You're actually not behind, you're right where you should be

[Alex Ficco]

“Control Freaks Don’t Eat”

This is less of a specific real estate post and more of a general mindset one, but is extremely applicable to a ton of people I talk to who are starting out in real estate investing.

Earlier this week, I was talking to a newer investor here in Reno, NV. We were going over how we do a few different things at the company. Basically, she brought us a VERY hard deal to close, but we pulled it off, got it to the finish line, and she’s cut in on the profit, but she also stressed that she wanted to learn through this much more than get paid.

Getting to see a deal like that be completed front to back… learn she has! As have I. It was a fight every step of the way to get that one done. A great one for her to witness. It was everything most youtube videos and programs leave out about going direct to seller to buy deals.

To set the stage on her so the rest of this post makes more sense - she is the type of person that gets overwhelmed easily, but it's not for lack of effort. She’s hard working. She’s driven. She takes action. BUT, like some of my posts from earlier this year have pointed out, she falls victim to playing the ‘comparison game’ with others and also from a bit of shiny object syndrome.

She’s constantly comparing herself to people younger than her in some coaching programs they are in, hearing stories of their success and then questioning her capability as a person and landing at the conclusion that she must be doing something wrong.

She knows that in the future, she wants to be doing a different strategy than she’s currently pursuing. This causes her to pull focus away from what she’s doing now and want to learn more about that. Which triggers wanting to learn about other things she hears about, etc.

Back to the deal. Now that it closed and we could do a debrief on the last steps, we were going through a few things and how we did them. She, clearly with a feeling of overwhelm, stopped me and said “How the **** do you know all of this? How did you learn it all? How did you get to this point?”

First of all, I’m no expert and I’m not sure what “this point” is, but I can answer the other two questions.

I learned what I know from DOING DEALS.

It’s very simple. There is only one way to do deals. TAKE THE RIGHT ACTION.

Especially at the beginning, there’s nothing else to do. As long as you know the action you’re taking can directly result in a deal (which she does, cause I’ve told her what to do)... THAT’S IT.

We are obsessed with trying to control everything and getting things right now and are always thinking we should be farther ahead than we are or things should be different than they are right now.

What does that even mean? Nah, you SHOULD be right where you are because all of the action (or inaction) you’ve ever taken has resulted in you being here, right now.

You can consume endless hours of videos and course modules and podcasts, but it’s not the same as doing it. You cant waive a magic wand and do 100 deals by tomorrow. You need to get the reps and reps take time.

I’m all for learning. I dedicate time to it each week. But there’s a line. You have to DO THINGS with what you learn. And you don’t need to know all that much to start.

You can’t control MOST things.

You can’t control how good other people are doing (and it doesn't affect you anyway).

You can’t control that homeboy on youtube is 14 years old making $40k a month doing Amazon FBA.

You can’t control that after 4 confirmed calls and conversations saying “we need the house vacant for 2 hours for inspections, so you and your aggressive dogs are going to be elsewhere, right?” and the seller was still there WITH the dogs and only left after a 10 minute BRUTAL dog fight ensued and the one dog literally almost killed the other and they had to go to the Vet ER. (I wish I was joking. I had a rough week 😂).

BUT you CAN control how those things make you feel… and you can control picking up the phone and talking to more people, setting more appointments, and making more offers.

Whatever that ‘right action’ is for you, you can control doing THAT, and not doing other things that take away from it.