BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 431: How to Make Trade-offs in Your Life (Before Others Do it For You) with Greg McKeown

Episode Date: January 3, 2021

Your agent is calling you to show you houses, your boss is emailing you about some work to do, your partner wants to grab dinner, and you want to take a nap. How do you prioritize things in your life when everything seems so important? The key is essentialism. Joining the podcast today is Greg McKeown, Author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Greg relates to the struggle of many entrepreneurs and investors: too many options, not enough time. Instead of telling you to wake up at 5 AM, take a cold shower and work until 10PM, he presents a far more effective (and simple) approach. What Greg suggests: pick the things you care most about, do them, and don’t worry about the rest. But how do you pick when everything seems essential? The answer: almost everything else besides your core cares/needs aren’t essential. If you begin to treat the non-essential as essential, you stretch yourself too thin, not allowing you the time to accomplish what truly is...essential. In the modern age, many of us feel like we don’t have time to accomplish everything we want. When we get laser-focused and put the principles of essentialism in our daily lives, we can accomplish more than ever. In This Episode We Cover: What is essentialism? How to designate the non-essential from the essential tasks Why having too many good options puts us in a dangerous position How to find out which tasks deserve delegation or deletion Developing the courage to say “no” Finding an accountability partner so you’re locked in for success Why Brandon wants to spend less time on Tiktok And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets book store Essentialism book Website StickK App. How to turn goals into a reality Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/show431 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 431. Non-essentialism only has one real defect, and that it's a, that's that it's a lie. The idea that you can do everything for everyone at all times, and that will lead to success, everything about it is not right. Everything about that equation isn't valid. You're listening to Bigger Pockets 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. What's going on, everyone? It's Brandon Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with a phenomenal show with my co-host, Mr. David Green. David, that was, we just got finished recording and that was crazy and kind of humiliating, but kind of, kind of amazing. It was humiliating for you. It was awesome for me to be a fly on the wall, watching you be tortured by this guest.

If anybody wants to see Brandon Squirm, you've got to watch this one on YouTube. Tortured. I was just glad when I pulled my phone up, it wasn't as bad as I thought. That's all I'm going to say is I felt a little vindicated right then. And then kind of a cool surprise came at the very, very end of the show that was very fitting.

So hang tight for the whole show. You guys are going to love it. But before we get to that, let's talk about today's quick tip. David, I'm going to give you today's quick tip ability. What you got? Well, this is very similar to one that we just talked about recently when we gave our Take Time to Think Challenge. So when we interviewed NIR, he spoke about, what was it?

You don't want to try the last name? You don't want to try a love to him? Hey, y'all. Hey, y'all. Hey, y'all. It was something like that, right? Something like that. Sure. Yeah. What was the name of the-destractable. Well, indistractable, yes. We, and by the way, I've gotten rave reviews on that podcast. Everybody really, really liked it. He spoke about finding ways to focus on what really matters. Today's episode is in that same vein. So, Brandon and I issue the take time to think challenge because what we want the listeners who are in some degree, we're all struggling with how we can move our businesses forward or our

goals forward. Nobody's completely oblivious to that struggle. But take time to think about where you're trying to go and what you can do to fix it. So if you haven't done the take time to think challenge, do so today. When this podcast is done, let yourself think about what is essential in my life, what would make my life look the way I wanted to look or make me feel the way that. I want to feel and start thinking about things that you yourself can eliminate to make that happen. Today's guest made amazing points, but one of the biggest one is we're always tempted to do more,

but usually the answer is cutting out things that we're already doing that we shouldn't be. Yeah, yeah, really good point. You ever head out on a trip, lock your door, and think, cool, my most valuable asset is now doing absolutely nothing. Because while you're off traveling, your home is just sitting there, quiet, empty, not contributing, which feels like a missed opportunity, considering it has solid Wi-Fi and a very comfy bed. With Airbnb's co-host network, your place can earn money while you're away. You can hire a vetted local co-host with real hosting experience to handle guest messages, prep your space, and manage reservations so everything runs smoothly.

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It's just cleaner. Sign up at baselane.com slash BP and get a $100 bonus. Baselane is a financial technology company and not a bank. Banking services provided by Threadbank, member FDIC. For decades, real estate has been a cornerstone of the world's largest portfolios. But it's also historically been sort of complex, time-consuming. and expensive. But imagine if real estate investing was suddenly easy, all the benefits of owning real, tangible assets without the complexity and expense. That's the power of the Fundrise flagship

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check out historical returns, and start investing in just minutes. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. This and other information can be found in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com slash flagship. This is a paid advertisement. Now it's time to bring in Greg. Greg McKeon. I hope I'm saying his name right.

Am I butchering that? I tend to butcher everyone's last name. McKeon. I think that's it. McKeon. I'm going to go with that. Greg McKeon. He wrote a book called Essentialism, and it is one of my favorite books of all time.

I love it. I've read it numerous, numerous times. And it's so important. So here's what this show is for. It's for anybody who feels like maybe you are overworked. There's not enough time in the day or in the week that you feel like you get distracted too easily using like social media or anything like that. You feel like there's a lot of different types of maybe business or real estate investing.

you want to get into and you can't really choose which is the right one. And for anybody who just feels like their life is not exactly the way they want it to be. So that's what this show is for. And again, pick up a copy of existentialism, it's just awesome. But that's our interview. And like you said earlier, Greg puts me in the hot seat at some point for the last like the last third of this show. And it is a it is humorous and humiliating. It'll be great. So check out the show and then make sure you stick around for the outro where Brandon and I are going to break down specifically how this material would apply to real estate investing and business in general. There we go. Without further ado, let's get to the interview with Greg McKeon.

All right, Greg, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast, man. It's a huge honor to have you on the show today. It's great to be with you, Brandon. Thank you. Yeah. So like I mentioned earlier, you know, before we said recording, I think I've read your book 10 times now. It's one of those books that I revisit. There's like a handful of books in my life whenever I'm in a spot where I'm like, I need to be reminded of this or to get back in that mode. Essentialism was one of those books for me, is one of those books for me. And they got, you know, the highlighted and underlined and everything here. So I'm excited today to dig into this thing. So why don't we start?

Go ahead. No, I mean, I felt the breath coming. No, you're the pro, man. You need to do this podcast. I'm going to listen while you do it because you're a master at this. Well, it's funny, actually, I was, I've been doing a lot of like, not, spanishable. Well, yeah, I guess you go speaking, like podcasts or other shows lately. And I realized a lot of my like things I'm talking about when I'm doing other people's shows,

I'm like, oh, man, I got that from essentialism. Oh, yeah, I pulled that story over here. So I'm just pretty much stealing everything from you anyway. I'm glad to hear that it's been relevant for you and that it's be useful. And that's always that's always an honor for me. Yeah, well, good. Well, let's get into it. So what is, for those who have not read the book yet, what is essentialism?

