anniversary of the BiggerPockets Podcast today. We’ve never missed a single episode ever. That’s momentum.
But you know what, it still doesn’t matter if we weren’t every episode saying, how do we do better next time? How do we improve our audio? How do we improve our video? How do we be better asking questions? How do we get better quality guests? That’s the mastery thing that we’re continually trying to get better at. Whatever you got, David, what do you got?

David:
I would say that when you and I started doing the podcast together, all of our conversations were about that topic.

Brandon:
Everyone, yeah.

David:
What do people like? What do they not like? How can we make it better? What’s making this difficult. How do we smooth that out? That’s an example that this is how millionaires think. Because we didn’t come in here like I’m a millionaire, somebody needs to fix this for me. We came in here and said, okay, we think like millionaires, how do we make it better?
This applies to anything but when we were talking before the show, we both acknowledged, I don’t know anyone who’s a millionaire that’s not super good at whatever that thing is they do that made them a millionaire. They’re really good at what it is. I would say, I like to use the… I’m not a hardcore martial artist but I like the concept of martial arts because it makes this a really easy concept to understand. I wrote about it in Burr, is you want to become a black belt investor.
With a Burr method allows you to continue to keep buying properties because you’re recycling capital, which gets you more repetitions and repetition build mastery. That’s what I really like, is it’s not just… Jerry, our instructor could show you a move and say, here’s how you do it. That doesn’t mean you’ve mastered it. You have to do that thing a lot to start to build up what mastery is.
That’s what we’re really getting at when we tell people analyze 100 deals. We’re not trying to be a jerk. What we’re doing is we’re recognizing, you need to develop mastery. The bigger pockets calculator is a very easy way to get 100 repetitions into where you can learn something. You need to call x amount of people. It’s not that we’re trying to make it hard for you, it’s that we recognize you’re going to get better at talking to people on the phone if you keep calling them.
Our buddy Andrew Cushman, is not the most networky type of a guy. He was an engineer, chemical engineer. I believe he made over 4,000 calls and tracked every one of before he got his first flip. I can promise you, Andrew was much better at talking to people on the phone after 4,000 calls than he would have been when he first started. He was on his way to developing mastery and now his mastery is really with multi-family property analyzing and he’s the best I’ve ever seen when it comes to that. You have Walker that works on your team. He’s an analytical genius. Do you think he does that seldom or do you think that’s something he does a lot?

Brandon:
Tons of it. The repetition is so important. No matter what you’re trying to do, how can you build more reps in continually to get better at it? Then the next part is I guess going through how can you specialize? I’ll even say the repetition goes deeper, how can you specialize in something that you can then get the reps in on?
For example, I want to just do real estate. Well, remember earlier we talked about the crystal clear criteria. If you’re like, no, I’m going to be the duplex guy in Houston. That’s what I buy as duplexes in Houston that need work. I want to fix them up. Duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, we’ll combine all of them. Small multi in Houston, I’m going to be the best investor at that. Then you get your reps in on that, do a bunch of them, analyze a bunch of them because that’s how you’re going to build mastery in that thing.
Before you start to expand to other things, people here like David and I do a lot of different things. That’s because we’ve been doing this for so long. When you’re first getting started, you need to become a master at something before moving onto something else. Or get a team of other people who are masters at that thing that can do it for you. But mastery is not an option in today’s economy. You got to be good at this stuff so get the reps in needed to become a master at it.

David:
That is a great point. If I thought, how do you know when you develop mastery? I would say when you can conduct that action with very little effort and it’s not hard. You take a martial artist who knows a certain kick, they’re expending so much less energy, they’re so much more efficient and they can do it without even thinking about it. That’s what mastery would look like.
When I have a client, sorry, when I have an agent on my team that’s like, “David, can you help me figure out how to [inaudible 00:46:12] off this house what would it be worth?” I’ve done that so many times. I’ve talked to so many appraisers. I’ve dug into understanding how that works, that you could throw a couple curve balls at me and they don’t really throw me off. I can adjust to it very quickly.
When I was new, I would have felt massive anxiety. I’d have been thinking the whole time, I don’t know if I’m doing this right. I would not have felt confident. It was the mastery that built it and then I realized, okay, I can move on to the next bridge. I’ve learned it, the next bridge is teaching other people how to do it. It really can become that simple. But if you’re avoiding the work, you’re never going to get there.

