BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 432: From $0 to $1,000,000 in 5 Years: The 4 Steps to Gain Millionaire Net Worth with Brandon and David

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Everyone wants to be a millionaire, and if you’re listening to this episode, you probably want to be one as well! With so many online gurus trying to sell their secret to success, it can be hard to distinguish the real from the...not so real. On this episode, we’re lucky enough to have two millionaires with us! Brandon Turner and David Greene! Brandon and David have compiled a list of 4 traits that all millionaires possess, and if you can possess these traits too, you’ll be on your path to millions. These millionaire traits aren’t just exemplified in Brandon and David, these traits tend to be universally consistent across self-made millionaires. This episode will also touch on mastery and how you can not only achieve it, but refine it using the 4 stages of mastery. Stuck on a deal, don’t know where to go next in your career, thinking of jumping ship on a project? List down these 4 stages and see where you stand, you’ll be able to see what you need to do to go on to achieve greater mastery in whatever you’re interested in. Since it’s the start of the year, it’s a great time to look forward with not only hope, but a plan. Take your existing plan and see where these traits and stages fit into your life, where you’re lacking, and where you can do better. This is how you’ll achieve success and the coveted millionaire status. In This Episode We Cover: What sets apart millionaires from those chasing millions The 4 common traits of a millionaire Developing your crystal clear criteria for investing in real estate The importance of raising standards over time to achieve more Why tracking your personal AND business life can merge to benefit your entire life The 4 stages of mastery that will make you into a millionaire And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums Ramit Sethi Will Teach You to Be Rich! – BiggerPockets Money Podcast 73 BiggerPockets Money Podcast 127: Planning for the Unexpected: Being Financially Ready to Take Advantage of Opportunities with Ramit Sethi BiggerPockets Podcast 403: Developing a Millionaire’s Mindset and Overcoming Limiting Beliefs with Performance Coach Jason Drees BiggerPockets Calculators BiggerPockets Podcast 170: The Journey From Flipping Houses to Owning 1,470 Units with Andrew Cushman BiggerPockets Podcast 126: From 0 to 400+ Units Through Value-Add Investing with Brian Murray BiggerPockets Podcast 212: Buying a 115-Unit Apartment Complex for No Cash Out of Pocket with Brian Murray  Check the full show notes here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/show432 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 432. So decisiveness leads to the data that you usually need to make the right decision. And that's what Brandon and I are really, really getting at is you can't go wrong if you start moving. 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 is going on, everyone? It's Brent Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast. Happy New Year, David Green. How you doing, man? Welcome to the new year. Thank you very much. This is probably the best start I've ever had to a year since I started tracking it. I have a lot of momentum.

And I've been thinking quite a bit about what I want the next year to look like, and I've made up my mind. So I'm pretty clear on that. Now I just have to go get really good at doing it. go. Well, that brings us today's show because today's show is about how to do all those things and more. Specifically, David and I sat for a long time and we talked about what do we want the first episode of 2021 to be about? Because, you know, like this is always usually the most listened to episode of the entire year. People love the episode the first of the year. And we're like, how can we actually

like really give some good valuable content for real estate investors listen to this show today? And we brainstormed for a long time. We took a bunch of notes. We came up with a ton of ideas. and the result is today's episode. So I'm excited to dig into the kind of the concepts we got. Basically, like, these are four traits, and we really struggle with the word traits because they're not like something you're born with. It's not like you have a trait of being tall

or handsome if you're David. Like, the trade is like something that you develop, or it's a skill is the wrong word. Steps is maybe a better word, but you'll see what we're talking about when we get into it. But before we get there, let's get today's quick tip. David, what's today's quick tip? Today's quick tip is be consciously aware of raising your standards at anything you want to have a better

result in. Just something I've learned about human life is we all tend to say when something good comes my way, then I will give a better effort. It could be anything. But good things tend to come to people that have gone the other way. So if you're single and you don't want to be single, don't say, I will dress better when there's a special somebody in my life. Start dressing better right now.