What does that mean? It's a way of thinking that you focus. and figure out what is essential. And you eliminate everything you can that is non-essential. And then create a system to make it as effortless and easy as possible to do what really matters most. So that's three things. Explore,

eliminate and execute. That's essentialism. So it's not productivity. I think there's an often belief that's like, oh, it just means get more stuff done. No, that's the distinction exactly,

is that productivity is about getting more stuff done. Like you're in a coal mine, you're trying to, you know, shift as much call from point A to point B. get it out. I don't think of essentialism really as productivity in that sense at all. It's, you know, essentialism is not about doing more stuff. It's about doing more of the right stuff. And that distinctions everything because going back to the coal mine, it's like waking up

and discovering, my goodness, we've been in a diamond mine this whole time. It's how do you find the diamonds so that you can, you know, harvest that instead of, instead of just more is better. We have this analogy we use all the time here on the show about building too many bridges. If you're like on one island over here, like Reality Island and you have success island, you got to build a bridge to get there, whatever that is in life, right? Whether it's financial success or whatever. And so many people are building way too many bridges.

I mean, there's a time I was trying to sell. Yeah, it's crazy. How many people build these bridges? Yeah, exactly. They aren't over to where they want to be. And so they just think, oh, I'll do another one. I'll do another one. I'll do another one. They keep starting more and more things and they're making a millimeter progress in a million different directions around that island, expecting somehow to get to the next place. And it just doesn't work that way. So I'm with you. You ever go to a carnival where they have those, and hopefully I didn't steal this analogy from you, a metaphor. But I don't know where I got originally. Maybe I made it up. We'll assume that I made it up. But you've got priors for this, Greg. Don't worry. He's got a rap sheet a mile long.

I'm gonna cut you stealing ideas. No, no, borrow it, borrowed. The carnival where, like, you have a dozen people lined up and they all these little squirt guns and everyone has their own target to shoot at this little, like, you know, round red target, like a, you know, target logo.

Right? And if you shoot in the middle of it, your little, like, horse moves across the thing. Have you guys seen that before? Am I just crazy? Yeah, yeah. It's in chapter 14. No, I'm just kidding.

Okay, geez. Oh, that was so good. I was like, no. Anyway, okay, good. I have seen that before. I won one of those when I was like seven years old with my grandpa. I still remember the little frog toy that I wanted to do. That's funny.

Okay, good. So I'm glad. Okay. So the idea that I've always used in my head now is even like the bridge thing. I like that metaphor. But I like this idea of you have one squirt gun. Like it's all you have. You can shoot out a certain amount of water out of your gun at one time.

And so when there's like 10 targets, like you shoot the top one, then the next one down, next one down, next one down. You know, that little horse moves across so slowly. But if you just pick one target and just hold on to that thing, that thing moves a whole lot quicker. Now, we all know this stuff intuitively. Like, I don't think anybody to listen to show right now is going, what? I'm doing too many things. So my question for you, Greg, is why is this so difficult?

Like, you've talked to a lot of people about this over the years. Why does everybody have this problem? And it's such a big one. Well, first of all, basically, essentialism is addressing a problem that you don't normally think of as a problem. And that is success. So most of what's been written about in the success literature and research is about how to become successful. Very little has been written about what you do once you are successful. And essentialism is in that, I think, rarer category. What happens if you have too many options and

opportunities to be able to do them all? And that sounds like a nice problem to have, and it is, but it doesn't make it less of a problem. And so what my observation is, is that even when people don't exactly feel successful. We are all living in an age of the undisciplined pursuit of more because there's so much success that's happened. So whether you know, whether you wake up this morning going, I feel great, feel successful, that's not the point I'm making. But do you have a lot of options? Do you have a lot of choices? The answer is yes to almost everybody. And certainly everybody that's at least able to get online, you can learn anything. You can you can connect and contact vast numbers of people compared to how it was before.

And so that's the challenge we're up against. That's the sea change that's taken place over, you know, it bends how you want to date it, but from the Industrial Revolution, that was a tremendous increase in options and opportunities. But then even over the last 10 years, as we've gone from being connected to hyper-connected, There are these big shifts in the number of options and opportunities and choices that we will have. We want that problem, but we haven't yet developed the skills to manage that positive problem. That's what I think makes it so hard, is that we're unprepared for the exponential increase of choices and options that have come our way.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what's your background in this? I mean, how did you, is this something you were just one day woke up? You're like, man, I'm way too busy. I got to figure this out. You know, how did this become like your life? I don't know if life mission is too strong of a word here, but how does become your thing? Well, one of the things that happened to me was on a personal basis when I got an email from my boss at the time and said, look, Friday between one and two would be a very bad time for your wife to have a baby because I need to be at this client meeting. And, You know, and I'm sure they were, you know, at least semi-joking about that. But as it turns out, we are on the hospital, Thursday night and then into a daughter's born in the early hours. And there we are Friday still, of course, just barely in recovery. And instead of being focused present on that clearly essential moment, I'm feeling pulled in, you know, I've got my laptop open. I'm trying to, how do I navigate all the different?

competing demands on my time, all the options, all the choices. And to my shame, I go to the meeting. And I remember even after the meeting, as we're driving back, my boss said, look, you know, the client will respect you for the choice you just made. And the look on their faces, I don't remember evincing that sort of confidence. But even if that was right, it was clear to me, in hindsight, that I'd made a fool's bargain, that I'd violated something more essential for something far less essential. And what I learned from all of that was a simple lesson, which was if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. And so I think that's true for a lot of people today. And whether it's just because you're in a Zoom, eat, sleep, repeat,

type of model where you're at a groundhog day and everything's the same. And you just got all this digital distraction and incoming meetings. And, you know, that would be maybe the present circumstance version of this. But in the end, you've got to take control of the prioritization of your life. This is what, this is one of the key stories behind why I wrote essentialism. So what are some symptoms that someone could recognize when they're not in control of prioritizing their own life. Yeah. I mean, I think somebody could just simply ask, look, have you ever felt stretched too thin at work

or at home, which, of course, now is often the same thing? Have you ever felt busy but not productive? Have you ever felt like someone was constantly hijacking your day with their agenda? Those to me are questions that people can ask to quickly ascertain whether they are in charge of it or whether other people are in charge of their life. Yeah, that's really good. It makes me think about in a business, when you first start, like let's take my business, for example, I'm a real estate broker.

Your goal in the beginning is I got to find clients. You just run around trying to find as many of them as you can. Then you get a couple clients and now you have to service all of these clients. You have a million different tasks, maybe not a million, but many different tasks. that you're doing for them. And at a certain point, you lose control of your own schedule and your own life because your phone is ringing and demands are coming in and you're trying to keep up with this crazy monster that you built.