Brandon:
Black belt, for example, Jerry, the guy who teaches a jiu-jitsu to me and David. So Jerry, did he become a black belt by continually fighting white belts, by continually finding the easiest person to fight? Just so he’d feel really good about himself. He’s like, that white belt again. When he moved up in the belts, in order to get better, he had to increasingly fight harder and harder people.
Part of mastery is not resting on what you currently are good at, but it’s asking yourself, what’s hard right now. What’s challenging. In my effort to become a more mastery level, real estate investor, I’m moved from yeah, originally it was a single family, then small multi, then medium-sized multi-family apartments. Then mobile home parks now. Then the skill changed from, the thing that I’m trying to get better at now is not necessarily analyzing deals.
I was the guy who did everything. Then I shifted the next level, the next belt for me was not even real estate. It was management or leadership or hiring. Those are the next level. I started reading books on that, started studying that, started talking to people about that. I continually moving up belts and sometimes it takes you even out of the niche you’re in because which was real estate. Now I’m leadership. But it’s all the same thing and that’s what I needed to get to a higher level belt when it came to real estate.

David:
That’s so, so good. That really is why we recommend the stack. Because the stack forces you out of always rolling with the white belt every single time.

Brandon:
Why don’t you explain what that is, for those that don’t know.

David:
The stack is a concept where if you’re having trouble building momentum, wow, this is all coming together so good, isn’t it? You buy a house. What I recommend is people start with a house act. That is the easiest way to get yourself into real estate investing. Once you’ve bought a house act, then you buy an investment property. Once you’ve got that, you buy a duplex, then you buy a fourplex, and this is every year.
The next year you’d buy aplex and you buy a 16. Your jumps are big enough that they’re challenging, but they’re not so big that you would drown. To go from 16 units to 32 is challenging but it’s manageable. Not go from 16 to 700 or something in the next step. Well, I don’t need to go into with another jiu-jitsu analogy for that one. But that is how you ensure that you are improving. You’re always taking on a bigger challenge which will force you to get better and that’s a very important components of developing mastery.

Brandon:
What’s cool about the whole stack thing too is it’s like you buy that house hack, you gain a little bit of knowledge and confidence. Then you buy that house by itself, and now you’ve got more knowledge and experience and confidence and you got other people going, “Oh, look at that guy. He’s investing in real estate. Look at her. She’s she’s making progress.” Then you buy the duplex and don’t get caught up on the exact numbers here, people. But now you gain even more.
When people are like, I think people oftentimes get overwhelmed at looking at the bottom of that stack or of that pyramid, you could call it. Because they’re looking at like, how could I ever buy a 50-unit apartment? I don’t have any money. People who are at that level don’t have that question. Because once they get to that level, they have the internal identity that can handle those questions. You have an earned the right to have those questions yet.
Your question is how do I buy the house hack? How do I buy the single family house? How do I buy that small multi-family? At each level, you’re growing but it’s not impossible to get there. Because you’ve earned the right to buy the duplex once you bought a house, and you could start with a duplex. I don’t care, that’s fine. But the point being, is it gives you that confidence at every level and it gives you that momentum as you drive and deeper.

David:
That’s the key, is you don’t have the momentum to take down a 50-unit deal most of the time-

Brandon:
Correct.

David:
… before you’ve bought a house, which is why you shouldn’t be looking that far ahead.

Brandon:
Unless, the only way around that way, is that you go in, hitch onto somebody else’s momentum-

David:
There you go.