Raise your standard in that area and watch what you'll attract. There you go. I love it. I have an uncomfortable question for you. If your rent collection drop to 80% next month, how long would your cash flow hold up? What about 70% for the next three months? Would your cash reserves cover it? I talk all the time about scenario planning.

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Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Let's get into today's episode. not an interview style episode. It is a, well, that's kind of a David and I interviewing each other in a way. We're talking and we're brainstorming ideas and concepts that have helped us become successful, things that we're currently working on to become more successful, things that we've seen other people become successful. And specifically, I'm going to throw out the word millionaire here. I'm going to throw that word into the conversation, Millionaire, because when we say millionaire, I don't literally mean you have $1 million net worth.

even though that is a goal for many people. When I say millionaire, what I'm referring to is like financial independence, financial freedom, that freedom from worry. And for most people, a million dollar net worth would get you pretty close to that if not over the limit there. So when I say millionaire, David, what comes to mind for you? Like, what are we talking about? Well, typically when I think of that word, I have a negative response to it.

I think about people that are, they think they're better than others. They're out of touch. They don't understand what it's like for the everyday person. they live a different life, maybe they're privileged. It's definitely not something that I would say in today's society is necessarily respected like it was at one point. Yeah. But today's show, we want to focus on the truth about becoming a millionaire, becoming

financially independence or successful or wealthy, whatever we want to call it. And specifically because this is a real estate podcast, we're going to talk about how this applies to real estate investors. That said, really, I think all four things we're talking about today that we are going to outline really could apply to anybody in any field. But we're going to make the examples about real estate investing today because that's what this show is. So let's first start by talking about what a millionaire is not. I thought maybe we'd start there, David.

So what is a millionaire not? When we're talking about that phrase today, what are some of the things that a millionaire is not? I would say millionaire is not a jerk. Okay? You can be wealthy financially. You could be, but you could also be a jerk and not be a millionaire. Exactly. Yes, exactly. They're not, it's not like once you hit a net worth of a million dollars or you hit success,

now you just turn into a jerk like a werewolf at midnight. I would say a millionaire is not someone who is better than other people or has more value than other people. That's another thing. I definitely don't think so. I don't think that a millionaire develops inherent value when they hit that number. And what I'm saying is they don't actually become a different kind of person. You stay the same person you were, regardless of your bank account.

Agreed. What are some things that you would say, Brandon, a millionaire is not? based on the people that I know and like for a little bit of context by the way everyone so just FYI so David and I are both millionaires we both have a net worth greater than a million dollars and we hang out with a lot of millionaires out here in Maui they're constantly people are coming to visit me

who have a million dollar net worth or greater we're part of several different like masterminds and tribes and groups that are made up of lot of millionaires and so this is not just us saying what a millionaire should be or shouldn't be this is like what we've see in the world associating with so many millionaires we've interviewed hundreds of millionaires on this podcast And so this is what we've seen.

So one thing that I've noticed over, like many times, many, I would say almost every one of the millionaires that I know did not start that way. They were not, they were not raised rich. They didn't start rich. Now, some people do start rich and they keep their money. Some people start rich and they lose all their money. But most of the millionaires, I know, started with a bunch of student loan debt, a bunch of credit card debt, didn't know what they were doing, trying to build something.

But they had some of the traits we're going to talk about today. So I would say number one, or I guess number three or four, whatever number you said. They are not born with it. I also say that they're not unnaturally gifted. Like, I know so many millionaires who don't have high IQs. They don't have some unnatural giftedness to focus where everyone else in the world is like trying to do 10 things at once. They're still sucked into Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat. They still have all the same weaknesses that everyone else has.