And at that point, you start desperately looking for help. How do I get someone to plug in to help me with some of these tasks so I can step out? And the game of what you're trying to accomplish is exactly what you're talking about is how do I replace myself with the tasks that need to be done that are not essential to growing the business. And the better that you do that, the faster your business grows, the happier your clients are, the worse you are at that, the slower your progress is and the more unhappy you are. Would that be a fair assessment of kind of how this works in the world of business? Yeah, I love that description. And there's just two additional cautions I'd put on that,

which is the first is to be careful as you get into that transition mode, is you're trying to shift, about to shift the gear, is to not delegate what should not be done at all. So sometimes there's a risk. I remember talking to a small business owner, you know, sort of six, seven people in the business or something. And then for a variety of reasons, they reduced it down to a couple of people again. And their comment to me was like, what was everyone doing?

They didn't know what value people had been created. They were all busy doing something. But when they removed four or five people from the equation, nothing changed. So there's a caution in that, which is be careful that you, as you, as you scale, you aren't just giving away tasks that could be just eliminated altogether. That's the first thing. And I think that the second cautionary tale is just to do with hiring so carefully.

It's another essentialist principle, right? It's less but better. It's to me, the principle that I came across, it sounds a bit harsh when you first hear it, but I'm not sure that it is. And it's higher, slow, fire, fast. And so it's, it's yes, scale, but don't scale as a non-essentialist with scale. Oh, I've got all these people and all this stuff. And I'm just going to expand it, expand it. And that's just like the fastest way to die. Growth is one of the fastest way to die in my experience. Now, of course you want growth. Of course you want expansion. So it's all about how do you do it in a disciplined way. How do you do it in a way that's,

that you can be around for a long time and you aren't just part of a sort of a whiplash, boom and bust approach. And I think real estate is actually is especially vulnerable to this. I mean, I lived in Arizona in the time, you know, in 2007, eight right before the, five, six, seven, eight, where everybody is giving up careers to be in real estate. Everybody.

Everybody. It was the weirdest sensation. no matter how effective they already were in their careers, how competent they were, how everyone's got a house here and a house there and they're flipping this and they're flipping this and they're flipping that. And it was such a bubble. And so it's how to be careful that you don't either get a victim of your own bubble that you get too big, too fast, or then, you know, the bigger challenges, I think it even is when the whole whole market It starts to, our whole industry starts to take on a certain set of norms.

And you expand just because everybody else is infomer is driving you and fear is driving you and greed is driving you instead of what is actually the essential next thing to do. And my wife, who's a better essentialist than I am, saved me from that literally in Arizona. I was about to buy another, it is a totally unnecessary house. I just loved it. I just go great. And I got almost, I got, as it were, to the altar on that one. And then I just was like, did not feel good about it and didn't do it. This was right before the bust.

And her feeling the whole time was like, we just don't need to do this. You know, just not needed. She wasn't caught up in the furor of it all. And that's really what an essentialist can do is, is let's not worry about what everybody else is doing. I'm going to have my own strategy, the thing that makes sense, the thing that's working, and be careful and disciplined in that way. So I say disciplined expansion and growth is the way to actually break through to next level.

You know, and it's that word you've used a couple times that it's on the cover of the book, right? The disciplined pursuit of less. So can we talk about what did you mean when you say discipline? Like, why did you choose that word? And what does that mean in terms of essentialism? Well, I've mentioned the alternative just briefly, but the undisciplined pursuit of more is the thing that otherwise successful people, teams and companies have to be careful of. It's that success cannot be properly trusted. I said differently, you know, success is a very poor teacher. And that's Bill Gates who said

that. And I love that he said it. And I love that he's credible in being able to express that, that you've got to not get caught up in the hype of success and opportunities, because then you over-extend yourself and you do too many things. you take on too much stuff and then and it starts to blow up. The disciplined pursuit of less is the antidote. Everybody just about uses the strategy of the disciplined pursuit of less in a calamity. Right. Like just about everybody in the real estate industry was an essentialist the day after the bubble burst.

Right now, suddenly, oh, no, no, well, we've got to be careful about where our expenditures go. We've got to be careful what we invest in. We're going to be careful. And we're going to, I mean, everybody's an involuntary essentialist when everything's burning, when the house is burning, when the industry is burning and so on. But that's the most expensive time to start to be an essentialist. What you want to be able to do is to do it when other people are all going crazy. And so, I mean, give you an example, a tech and example, you've got HP, Hewlett Packard,

is one of the founders of HP said, that a successful venture is more likely to die of indigestion than starvation. And so he understood as he was building this company that he wanted to last for 100 years, he just waited, we've got to do it carefully and so on. But then those two founders left the company over a generation. It became, for HP, the problem he had predicted is exactly the biggest problem for them. They started investing in everything. They're just going in all these different too many directions.

they came out, for example, at one time with a touchscreen interface laptop, basically. It was really beautiful. It was done really well. It was designed really well. Everything about it was great. But the problem is that that product came and went. And even to this day, people in HP don't all know that it existed. So you launch a major product or at least something that could be really big in the marketplace. And people inside your own company don't even know you launched it. That is a fundamental example of like, indigestion rather than starvation. You just did too many things. And that's just one illustration. And I'm contrasting that now to Apple that has shown a much more disciplined pursuit of decision making. And one of the really clever stories, insightful stories about their culture and mode of decision

making is that they were working on the iPad. So the equivalent product is the one I just mentioned, to HP. And as they were working on it, they're making lots of progress. They've put lots of energy into it. And then they decide, hold on, really, there's a phone market. And now we've got the phone market and we've got this iPad possibility. You're not putting product, not markets, just products. And what they did is they didn't do what I think most companies would do with the resources that they had. Well, we'll just do both. They paused on one and they said, okay, we're not going to do the iPad, we're going to do the iPhone. If we do the iPhone first, maybe we'll end up with both markets. If we try to do both at the same time, we may lose both.

And so a very similar time as HP comes out and loses this product, Apple's choosing not to do it yet, do the iPhone, and then later got the iPad market. That's a case study contrast in what it is to be undisciplined in your decision making. Well, I'll just do both. I'll do everything. and a disciplined pursuit where you're saying, which is the trade-off I need to make in order to get to the results I really want down the road. So this is really good and really applicable to a lot of people listen to this show right now

who, again, our audience is largely real estate investors, right? Or they want to invest in real estate. They want to be that guy back in 08 that can quit their job and flip houses or whatever, buy rental properties, whatever. But the problem is, and this applies to every business. In the beginning, people don't know what that line is, right? They don't know what the, they don't know that, you know, the iPhone is better to pursue than the iPad necessarily because they're not established yet. So how do you recommend or how do you balance the idea of when you're just beginning something, the idea of being open to lots of things versus being focused? How do you balance that? Yeah. So I think, I think this is, this is what I would say in the early days of any venture. So there are these three principles I've mentioned, but let me mention them again. Explore what's essential, eliminate what's not and execute by making it as easy as possible.