Brandon:
… and you get a piece of them. That’s the only way I recommend ever jumping into a 50-unit or 100-unit property right away, because you don’t have the momentum, you don’t have the identity to have those problems yet. But if you can find somebody else who has done that, then you can definitely skip some levels and get their speed, basically jump on their train and learn from them. You’re going to give up part of the deal.
But if you’re in a hurry to build financial independence, a real big hurry, really there’re two ways to do it. Is either go through that stack process quicker than normal. Instead of buying one a year, maybe buy one a quarter. Quarter one, you’re going to buy a house act, quarter two, you’re going to buy a single-family, quarter three, you’re going to buy a duplex, quarter four you’re going to buy that fourplex. By the end of two years, you’re going to have to like 50 units. Then a year later you’re going to be at 200 units or whatever that is, 300 units, 400 units.
That would be one way to go very quickly. It’s hard to learn the lessons in a quarter. That’s where I think five years at a totally reasonable time to be able to quit your job and become a millionaire, doing it in two years. Then you have to go the alternate route of jumping onto somebody else’s trend.

David:
Which is something millionaires do as well. Not all of them, but many of them do partner with other people. Another really important component to mastery is what we call pattern recognition. This is something millionaires are really good at. You get enough reps in and you start to recognize, this thing works and that thing doesn’t.
When you’re saying, I get a question all the time Brandon, David, how do I find a good real estate agent? When you don’t know what a good real estate agent looks like, you don’t find one. You’re just hoping to get lucky. I don’t have a hard time finding a good agent because I can tell within a three-minute conversation if that person’s good or not, and how good they are. You take a person that’s been doing jiu-jitsu forever, and I’ve heard them say, “The second you touch me, I have a really good idea how good you are.” Just from the way that that contact is made.
I noticed when Brandon and I were rolling and I was getting my very first experiences with jiu-jitsu, he’s got a really good triangle. There was a point where he put me in it two or three times in a row, and on the second or third time, I recognized every time my hand goes on the mat next to him and he gets a certain grip, it’s coming. My mind recognize, there’s a pattern. This is what keeps getting me. That made me better because now either I don’t let my hand go on the mat that way or I’m prepared when Brandon would grab it.
Business works just like that. There’s a certain part of town where you’ll notice more deals are popping up or the cashflow properties aren’t in that area. They’re over here. There’s savviness that you develop with who you’re dealing with that they’re being honest or not, that you cannot get if you’re not getting in repetitions.

Brandon:
That’s so true. I got nothing to add. That was great. All right, that’s really all I got from mastery. Anything you want to cover on before we get out of here?

David:
The last thing I’d say is what we call the four stages of mastery, and I’ll go through those really quickly. The first is referred to as being unconsciously incompetent. That’s when you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s how everyone’s starting off is, is they want to get into real estate investing but they don’t even know where to start. They don’t know if it’s easier, if it’s hard, there’s no way to know.
The next stage is you are consciously incompetent, which means I’m aware that I don’t know anything. But that’s good because now you know where to start. You know you’re in competent and you know what areas of knowledge you need to gain. The third step is consciously competent. This is where the plane is now up in the air but you’re still flying it. You can do a good job but it takes your own focus. It takes a lot of effort to make sure things go well.
Then the fourth step is unconsciously competent. This is where you’ve done it so many times that you don’t even have to think about it. The plane is on autopilot. It is flying itself. These are the guys that you see that are blindfolding themselves, wrestling with somebody in jiu-jitsu and winning every time. They are so good, they could just tell from feel what the other person is doing.
What my recommendation would be is to ask yourself, where are you here, and what would you need to do to get from one step to the next? You’re not going to get out of unconsciously incompetent the first step if you don’t start taking some kind of action. If I never got on the mat with you and Jerry, I don’t know if I can do jiu-jitsu or not and I don’t know what I even need to learn. I might think I could beat a black belt if I’ve never done it.
You could actually get hurt in life if you’re walking around unconsciously incompetent, and investing is not different. You can jump in and put money into somebody else’s deal, having no idea if it’s a good deal or they’re a good person, hoping it works out. That is not how you should be investing. Work yourself through those four stages and understand that mastery is something that millionaires all strive for and there’s no reason everybody listening shouldn’t be doing the same.

