It’s only a partial truth when you hear the saying, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Because the alternative to that is that something could beat you down and wear you out, and if you don’t allow yourself to recover before the next defeat, you’re only going to see a decrease in performance. Too many harsh defeats in a row could decrease your confidence, and instead of making you stronger, it weakens your resolve.
Practice balancing between setting hard to achieve, but still realistic goals and getting some quick wins under your belt (to build momentum and confidence). When you do go for something and fail, prioritize learning from your mistakes and recovering from failures. Just make sure that A) you’re not aiming too low just to avoid the feeling of pain/loss; and B) you have regular stretch goals that are realistic, but definitely not guaranteed.
The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.
Most things in life that are worthwhile are either difficult to obtain, take effort, or take time to develop/grow. Some of the best things in life require all three. For example, having a strong relationship (whether between your spouse, best friend, or co-worker) takes time. You don’t have a deep relationship with them the first time you meet them. It takes effort on your part to listen, to show you care for them, etc. The longer you do this, the stronger your relationship grows.
The same can be said for physical success (building/shaping your body how you want it to look), mental (learning a new subject or language), financial (accumulating wealth), or at work (you have to start somewhere, and that place usually isn’t at the top). Most great things take time. We don’t plant the seed and eat the fruit the same day, just as we don’t do one workout and get a six pack the same day. The overnight success is the outlier.
Practice patience. Be patient with others, but be patient with yourself and your goals too. Don’t give up just because you’re not seeing results as quickly as you want. Eventually, if you are consistently working towards your goals, you can achieve great things. Just make sure you’re setting S.M.A.R.T. goals towards things that are actually meaningful to you. If you really want to achieve them, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.
When you face uncertainty, do you take action or do you pause? There’s fight, flight, or freeze.
There’s not a “one size fits all” answer for every situation. You can deal with each scenario differently, and depending on the urgency of what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, your previous history with that person/scenario, and the risk/reward balance, you may choose differently.
But we all have a default action or inaction that we take.
I tend to lean towards taking action. Instead of thinking about doing things, just do them. You’ll make mistakes along the way, but you’ll also end up getting much more done than those who default to pausing/talking things over.
Default towards taking action. Be aggressive. Don’t be passive.
Look around you and figure out what successful people have done in order to set themselves up to achieve that level of success. Tease out the similarities in what many successful people are doing to get them there. Their individual tactics may be slightly different, but I can almost guarantee that they have a similar mindset or strategy.
What did they do to achieve success that other successful people have also done? Correlation does not equal causation, but if you continue to see the same patterns over and over, you can at least increase your odds of achieving success. Look for the clues to lead you there. Listen for them. Then act on them.
There are four sectors of the Cashflow Quadrant – E (employee), S (self-employed), B (business-owner), I (investor)
The Cashflow Quadrant describes four ways of making money – as an employee, a self-employed individual, a business-owner, or an investor. You are not limited to earning income in only one category at a time.
The most common way to make money (and what most people are trained for in school) is to be an employee. As an employee, you’re working for a company or organization and trading your time for money. You generally have the most “security” but the least amount of freedom as an employee (think W-2). You work the hours your employers set, follow their rules/handbook, and as a result, get paid a set wage (usually based on an hourly rate, but sometimes as a salary). Examples of this are everywhere – the cashier at the store you go to, the secretary at your office, a warehouse stocker, a janitor, teacher, office administrator, etc.
The second way to make money is as a self-employed individual (think 1099). Here, you don’t have a “boss,” but instead you are your own boss. It sounds great, but essentially you own your job here. You still trade time for money, but now you trade off some of the safety/stability of working for someone else and having a guaranteed paycheck for having to earn new business everyday. If you don’t sell something, you don’t get paid. Examples of this include lawyers, real estate agents, the owner of a landscaping company where the owner is doing a fair amount of revenue-generating/business-sustaining work, etc.
After that, you can move to the right side of the quadrant and start leveraging other people’s time or money to make you money.
In the business owner quadrant, you move yourself out of operations. You are no longer physically doing much of the work. Instead, you have employees doing the work on your behalf. You have scaled to the point where not everything hinges on you. If you decide to leave for a few weeks (or months), the business will still make money because of the people you have working for you, and the systems/processes you have in place. Think of Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates as examples of this, but it can be on a much smaller scale too. Do you think any of them are out selling their products on an individual level, making the product, or packaging the product? Can they leave for vacation (or pass away) and have the company still survive (or thrive)? They leverage other people’s time so they can accomplish more.