So I think in the early stage of any venture, you just flip the order. You explore, execute, eliminate you. So you're exploring is like you're setting a hypothesis. You're saying, well, what could be the essential way? And I think the primary way you do that is actually by just asking people, learning from people, and be admitting as fast as you can, your ignorance. not pretending you know anything just telling people i know nothing about this can you tell me everything that you know about this can you assume i know nothing and go and just keep on being in that state so you're

you're accelerated you're learning then you are quickly executing you're going to try something out yeah small bet fast then you eliminate also fast so you're you're making the cycle as small as possible in the early stages. You're reversing that order, as I just mentioned. And you're just in this rapid learning process. This isn't real estate, and obviously it is different in kind. But I've, I've, like, spent a day skiing in my life. And I just decided, okay, I'm going to set up a ski trip for our family. And we're going to do some learning. We're going to do this. And so I've been on the phone over the last week talking to different people that every person I talk to, I just give that speech to them, right? I know nothing. Everything you know and everything you think I know, I don't know.

So just tell me everything. And if I hadn't done that, my learning would have been so much slower. I would have learned the hard, expensive way. I'd have bought the ski passes directly instead of getting the icon passes, which I didn't even, I didn't have known about that. Anyone who knows anything about skiing knows about this, but I didn't. And so, So you've just got to keep on admitting your ignorance so that you can learn really quickly. If you pretend to know and act upon that pretension, you're going to make expensive mistakes. And maybe you just kill your whole opportunity. So that's my, that's what I would say.

Yeah, that's really good. Yeah, admitting your ignorance. I really like that. That's one of those quotes like, like, I want to like blow up on a sign and put on my wall. Like just remind myself like, oh, even like, hey, I'm successful in a lot of areas right now. like, but there's a whole lot of areas I'm not successful in. And even the ones that I think I'm successful at, it's only because I'm comparing myself to somebody who's not as successful, not as far down the path. So in reality, the more we can do that, right, the more we

have that attitude. I just had, um, I've got to know Arianna Huffington over a period of time. And, and we were, she was one of the first people I had on the, on the, on the Watts Essential podcast. And, and it was still in the midst of COVID. So I definitely did not know anything about podcasting. I partnered with a company Willhouse to do this and then suddenly COVID happens. And I mean, I'm literally using the worst equipment. I know nothing about this. It's definitely like a starting from scratch thing. And when I called her to record her that day, she just admitted ignorance instantly because she was also in a similar situation, if though she has like a successful podcast and so on, she was.

not used to doing any of that from home. And so she just was like, oh, hell, listen, I'll just learn from the best, which, of course, wasn't me. But the fact that she says it that way implies something really positive that she's not, she's not going to pretend to know something that she doesn't know. You just ask the obvious question, ask the dumb question, ask, just keep asking. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you can learn, you can, I think you can 10x your learning, speed, your capacity, not by being more intelligent, but by being more honest about your ignorance. Yeah, it's really good.

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let's say you grew up without any food, gluttony would be a much bigger struggle for you once you get around, there's food everywhere. Because you're in this scarcity mindset of if I don't eat it now, maybe it won't be there tomorrow. And like you mentioned, the problem becomes indigestion, not starvation. So having studied this, do you have any advice for people who maybe struggle with fear of missing out or FOMO? It's extra hard for them to say, no, I will not take that opportunity. because I have faith that if I say no to the wrong things, the right thing will come. Oh, yeah.

I mean, there's two things that you make me think of. The first is just every time you mention FOMO now, anytime anyone says that to me, I just had Patrick McGinnis on the show, and he's the person who came up with the term FOMO. So that's like a pretty good mic drop moment right there anyway, right? He's the first person to publish that term online, and now it's in the dictionary. But he, I mean, he had some really great insight about FOMO and also a similar thing, which is phobo, which is, you know, the fear of better options, where you're always looking for something that could be better than one you have and you're worried that somebody

else has that option. And so you're just in this endless unhappiness cycle, because something better exists in, you know, in the world. And it probably does, but you don't want to have to spend your whole life in indecision or in, you know, chasing everything. So anyway, that's sort of my FOMO thing. Your question is more subtle, though, if I understood it right, which is just if somebody knows hunger, if somebody, and that literal hunger, I think you said, specifically said, but also just other kinds of hunger where you're just, there wasn't money growing up. Other people seem to be able to go off and do things. Other people could have new shoes, new cool in England trainers, that creates a hunger in you. And I know that hunger. So I know what you're talking about.

And I think it's a really positive thing in that it gets you up. I mean, I started my first business when I was 10 years old washing cars because I was hungry that I did not want to not be able to get those things or do things that I wanted to try and do or go to where I wanted to try to go to. So it's a very positive trait, helpful, but it makes a good servant and not a, and like a poor master. Yes. It outlives its usefulness. You've got to have something else to guide you. Now, I was talking to Steve Harvey about this because he read essentialism and he just, he blogged about it. That's how I even know about it, that it changed his life, which I It was great. And we talked a few times about this. But one of the things he told me is that

he hadn't taken a break. He hadn't taken a summer off since he was 16 years old. And he was 60 when he was telling me this story. Not one summer off. He just worked a whole time flat out, nonstop. And that's how he came to essentialism. As somebody said to him, you know, like you're the busiest person I've ever met. You've got to do something different. And they got their assistant to go buy that book over lunch, give it to him before the end of the day. And he read it that night. And that's what he was doing. He's running. You know, that hunger, you've got to have it serve you. And so, I'm trying to think really about how do you get out of it. I'm trying to work out whether I'm out of it. Well, that's exactly why I ask the question, because as you're

talking, I'm thinking, man, he is talking, he is speaking to the challenge of my life right now. Yeah. is how can I get better at saying no so that I can focus on what my business is really need or what my life really needs. But there's always an obstacle. There's a guilt I feel that if I tell this person, no, that I'm a bad person because I didn't, you know, that was my friend from when I was in sixth grade. Yeah. They're not really serving me now. They're not essential, but it feels wrong at times. Or, you know, when I was a kid, I didn't really feel like anyone was paying a whole lot of attention of what I was doing. I was just desperate for some older man to see me and say, I see something in that kid. I'm going to take him under my wing and no one did. I never felt like I really got opportunity.

So when I got into a position as a man where there was so much opportunity that I couldn't say yes to all of it, I was always fighting this internal struggle to think, oh, if I don't say yes, it might not be there tomorrow. But the catch 22 is that that then prohibits me from actually being successful because I'm trying to download 12 movies on my laptop at the same time and none of them are getting done. So I find myself resonating so strongly with what you're recommending. And I was wondering if in your experience studying this, if you've come across certain traits or a way of looking at it that helps somebody who's in my position where they think I'm hungry, I have to get it all. But that hunger is also then becoming an obstacle to their success.