They just have the things we're going to talk about today. And then the last thing I have is they weren't just lucky. In almost every case, I don't know any, I don't know any lottery winners at all. I don't know anybody who got in just at the right time, at the right place on some business IPO and made tons of money. That's not actually as common as people might think. I think, and I'd let me get your thoughts on this. I think people like to assume that all millionaires were lucky because it takes the pressure off themselves to perform and to do the four things we're going to talk about today. What do you think on that?

Yes, that's a huge component of it. And if anyone's having a problem with this, I would challenge you by saying, would you have a problem with the principal brand is discussing. if it wasn't about money. If this was about fitness, how to have, what's a healthy body fat, like 10% or 12% something like that? Sure. I have no idea. I don't want to know what mine is, right?

Because the minute somebody would say, hey, this is how you have to have a 10% body fat. There is all these objections that come to mind if you're not super into fitness about how, well, of course, it must be nice to have time all day to do nothing but work out or whatever the case would be. It must be nice to have perfect genes where you can be able to do something like it. You have to understand that when we talk about being a millionaire, what we're talking about is being very good at something that matters to you, whether that's fitness, whether that's money. It could just be developing a great personality. It could be being a

great friend. It could be building a great nonprofit. You're not always tracking your success in those areas and money, but there are fitness millionaires, so to speak. So that's something that I like to just make sure we highlight because there's people out there that would be completely on board if someone was teaching them how to be more fit, but recoil at the thought of, oh, well, just because I don't have a million dollars, it doesn't mean that I don't matter. That's not what this is about. This is about people that have mastered certain traits that led to them having a lot of success. And because on this podcast, most of you listening want to have more success financially and you want to do it through real estate, we are going to share with you what we have learned those people

do and maybe even some stories about how we've seen this put in action. There we go. I love it. So with that said, let's jump into these four traits or the four steps or the four things that millioners all seem to have in common of the millionaires that we know and how you can apply those to your life starting now. And if I'm going to be. even make a bold claim here. I would say if you, if you accomplish these four things, you add these to your life, I would say barring some completely crazy, unfortunate series of events, which would be like, you know, a nuclear bomb goes off in your country and throws your guys into, you know, economic unheaval, whatever, barring anything like crazy. I believe anybody who accomplishes these

four things will become a millionaire in five years or less. I really believe that. Like five years or I believe if you really apply this stuff, you can become a millionaire. Maybe six or seven if you're a little bit slow at it. That's fine. But there's no chance at not becoming successful after following these four things. And they're pretty general in their titles. You're going to be like, yeah, I already know that. But then we're going to dive into each one and give you guys some specifics on how that applies

to you and how in 2021 and beyond you can implement this in your life so you can get that level of success as well. So without further ado, let's get into this thing. Number one, David, what do you got? Number one, millionaires are decisive. Now, I know, Brandon, you have some really good content to share on this that I literally watched in your life when we sat on your line one day and you just said, you know what, I'm sick of it. I'm just going to go to mobile home parks because I don't want to talk about it anymore. That led to open door capital.

So not to steal your shine. I know that's where you're going to go. What I want to say about this is that I have watched my own personality and other people's personalities become more decisive as we became more successful. So it was kind of like watching your muscles get bigger when you lift more weights. I would say that's how important being decisive is because I recognize the need to be decisive when I got into situations where I had more success and I wanted to get more than that. So this is incredibly important. If you're somebody who isn't decisive or you've struggled with decisiveness, it's very important

to take that on. And Brandon, why don't we talk a little bit about what it means to you to be decisive? Sure. Yeah. you know, I think so many people struggle with like what's the right choice. And you guys have heard me say this before on the podcast. I've told this analogy a number of times. And people think that there's like gold hidden on a beach somewhere.

And they're out there with a metal detector trying to find it. And they think that by not making a decision because they don't know the perfect answer for them, they don't know exactly what type of real estate to get into or exactly what market to get into. They don't really know those questions or how am I going to do this thing? They don't, they can't see the entire beach every hidden item. So now they're looking and they're, they're, thinking they're going to find some hidden gold. But the fact is, like, we are not at a beach looking for hidden gold.