Lastly, we have the investor quadrant. Anybody can be in the investor quadrant as long as they are investing in an asset that produces returns positive returns. The ultimate goal in the investor quadrant though should be to have your investments produce enough passive income to cover all of your expenses. once you get to that point, you won’t have to work another day in your life. You can choose to work, trillion time for money or being a business owner and working on your business, but you do not have to work. There are many ways to invest in assets, whether that is through index funds, mutual funds, cryptocurrency, and my personal favorite – real estate. Here, you leverage either your own money or, preferably, other people’s money to work and earn more money. The idea is that your money is working for you even when you’re sleeping.
Where I’ve been
As I write this, I’m now 31 years old. I’ve been working in some capacity for over half of my life now. I started working part-time jobs in high school on an alpaca farm, at a pizza shop, and landscaping. I took the first quarter off from work in college, but other than that I worked a minimum of 25 hours per week throughout the school year (and 40+ hours per week in the summer) at an office, as a personal trainer, and landscaping. After graduating, I began working 55-60 hour weeks at a food packaging plant, as a personal trainer and CrossFit coach, a gym manager, and a salesperson/project manager. I understand what it means to be an employee – trading time for money. I decided that this wasn’t the best path for me, even though I see how it makes sense to many people. The problem I had with it was two-fold. First, no matter how productive I was, my income was always capped. I could help the company make record profits, but it didn’t necessarily translate to an equal payday for me. But don’t hear what I’m not saying – I didn’t necessarily need to be paid in equal proportions to what I earned for the company. The business owners were the ones who took the risk to build the business and who spent the time, money, and energy in developing systems for me to succeed. It’s just that I knew my income and my family’s future would be capped if I stayed there. The second limiting factor for me as an employee is that I love learning and trying to implement new ideas. But as an employee, I had to stick to the rules and keep following what was working. I felt my innovative side was being stifled and I wanted to make my own rules. This led to my career change last year…
Where I am
As of June 2020, I became a licensed Realtor in the state of Ohio. The primary locations I focus on are Medina, Cuyahoga, Summit, Lorain, and Wayne counties. I generally work with people looking for a primary residence, and it ranges from first-time homebuyers, people looking to upsize, or people looking to downsize. That being said, my wife and I invest in rental properties and we work with other investors ranging from single family rentals/house flips, small multi-family, or commercial properties (such as apartments).
I’m now on a great team (The Casey Team) and working with an amazing brokerage (Russell Real Estate Services).
But even though I’m on a team, it’s still a 1099 (self-employed) profession. If I don’t sell houses, I don’t make money. I can cold call, door knock, show houses, and write offers, but if I don’t perform and close deals, I don’t get paid. It’s a 100% commission career and it can be stressful at times. But here, the harder I work, the more money I should make. My income isn’t capped.
As I mentioned, my wife and I do invest in real estate, but we also invest in the stock market with our IRA plans and her 403b. We also have the kids set up with UTMAs (Uniform Transfers to Minors Act) so they will be off to a good start once they become of age. We do not touch any of the cashflow from the rentals, dividends, or increases in equity that we receive from these investments and rather re-invest them so they can grow larger for us. This is similar to the example used for “make thy gold multiply” told in The Richest Man in Babylon.
Where I’m going (my plans)
My goal is to be able to retire by age 50. I don’t ever see a time when I want to stop working – I enjoy work, learning, and improving myself everyday. But I don’t want to have to work. If my family and I want to go on a long vacation, I want to be able to pick up and go.
With that being the end goal, I need to change a couple of things. First, I need my investments to produce a greater return. My goal is to do that through buying one new rental property every other year for the next 5 years, then hopefully increase to one per year (or more) for the following 15 years. We would hire a property manager so we are not handling the day-to-day items and it becomes a much more passive system.
I also want to move from the S (self-employed) quadrant to the B (business-owner) quadrant. While I don’t have any plans to open a brokerage, mortgage company, or title company, I would like to eventually be a partner on the current team I’m on and to get more Realtors on our team. Then we can have them out making deals while we help provide the support for them (with leads, office administrators, inside sales agents, stagers, photographers, etc). This will take time to build, and we will have to write up processes (and tweak them as we go). But this would eventually free me from the trading time for money conundrum that so many of us face.
If you have any tips or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or to message me directly.