Yeah, you know, something that occurs to me is that really you might be at a whole on to the drive and the hunger, but it's changing the mindset. The non-essentialist believes that almost everything is essential. And so that the answer to meeting that hunger is eating more, right? It's saying yes to everything. They're trying to satiate a hunger through a strategy because they see it a certain way. And I think the essentialist is just a higher level mindset where you realize not everything is of equal value. In fact, it's incredibly disproportionate that a few things are incredibly valuable and essential and most of the other stuff is non-essential.

I mean, I see it like almost opposite to how a non-essentialist sees it. Non-essentialist thinks everything is essential and essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential. And so as you start to adopt that mindset, keep the hunger, but apply a new mindset, a new strategy, what are the few things that are really going to help me make the highest contribution in my business, but also I sense in your just general sense of life mission to make a difference to people. You've got to be selective. You have to make tradeoffs.

And here's why, because you can't not make tradeoffs. So when I say you have to make tradeoffs, all I'm saying is be conscious yourself and intentional about it because otherwise other people will make the tradeoffs for you. Other circumstances will make it for you. And by other people, I don't mean your sixth grade friend, although that could be true. I mean some superpowered executive team in Silicon Valley who is hijacking your day 20 times a day with notifications on your phone to get you to be on that social media platform or on a, it's. PN or whatever the device of the app of choice is. I mean, these people are spending hundreds of billions of dollars collectively to hijack your day. So we don't have to go to the highest guilt tradeoff first. There's lower hanging fruit than that. And we can start with like, what are

the non-essential stuff in my life that I know I'm over investing in? That's really good. I start there. Like what comes to mind when you say that now, David, we're going going deep now. Oh yeah, Brandon, you're saying TikTok. Is that true for you? Yeah. Really? I have to uninstall it from my phone. And then a week later, I'll reinstall it because I'm bored.

And then I have to uninstall it because it just kills me. It sucks me in. I don't make videos. I just like, it sucks you in. You're right. Of course, it's addictive. Of course. It's very addicting.

And TikTok has been built upon the learned addictiveness of the other platforms that came before them. So they're just smarter addiction than the one before. Agreed. And so. And it's going to be like this for here on out because the learning capacity of AI is so much more advanced than our learning capacity that we are going to have not just addictions in our lives like with always has been. I mean, these are personalized addictions. These are exactly what you go on YouTube, because it's learning from the last thing you went, it just serves you up more and more of exactly what it is you're into right now.

So I think this is why it's become so urgent to take responsibility for prioritization. It's like I've got to take control, I've got to take back control of my life. You know, two quick thoughts come to mind. First of all, you said earlier about prioritization. And I remember having that circled in the book as well. If you don't prioritize your life, somebody else will prioritize it for you. So one thing that I do, and maybe I got this from your book, maybe I've been doing it longer than that.

I'm not sure. but every time somebody asked me to do a commitment now of some kind. There's two things I do. One, I know I took from the book, which is the buffer zone, adding the buffer to, you know, in between. But the second thing I do is I always, I actually phrase it like this. If I say yes to that, it's going to be robbing time from my wife and my two kids. I like literally in my head, I say that.

Like, I love doing the podcast. I love doing other people's podcasts. But I have dramatically slowed down because if I'm out here doing a pot right now, like you two are robin time. from my kids and met me, you know, my wife, right? And now that's okay. We make that trade off, but I made that trade off. I didn't let somebody else make the tradeoff for me. So that's just one little, I guess, thing that I do. And when I say the buffer zone, I just mean like I, I add in space in between me saying yes to stuff. I had in space between committing to things.

I just try to add that zone in there. So I'm not sucked into the moment. But anything you want to add on those two things? Well, I like what you're doing because you're, you're restoring reality to your mindset. Right. When we have limited mindset, sets when we think we can say yes to something without having an impact, without a saying no to something else, we're just in a great big con. We've been conned. We've been sold a bill of goods and we're buying it. Non-essentialism only has one real defect and that it's a, that's that it's a lie. The idea that you can do everything for everyone at all times and then be, that will lead to success. everything about it is not right.

Everything about that equation isn't valid. You cannot do everything for everyone. And so your attempt to do it will not produce the outcome. It's promising. It will not live up to what's promised on the packaging. So you saying to yourself when the request comes in, and I want to again emphasize, it's not just when the request comes in,

but when the TikTok comes in, you know, it's, you know, when somebody emails you, okay, that's one thing. Oh, can you help me? with something. Okay. But then when the TikTok notification comes in, use that same sentence in that situation. If I watch TikTok, I am taking time away from my wife and children because that's exactly what's happening. And so I really try to encourage people to do, and we could do it right now, if you're interested. Do you want to do a little intervention? Should we do a live intervention? Let's do it right now. Okay. So here we go. So Brandon, I want you to tell me what is something that's

essential for you right now, highly important that you're underinvesting in. First thought. Go, you've already had it. Okay, I was going to say, my daughter is ballet. I should be more involved with her. Okay. And why does it matter to you so much? Because I will never get that time back, and I'll regret that. Yeah. Why? Why will you regret it? I will regret it because, I mean, at the end of my life, when I look back, I'm never going to, I don't know if it's answer the question, but I'm never going to say, I wish I would have worked more. Never going to say I wish I would have even surfed more or walked more. I'm going to say, I wish I would have spent more time with my family because that's number one. You're worried that at the end of your life, this will be like actual life regret if you don't spend this time now with your daughter.

Yeah. Why? Why will that be something that you would regret in that moment? I would say because I value being a good father above almost everything else in my life. Like that is that that's like value number one. It's really close to your highest value. It's up there in your very top tier of what matters. Why is it so important? Why is it one of your top values?

I mean, part of it is because when I was a kid, I suppose you could say, because my dad's awesome, but my dad worked a lot of hours. And so I, like, one of the biggest things I longed for as a kid was for my dad to be around more. But he just worked 80 hours a week. And so I guess I think I don't want to be that way with my kids. And so therefore, that's my value. The absence of that for you left some pain for you. Yeah. Yeah.

What would success look like for you in this area? with when you say ballet, what does it mean? Is it, are you talking about talking once a day with her, asking how it's going, checking it once a week? Is it going to something with her? Like, what would the adjustment be concretely? Yeah, I'd say it's probably going with her more often. I mean, maybe once every other month now going with her. Okay. So you're at once every other month, what would it, what would success be for you? I don't mean perfect. Just what's, what's, what's, Solid progress for you. I'll say every other month probably.

I'm sorry, every other week. Every other week, right? So you're doing it once every other month. You're doing it once every like eight weeks. You want to be doing every two weeks. How long does it take when you go? An hour. So you're looking for an additional three hours.

