Four Steps for Achieving Success in Real Estate and Life
Reflecting back to 2009 when I first got started in real estate, my life was filled with several limiting beliefs that were holding me back from attaining success. My first limiting belief was that you need to start with a single-family home and expand from there. My idea of what a successful life looked like was also very different from what it is today. Rather than focusing on luxuries and acquiring “stuff” my wife and I now focus on creating experiences, traveling the world and living a happy, minimalistic life. In this article, I am going to dive into four steps that will bring success into your life and provide examples on how I used these steps to achieve my goal of “Time Freedom” or Financial Freedom.
Here are the four steps:
- Know WHY you want your goal
- Take MASSIVE action
- EXPAND your knowledge
- Be ADAPTABLE to change and fine-tune until you get what you want
Know WHY you want your goal
I had several reasons why I wanted to achieve financial freedom at an early age. I wanted to feel successful and I wanted to be a role model for others. In addition, I worked in the oil industry for many years and did not want to be a salary slave for the next 30-40 years working in extreme conditions away from home. Those reasons fueled my motivation toward achieving success in real estate. It took me several years to learn that reasons come first and answers come next. When I first began investing in real estate, I wasn’t sure what my outcome was, I just knew that I wanted to be passive in my investing approach…one day. I knew from reading books that real estate was a lucrative place to invest, but I didn’t have a “why”. By default, my goals were driven by money and numbers. Eventually, after much soul searching, I came to the conclusion that my “why” had to do with freedom. Freedom over my time and freedom to do the things I enjoy most. I am very grateful that in this soul-searching process, I found an amazing wife that shares this same passion. This significantly amplified the action I was taking.
Take MASSIVE action:
Take a moment and think about your ideal long-term outcome and explain to yourself why you want it. Really take some time to consider this. Then, and only then, will it be time to take MASSIVE action. I used to use every break opportunity, every lunch hour during work and any available time driving throughout the day to dedicate to educating myself on real estate and investing. I would often hear comments (especially from my mom) that life is not all about work. Take it easy, money isn’t everything.
When you hear comments like these, you are taking massive action. I loved what I was doing, I was becoming more passionate about investing and it didn’t feel like work to me. I was excited to wake up on a Saturday morning and listen to podcasts or read a book on real estate. Massive action leads to momentum, and those small victories start to turn into bigger successes.
EXPAND your knowledge:
It all started with a book. I hear many real estate investors credit the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki as the book that caused a shift in thinking and a pursuit into real estate. It’s funny because this book really has little to do with real estate, but nonetheless it has helped many people start their journey. The first book I first remember reading on “investing” was Rich Dad’s Prophecy, also written by Robert Kiyosaki. The book focused heavily on the stock market and the overall economy in the US. The “prediction”, if you will, was that the US would have a major stock market meltdown at some point in the future, once the baby boomers started to retire.
Coincidentally I read this book around 2006-2007 and I had 100% of my investment portfolio in the stock market. I didn’t know what to make of the book, it didn’t tell me what to do or how to do it and it didn’t provide any investment advice. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I hit the “sell” button and liquidated my entire stock portfolio and held it in cash until I could learn more about what to do with my money. As we all know…2008 came shortly after and thankfully I was still sitting in cash during this time. I continued reading books and expanding my knowledge over the next year and a half, though I did not accomplish this at a rapid rate. I read maybe 2 or 3 books during that time and decided at some point in 2009 that I wanted to give real estate a try. I attribute 90% of the reason I “avoided” the last recession to expanding my knowledge through reading; 10% was simply dumb luck. After realizing the impact this knowledge provided, I doubled-down on expanding my education by joining local and online real estate groups, finding mentors, listening to podcasts, watching videos and reading more books. To give you some perspective, I read 52 books in 2015. I have not topped that number since, but you get the idea. Double-down on what’s working!
Be ADAPTABLE to change and fine-tune until you get what you want
This is a very difficult, but necessary step for most people, myself included. We often think that we have tried “everything” to achieve our goal, when in fact, we have tried only a few things. Michael Jordan is a great example of this. Jordan was famous for being relentless when he practiced basketball. He knew his outcome; he took massive action and out practiced and outperformed his peers to gain his success. I find his mindset and willpower truly amazing. One of his famous quotes is “I have failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed”. In the course of his failed attempts, he found a pathway to success.
I began with one single-family home, purchased on the outskirts of town. I obtained a conventional loan and used my liquidated stock market cash for the 20% down payment. That was my extent of knowledge at the time. Over the next several years, I implemented various single-family strategies and eventually found my WHY and doubled-down on my knowledge. I decided to change my perspective to focus on larger multifamily properties, specifically with the intent to convert my portfolio into a completely passive investing approach that allows my wife and I to be 100% hands-off with managing tenants and rehabbing properties. If I was unable to change my approach to real estate investing, then we would never have been able to partner with amazing teams to collectively acquire more than 6,000 apartment units to date!
Please Please Please:
I encourage you to focus on what you want, know WHY you want it, take MASSIVE action and be willing to change or fine-tune your approach if it isn’t working. I hope this article has added value and has given you some additional perspective. I am happy to be a resource for you if you would like to learn more about investing in apartment syndications or if you would like to share experience; the door is always open. You can schedule a call below:
https://calendly.com/traviswatts/consultation
To your success
Travis Watts
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