Analyzing differing & conflicting real estate philosophies

[Jimmy Martz]

How many different conflicting opinions are there in real estate that cause doubt and inaction?   Here are the ones that I have had to deal with.  Feel free to add you own issues and how you dealt with them.  

1.  Get properly educated before making a foolish newbie mistake vs. analysis paralysis & "you can learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book.  Go out & do it".  

2.  "Work smarter, not harder" vs.  "work so hard, people think aliens did it"(saw a meme on linkedin recently with a pic of the Egyptian pyramids and this quote)

3.  Find highest-and-best use of time vs.  GSD (Get S... Done) Mode.  

4.  Opportunity costs of a deal vs. sitting around & not doing a deal hoping for a better one.  

I feel that these are just scratching the surface of this conversation & I have had long conversations with many people about these things but my personal philosophy is that these ideologies all are worth considering but at the end of the day, action is what will prevail.   And different dilemmas need to be addressed at different points in the business.  Here is the foundation in which I run my entire business at this point:  Work hard AND work smart; if one fails, the other will prevail.      What's your formula for success?

[Jim K.]

@Jimmy Martz

My father had many wonderful traits, but he lived by the mantra "Work Smarter, Not Harder." He was addicted to looking for the easy way out of everything. And as the years passed, he not-so-gradually lost the capacity to actually put down his head and work hard through complicated problems with no easy solution. If the possibility of an easy solution appeared to present itself, oh, he was all over that...but when it was grim work that had to be slogged through, my father would consistently waste incredible amounts of time looking for the easy way out instead of gutting anything out.

The results were predictable. He died so broke I had to pay for his funeral. He left his widow, my mother, with no money and no means of legally supporting herself. She was living in a foreign country, and he never had a clear thought to what she should do if he should die suddenly and unexpectedly, which he did. Not so smart, from a guy who very much spent his entire life thoroughly convinced of his own intellectual superiority over lesser mortals. A part of me still despises him for it, and always will.

So this is what I'm telling you from that perspective: don't ever lose the capacity to put your head down and work hard. If there is an opportunity to work smart, sure, take it, but don't spend your life on what Robert Louis Stevenson once described as "the soft-job hunt."

They talk about looking for gold at the end of a rainbow; but if a man wants an employment that'll last him till he dies, let him start out on the soft-job hunt.