Yeah. Over a two month period, right? Yeah. You're looking for three more hours every, over every two months, correct? Three more hours every two weeks to do it. Okay. tell me

non-essential stuff that you're over-investing in you mentioned TikTok right off the bat before how much time are you spending doing TikTok? The clock is

talking that much yeah nobody nobody including you believes that yeah I'm going to say

I'll go like a week without it at all because I'll uninstall it then I'll be like 20 minutes a day anyone who's installing an app from their phone

has a problem let's go Let's go 30 minutes a day. So that's three to four hours a week where I'm probably aimlessly scrolling either TikTok or Instagram. Could it be more than 30 minutes a day? I don't. It could. It could be, but I don't think so.

I'm probably afraid to look on my phone. Yeah, I mean, there is a way to tell. Don't worry. I don't need to. Okay. I can pull it up, but, you know. All right, going to pull up. You just offer them now.

Now let's pull it up. All right. Let's pull it up right now. All right, I'm pulling it up. All right. So screen time. Let's go last week. We'll go last week because I think it was on there the whole week.

Daily average. For my whole phone, my daily average is only two hours and 16 minutes. It's about the lowest it's been in a while. Oh, but last week was much higher. All right. Okay, it wasn't terrible. It wasn't terrible. Last week, total time on TikTok was an hour and two minutes.

So that's not terrible for last week. Instagram was three hours and 21 minutes. So maybe I'm misjudging what I'm spending my time doing. Okay. So there we have four hours. Yep. But actually, you're only looking for, you're only looking for an hour. Is there any, what is the benefit?

Like, when you look at those two things, do you find yourself going, you know, but I like TikTok. It's good for me. It de stresses me. So I do want a bit of that in my life. No, it actually makes me, it makes, it makes, be angry. Most of the time, most of the time it makes you, I get irritated after, after Instagram the same way, especially with like a lot of the last few months of politics. It's been a,

so you're telling me that not only is it unimportant, it is, it's actually negative. Yeah. Yeah. So you could find, if we could find a way to make a trade off between Instagram, TikTok, you would have found, I mean, vastly more time than you need to be. have to make this time with your daughter. Yeah, dramatically. Is it a trade-off that you would like to make? Or inside are you like, you know what, Greg, I want my vices. I just want this.

No, it is a trade-off I am very happy to make. So that's like step one and two. We haven't got to step three yet. That's what we need to do. Step one is what's essential that you're underinvesting. And step two is what's non-essential you're over-investing. So that's the explore and the eliminate. right now we know what the changes we want to make so you move into execution and what people

normally do when they come to execution when they normally think of the word discipline they're thinking make a decision and force it yeah and uh and do this i'm gonna do this willpower will power will power and and i do believe in the power of decision making i mean you can make a choice i am confident that you could make a choice to go i'm i am off this and i'm never going on TikTok again. People can make those choices. So I'm not trying to diminish that to zero. But what I think is also important is stacking the decks in your favor. Because as we mentioned before, right, TikTok and Instagram are literally high hundreds of people, thousands of people now who are targeting systems that target you personally, uniquely. And they are coming

after you all the time and in every possible way that they can come up with. through other social pressure. Other people mentioned it. Oh, yeah, I've been on TikTok. Did you see this thing? And now you're pulled back into it. Now you're curious again. Now you get sucked in.

So they are creating huge webs to try and pull you in. So that's the current system. Now we want to try to at least create some system to weigh it back in your favor. So I'm going to put this over to David for a second. So David, what can Brandon do to make this easy or at least easier to make the tradeoff we've just described. I think he could make a rule that he only looks at TikTok if he's with his family. So maybe Rosie or Wilder has to be with him when he's looking at it.

And as long as their intention is there, he can do it. But when they get bored with it, he's going to naturally put it away and go do something else. He could also schedule some time in his day for that, like, whatever you want to do to recharge your brain. I thought you made a really good point, Greg, that there sometimes is some value to what we may call mindless scrolling or whatever because it's like a recharge. You can't just focus on business all the time. You can't just lift weights all day. You have to regroup. And sometimes after I just

watch YouTube for two hours, I'm in a much better mood and I'm way more likely to go on the forum of bigger pockets and communicate with people because I'm happy and I'm charged up. So he could look at if I do this, it's for the purpose of kind of de-stressing so I can be a better, more present parent to the things that matter more and only using it for that purpose. Well, what about this? Let's go, let's go a little more extreme with you, Brandon. What if you just give the password to David? The password to open up different apps? Like, put on the app. TikTok and Instagram. And only he has the, only he has the password. I could definitely do that. this is literally based on experience with somebody that I was coaching who had who had I mean

you based the way you said that you were like no way I'm going to do that the body language and tone did not support an action but I worked with somebody who was I like the idea who was on Instagram 14 to 18 hours a week and so he had a part-time job being on Instagram just scrolling you know this this doom scrolling and and so and so what he did is he gave he you He gave his password to someone else. And all through the week, he couldn't access it. He could only access it, I think, maybe on the weekends or something like that. And maybe that's how it would be for you.

So you're already self-policing it right now. But maybe you just go, these tools are too powerful for me. I don't want to use up my precious discipline managing this and having this battle. I'm just going to give it to somebody else. So they are managing this for me. They just take care of it. It's gone. I don't have to think about it anymore. Brandon, are you up for the challenge? I'm up for the challenge. Would you give it up for two months? Up entirely or up for like unscheduled time. Yeah, that was amazing. Brandon, you, the fear of God and you as you said that. You're like,

what are we really committing to here? He's going to start talking like Gallum from Lord of the Rings. I have my precious. TikTok, I would say, yes, I could give that up for two months. No problem. Instagram would be much more difficult to give up. We're going to start with TikTok because that was the one that you first mention. Even though your commitment to Instagram is much greater, I can tell. The hours and hours are all there and the addiction is higher.