We are artists. We are at a gigantic paint, like, easel. We have a blank canvas in front of us, and we have a bunch of paint. And you can paint whatever you want. And so once you realize that the world is a giant painting and you can paint whenever you want, it allows you to make those decisions that ultimately, they matter, but they don't matter as much as you might think. Like, people are like, well, I just don't know if I should house hacker or do a flip first.

Like, it doesn't really matter. Like, it's more important to be decisive and then do the rest of the three traits. There are other three traits that we're going to talk about today and go in on it. Because you could always correct course later. I mean, let's say you spent two years of your life working on one thing. You're like, well, that, you know, and you did everything we're going to talk about today. And it didn't get you to where you wanted to get to for some reason, which I think it would be almost impossible not to. But just in case, like, again, something civilization changes.

Okay, that was a couple years of your life. At least you dedicated towards something. There's this great quote from Mark Cuban who said, the great thing about entrepreneurship. is you only have to be right once. In other words, like, if you just go all in on something and really master these four things we're talking about today, you're going to get there. But it begins with decisiveness,

which means begins with making a commitment to, I'm doing this, and I've decided what I'm going to do. I'm going to go. Now, in real estate, one of the ways I encourage people to be decisive is something known as the crystal clear criteria, the CCC. This is a big component of my new book that's coming out later this year in 2021. It's going to be called a multifamily millionaire.

So I'm not selling it now or anything like that. But it's a big piece of that book. We talk about this crystal clear criteria. And that is to be crystal clear, be decisive. And I would give yourself on these five things, give yourself a week to decide and then no more time. Give yourself a deadline. So number one, location.

Where are you going to invest? Number two, what property type are you going to buy? Number three, what condition are you going to buy it in? Number four, what price range are you going to buy it in? Number five, what makes it a good deal? I call that profitability. What would make it a good deal? And I'll add number six here because this isn't just for multifamily or rental property

owners is what strategy are you going to employ? So those six things. So what strategy, the price range, the profitability, the condition, the location, and the property type. If you were decisive and you made your decision on that in your real estate journey, is there any doubt going forward that you're going to succeed? I have none. At least if you start there, you make a clear decision.

Now you can get people around you to help you. tell other people what you're looking at, they can find it for you. Now you can cater your marketing toward that thing. And now I'm hugging the mic. So, David, what do you think about? No, that was really good stuff. Here's the point I want to make. There are, in retrospect, some decisions that are better than other decisions, okay? Like the decision to get into it during the dot-com bust would have been a bad decision. So we acknowledge that, you know, there are certain paths that looking back will be better than others. Here's the point I want to make. I have never in my life ever met a human being that said, I really couldn't decide what to do. So I sat around waiting for the right choice to become

obvious and then a million dollars found me. Has never happened. What has happened is I know people that have said, I didn't know what to do. So I got a degree and became a CPA. As a CPA, I started to recognize my high net worth clients all owned real estate. I knew I wanted to own real estate, but I wasn't sure what to do. So I just went to a meet up. At a meetup, I sat next to a person that was to me and they invested in duplexes. So I started buying duplexes and I watched my net worth increase. Then I came across a person that buys multifamily and I knew, oh, multifamily is the perfect thing. So decisiveness leads to the data that you usually need to make the right decision. And that's what Brandon and I are really, really getting at is you can't go wrong if you start moving. You can maybe

go less right than if you picked a different path, but movement is what you need to get into. And that's a great segue into our second trait that we should cover, Brandon, if you'd like to to share what that is. That was a really good segue. But before we get there, there's one thing to just pop in my head. I want to make a quick, quick tip for everyone on decisiveness

and I'm going to move to the number two. And that is, sorry to take away your amazing transition there. And that is, decisiveness, you mentioned this in the muscle. It's a scale that you develop. So start practicing it on the small things.