Brandon:
That’s really good. One point to make on that four stages of mastery is that it’s really easy to be excited during the first stage and then it’s very easy to lose that in the later stages. In other words, you start out, you’re like, “I don’t know what I don’t know, but I heard this podcast on real estate. I’m going to become a millionaire.” You’re unconsciously incompetent. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know anything and you’re really excited about it.
Then you dig into it and you become consciously incompetent. Which means you know that you don’t know anything, and you realize it’s going to take a lot longer and a lot harder than I thought. It’s really easy to lose momentum there and to lose heart and to say, oh, you know what, I’m going to go on to this new thing. I bet I could start an Amazon business, or I can go in and do this MLM and sell candles or essential oils or some crap like that.
Then you move on to the next thing, because these four stages apply to every business you’re going to go into or every wealth building thing or every skill you’re going to try to build for yourself. They’re always there. If you’ve jumped around from thing to thing, to thing, to thing to thing over the last five, 10, 20 years of life, it’s probably because you give up every time in the consciously incompetent section.
But if you work through that, getting yourself to consciously competent. Well, now you know what you’re doing and you’re doing it well, but you’re still trying. You’re still having to work at it yourself to say, okay, I’m going to analyze this deal here, I’m going to do this number here, I’m going to make this offer here, I got to figure out the financing. Well, I got to work through that and you do that enough and you keep heart through that part, then the happiness and the ease, and the fun comes back in the fourth field, which is the unconsciously competent. It’s natural.
I’m unconsciously competent right now when it comes to buying small multifamily. I do in my sleep. You can just show me a deal, I’ll be like yeah, that’s fine. Let’s do it. It’s all pretty easy because it’s natural. Now, if I’m going to go and buy, let’s say a 50-unit apartment building this year, I’m not there right now. I’m probably consciously competent or I can do it, but I’m just so into mobile home parks that buying an apartment building would take some additional effort for me.
I’d have to really think through. I’d have to have conversations with Andrew Cushman and others that are… Brian Murray and asking, okay, am I doing this right? God, I got to make sure. Anyway, my point being in my long-winded point here, is understand that there are emotions involved with each stage here and that’s completely normal. Don’t give up and you’ll get through the fourth side of it and that’s where a lot of millionaire success is found.

David:
That is fantastic advice. I didn’t think to say it. I’m so glad you did. That there’s excitement when you’re unconsciously and competent and it goes away. One of the favorite quotes that Gary Keller made last year that I liked was he said something along the lines of, people get bored of doing what works, so they start looking at what doesn’t work and trying to make it work.
I see that in my own life all the time. It’s not exciting when you’re unconsciously competent. But that’s what you work to get, man. That things on autopilot, doubled down, take advantage. That’s the point where you can start building another bridge. But don’t let your lack of emotional excitement dictate the decision you make. If you’re tracking your numbers, you can keep that excitement and you won’t lose that momentum.

Brandon:
All right man. Well, this was a good episode today. We’ll keep it on an hour long it looks like, and we’ll get everyone out of here, get on with your day. Go take some massive action today on something that we talked about today. Find a way to put these four principles into your life. David, as you take us out, you want to review the four real quick and then get us out of here?

David:
Yes, sir. The first one is be decisive. Make a decision. It doesn’t have to be the best decision. Just a decision is better than nothing. The next is going to be build momentum. Look at how you can build momentum with what you’re trying to do or what momentum you already have that you can apply to your new goal of real estate investing.
The third is tracking. Track both your personal budget, track the steps that you are taking, the actions you are taking to make something happen. Then track what worked and what didn’t work. The fourth is develop mastery. Get repetition in, start to recognize patterns, get more efficient at what you’re doing, and you combine all these together and you will become a millionaire.

Brandon:
There you go. I love it, man. Thank you for joining me today and a happy new year and go crush it in 2021.

David:
This is David Greene, for Brandon unconsciously competent Turner, signing off.

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