But still, we're to start with TikTok because you're only looking for three hours extra in a two-month period. If you give up TikTok and you reclaim the time to be able to spend, doing this with your daughter. Now, that's not the end thing. So are you willing to give your password up to TikTok to David for two months? Yes. Okay, so we're way closer to your goal now. David is going to be your accountability partner. He's going to help keep you to this. Everybody listening to this, of course, you've got lots of social pressure on your side. You have positive peer pressure. And that's exactly what you want, because you want that to help you live by your values. When you get to the end of your life, you are going to be glad that you had social pressure

helping you to do what you say to me is essential. So, okay, what else can you do? Now, that got you sort of the time rebate, but that's not getting you the action to become effortless. We want this to be as easy as possible for you to actually fulfill your commitment to your daughter that you're making here. So what can you do to make it so that you will not break this commitment? I mean, I live by my calendar. So if it's on my calendar, I do it. Like, I'm a, I'm a slave to my calendar. So you can put it on the calendar. I can put it on the calendar. Okay. That's one. That's another step. What else can you do? I mean, I'll tell you one thing you could do. You can, you can talk to wife, yes? Yep. Wife, yes, Heather. You can talk to your wife, Heather. And you can, you can tell her about this,

this deal that you're making. Yeah. How would you, how would you explain that? I would tell Heather just that, hey, I want to help. I'm, I mean, the exact what we just talked to, that I realize. Put it into your own words. Yeah. Kids and family is number one priority. And I have not been living my values the way that I want to and the way that's going to make me feel the best. So, I'm going to be attending ballet at least every other week, if not every week, with Rosie from now on. Yeah. Do you think your wife's. to forget you mentioning that. She will not forget that. You say that once and that that's going to be another really important accountability partner to help you fulfill that. And I suspect,

assuming that she's the one that's going. She is. She will have to trade off with me every other week. She will trade off with you every other week and she'll be happy for that. And even though the first time you do it, you might be like, oh, don't garnet, Greg, essentialism. Where's my TikTok? talk. I think it's the kind of thing that as soon as you start doing it, you go, yeah, I'm where I want to be here. I want the advantage of being here. And essentialists embrace and love tradeoffs because it allows them to have strategic advantage. It means that you can have the benefits of all that ongoing relationship with your daughter that will build and build and build. And as someone who's just, I mean, my youngest is 11. I have four children. So now sort of basically all

teenagers. There's not one day I regret now, even now, so not end of life, having made specific, deliberate intentional tradeoffs, which I know you've made. I can tell you've made already, but watching them now, you know, we're like really good friends, all of us. We really enjoy being together. We have deep relationship when travel was a thing, you know, back in the old days. About 80% of the time I'd travel with one of my children. And we just have these amazing memories traveling all over the world together. And we didn't have to do that, but those investments have just created this goodness

that I think would have made it be so much harder if we hadn't done it. Okay. Still one more test for you here. So, or, you know, to help make the system work for you is,

I'm going to suggest a $100 challenge, which is that you put a $100 bill up on the fridge or up in the office, wherever, wherever it is that's helpful. But somewhere public, And that $100, you've got to decide what to do with it, but it's there if you don't fulfill the commitment. So if at the end of two months you haven't gone, you know, four times, then that $100 will be either.

These are some of the things I know of people that have done this. You could, and this is awful, but you could just rip it up. That could be your thing. If you don't do it, you have to rip up $100, they'll throw it away, right? That's just like so offensive to people. That's why it's helpful. Yep. Or you could say, okay, I'm going to give it to, you know,

and some people say, I'm going to give it to the political party I don't subscribe to so that give it to some other cause or just even give it away to some other thing. But either way, it sits there, it exists there as a perpetual reminder of the commitment that you're collectively making. Thoughts on that? You willing to take the $100 challenge? Here's what I'm going to do, Greg. I'm going to send you $100 because I really don't want to.

ought to send you $100. If I go, that's what I should do from now on. From now on, you could make a lot of money. From now on, I'm going to have the $100 challenge become to me. Yep. That's funny. So actually, there's an app. There's an app out there. I think it's called Stick.

St.I. Yeah, yeah, you take the money and like they hold it for you and then you have an accountability partner. I did that a couple years ago. And it worked. I lost like 20 pounds. It was a challenge with a buddy of mine. I thought you're going to be.

I lost $20 just like that. No, no. we put like a thousand bucks up on me and this buddy about who could lose like, I don't know, maybe it was 15 pounds, something like that. This is, yeah, several years ago now. But yeah, it worked. We both lost the weight we wanted, both got our money back and didn't have to go send it to whoever it was at the time. Yeah, yeah. So, so, so I love that you had experience with it. That's the process. We've just gone through, the explore, a limit to execute. It doesn't have to be that you start with the hardest tradeoffs. The hardest tradeoffs are the ones where you're choosing

but something really essential and something else that's important or something else that's somewhat important. I mean, that's more painful. But if you start with the total trivia, the non-essential, the bottom 10% of stuff on the one hand and the top 10% on the other, you have like no brain of tradeoffs. And that's essentialism like 101. That's a place to start. And so you're saying no to the stuff that just doesn't, shouldn't even be in your life at all. And so that's what we just did. That's awesome, man. Yeah, I appreciate that. I had not thought about it from that perspective because, I mean, even just like yesterday,

I had a long conversation with one of my buddies about how I really want to launch another podcast. I've got another podcast idea. I want to launch another show. But I'm already doing two a week of this one. And I'm like, oh, man, a third pod. That's another hour a week. I was like, I just don't have time for another hour a week. But the truth is what we just talked about, like, what's more essential an hour of TikTok

or launch in another podcast that'll reach another quarter million people a week? Like, now that sounds like a pretty stupid thing to say I don't have time for another podcast. Well, and just building on that, right, you say Instagram, which one is more valuable to you? Now, you may again have some value on Instagram. I get that there could be things that you're learning from there, from your audience. You could be learning from other people. But people know when they pass the point of usefulness, where they're past the point of this actually added value. And I think that happens pretty fast.

You know, like, I think if you're, if you're past sort of five minutes, you're probably past the point of real value addition. And so maybe that's where you can get the time you need to be able to do this second podcast. Well, it's funny. It's funny. If I were to use that, you know, my argument, my head wants to go to is, well, I use, I use Instagram for work. You know, I reach a lot of people that way. It's good for me. But I'm reminded of Tim Ferriss, you know, Tim Ferriss for our work week. He has a section for our work week where he says, if there was a gun to your head and you could only work four hours a week, what would you get done? And I like that question because it's kind of an essentialist type of question, right? It's like, what are the essential things? It kind of helps you prioritize. But when I think about like, okay, fine, if Instagram is important for my life and for my business

and I raise a lot of money for my real estate fund on Instagram, great. If I had five minutes a day for Instagram, what do I got to do? And that's a much easier question. I mean, actually, oh, I guess I would post something. I'd probably comment on a number of people's stuff. I'd check if anything important came in the DMs and then I'd log off. I could do that in five minutes. I don't need 30 minutes a day. Or you'd get somebody else managing it. Or I'd get somebody else to manage it for me.

Exactly. Somebody else can manage it. And if you just use just one of the social media platforms, you know, the management systems, you never have to go on there and scroll pointlessly. You can still post. You can still respond. I mean, the system I use, you can still write in response to people on there and never have to get dragged into the pool of distraction that exists on there.

Or you can just never do the second podcast. Yeah, yeah, if that's not. Right. Or you can not see your kids and family. Like my point is you can continue to make the tradeoff you're making. That's great. If that works for you, and this is what I always say, it sounds like I'm picking on you and I'm not, I'm just saying just in general, if non-essentialism is working for people,

by all means, continue with it. If people are happy with the way they're spending their time and energy, if they feel like their life is in its current system, it's producing great relationships with the people who matter most, that's producing great overall mental, emotional, physical, spiritual health, and it's helping them to make a great contribution out there and even in a way that's increasing over time, the positivity they make out into the world, keep doing it. But on the basis that non-essentialism doesn't deliver what it promises on the basis that it actually just introduces waste of time that actually stresses us out well let's consider an alternative path

an alternative strategy that's like perfect timing that was good timing my my daughter rosy just walked in hey babe well on that note no you should explain to rosy right now what you're going to do who who hey rosy guess is going to start coming to ballet with you more often who Uncle David. Oh, me. Okay. She whispers. Yeah, I'm going to start coming to ballet with you more often. Okay. Is that exciting? Yeah, you like that. All right. Well, I'm going to make a tradeoff right now. We're going to kick you out of here, Greg. And I'm going to go play with my little girl for a little while. Greg, where can people find out more about you? I think that if they just go to essentialism.com, that's also a good place to start. Right now, they'll be able to sign up for the one minute Wednesday, which is a newsletter. that I just started. They can read it in one minute each week. So it's just nice and nice and concise, less but better. But also what is coming there are a few really cool things. A new paperback of Essentialism that people learn about a new academy that I'm going to be launching. All of that will start at the hub of Essentialism.com. So that's the one place if you're going to

go somewhere. That's awesome, man. Really, really appreciate it. It's been phenomenal. I knew it's going to be phenomenal, but it was even better than I thought. So really appreciate you coming on the show. anything you want to close with? I just want to thank you, Greg, for such a great interview. I mean, you not only shared the concept with us, but then you applied it to specifically something our listeners could benefit from. And then to get into Brandon's world, that's an awesome example that everyone can take and say,

like, how do I do this myself? And Brandon, thank you too for being so transparent with everything. We also did not plan for Rosie to show up like this. No, no. Perfect timing, though. It's awesome. It's awesome. Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, Greg. All right, Greg. Thank you very much. And that was our show with Greg McKeehan. Awesome, awesome episode. I knew it was going to be good. I've heard him on a few other podcasts over the years. And yeah, this was the best.

I mean, this was the best. I've heard him. It was awesome. Of course it's the best. You know, it's us. That's right. That's the best. Yeah.

As soon as he started talking, it just felt like everything he was saying was so applicable to my life. I knew this was going to be a really good episode. I'm hoping that everybody else heard it felt the same way. Well, let me ask you, how, how, have you, you applied essentialism? How have you struggled? I won't say fail. How have you struggled with essentialism? We'll start with those two questions. All right. So in my real estate investing business, I had a lot more success with this. And I don't know for sure, but my assumption would be because

I was investing long distance, it was much easier to get other people to do the non-essential parts that went into real estate investing. So I was never tempted to go fix the toilet or change the lock myself. I was tempted to go walk the property and rely on my gut. I turned everything into a system and found a person to do it because I literally wasn't present. So I think it kind of gave me an advantage into systemizing things. And my business grew because I just focused on finding the deals, putting them in contract and letting everyone else do the follow up, which was the essential part to being a real estate investor. Where I've struggled with this is in my real estate agent business. There's so many different things I could be doing every day. And I'm always,

tempted to jump in and bail out team members who are afraid to step forward or answer questions for clients that if I was, if I just gave it a day, they probably get the answer that they needed and they'd calm down. But it's so tempting when you see people that are highly emotional or scared that you want to go provide comfort to them. And I end up running around all day long, focusing on putting out little tiny fires where what I should be doing is looking for my next tire that will come in that will be the person that puts those fires out for me. or the next person that will be able to do the job the way that David does so that I can serve a more essential purpose or a higher purpose of helping more people become a homeowner, helping more people save money through real estate, training 10, 20, 30 of me to make a bigger impact than just me doing it. So when he started speaking about essentialism, I realized this is my every day when I get out of bed.

I'm going to work and I'm praying, help me to do this better. And then I'm failing in different ways throughout the day as I don't. And it just, it was so, so applicable to what I'm going through. And I realized what I did with my real estate investing, I did this well. With my real estate agent business, I have not done this well. And when I look at the difference between my experience and those two things, it's wildly different. Yeah, it's really good, man. You know, a lot of times we talk to real estate investors, up and coming ones, people who want to get into real estate and they say they don't have time for it. I hope that more than anything else for you guys that are listening to this show right now, that that practice that I went through at the end there with, talking about TikTok and, you know, my daughter's ballet. I hope that you realize, like, that applies to you as well, I'm sure, in some ways, is everything to trade off. Real estate investing does not take 40 hours a week. It doesn't take 30, doesn't take 20. It takes a few. Like, if you go work two hours a week on your real estate, you could start buying real estate like now. It doesn't take that much work. If you are focused on the essential

stuff, get a good real estate agent to hook you up with some leads that come in, and then you just go and run the numbers on them. It takes like 10 minutes to run the numbers. That's an essential task. Maybe like having a sit down meeting with a local real estate investor. That's a pretty essential task. Do that. But like there's not that much involved here. I go call up a bank, get pre-approved, submit some paperwork.

That kind of stuff doesn't take much time. So if you continually identify what is the essential task that I have to do next. I call it the most important next step. Always identify what that is in your real estate ambitions. And you're going to make dramatic and very quick strides towards your goals. if you just start thinking like an essentialist instead of like a non-essentialist. So I hope that's what you take away from this show and hopefully more. And of course, head to the show notes if you want to leave us some comments or questions.

Or if you're watching this on YouTube, you can put the comments in the YouTube section below that. But man, good stuff. Anything you want to leave us with David? Just make sure you take time to think because information like this can, it can trick you into thinking that you benefited from it, just hearing it, be like, whoa, that's really good. But then if you don't take the extent to apply it, it didn't help you. So don't like conferences, right? You go to conference and you're like, oh, there's so much good stuff. And you go home, you don't do anything.

Yes. But you were tricked into thinking that something good happened because you learned something new. So just don't fall prey to that temptation. Take some time to think about what you need to get out of your life. Take some time to think about what is essential. Calendar it. Tell somebody about it. Find some form of accountability because these goals are not going to meet themselves.

You're going to have to do something to get there and it's totally worth it when you do. That's all I'd say. Awesome, man. Well, keep it up. Keep an essentialist and look forward to having you back on the show again next week, David. Thanks, B. I appreciate it, man. And also, thank you for having the guts to just open up your whole life and let this guy pick it apart.

That's a lot harder to do in front of 300,000 people in one list than the audience might think so. Thanks for being a brave man. Thanks. That's why they call me Brandon the Brave. Well, now they're going to be calling you Brandon, no TikTok Turner. for David Green, signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small.

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