What I mean by that is next time you go out to dinner, for example. Oh, so good. Right. Rather than sitting there going for 15 minutes, I'm not sure what the right meal is to eat. Just look down, give yourself 10 seconds to decide what you're going to eat for that meal.

I'm going to have this chicken right here and make the choice and go with it. Or as the guy named Ramit Sati, he's been on the Bigger Pockets Money podcast a couple times. Remed's a huge personal finance guru. He says, order both. He's like if every time you were indecisive about food, instead you just ordered both those things, you'd pay an extra couple hundred dollars a year in food, but you'd always know what the better food option was than when you were indecisive. I thought that was really good and I'm sure applies somewhat to other areas of life.

But anyway, the point being practice in small areas. So practice like, where do you want to go tonight on a date? You tell your wife or your husband. And it's out of know where do you want to go. You say, I propose we go to here and just make the decision. And people will be like, okay, because people follow people who are decisive. That's why like when I was like, I'm doing mobile home parks. All of a sudden, like, people followed me because I was just decisive.

People like that. And then I raised a bunch of money. I think we're raised over $20 million now or something like that in three funds that we're continuing. We're going up to $30 million raised here in the next few months. Like, open our capital is thriving. largely because I was decisive about what I was doing and how I was going to get there. And I didn't know exactly how I was going to get there.

But this is the point that my coach, Jason Jaree, my performance coach, Jason made a few weeks ago on the podcast or a few months ago now, he said, rather than trying to like plan and know exactly what you're doing, I think it was decide, commit, plan, was his order, right? Not plan, then commit, then decide what you're going to do. It's like, decide, like, decide and then commit to it and then make your plan. You'll figure it out as you go. But it's more important that you make the decision. So this is the final quote.

I'll say, you've heard it before. It is more important that you decide than what you decide. And if you just remember that, it's more important than that you make a decision than what decision you make. You're going to be well on your way towards becoming a millionaire through whatever means you want to become. Now, back to your transition. Number, we talked about once you're decisive and you start making good decisions,

then you make another good decision, you make another good one. That leads to a trait or a, and we struggled to find the, word for this. I don't even know what this would be. But the word that we put here that we came up with is momentum. Momentum is one of the most powerful forces. Maybe force is a good word. These are like four forces. I don't know. But momentum is one of the most powerful forces in the entire entire world. An example of that would be like a train. So if you imagine a train, the amount of work and effort and steam and whatever that it takes to get the train moving one mile an hour. It's a lot. It's a tremendous. It moves very slow. You can walk next to a train. You can walk next to a train.

You could walk, you know, my, like, great, great grandma in a wheelchair. She's not alive anymore. But if she was, she could, like, wheel next to a train when it's first starting, and she could, like, kick its butt in a race. Right? But then it gets going a little bit faster and a little faster and a little faster and a little faster and it builds up momentum. And so pretty soon, like, you know, the thing's going 80, 90, 100 miles an hour.

And there's no way a car could even catch up to the thing at some point. So that's the moment. And it uses less energy to bit there because it's just got this momentum. And I feel a ton of momentum in my life right now. And you might be thinking, well, sure, Brandon. I'm sure, David, you guys got a ton of momentum in your life. But the fact is, like, we built momentum from the beginning. Now, David, how do we do that?

I just talked for like an hour straight. No, dude, you got to talk about that more because honestly, this is to me the most important thing that I want people to understand for all of 2021. Is if you are having trouble making progress, it's because you don't have momentum. I would challenge almost anybody to come to me and say, David, I'm having trouble getting past this hurdle. I'd say, that's because you're crashing into it with two miles an hour of speed and a tricycle. If you had a train going 95 miles an hour, that obstacle would not be standing in your

path. And a lot of what you and I are even doing in our businesses right now, isn't so much planning the details of how we are going to execute what we have planned in the future. It is building the momentum. Then once we've got it, we can come up with the plan pretty easily. And when you have so much momentum, it does to be a great plan. Can you explain what you mean by momentum? Like, for the people like, we know what momentum means in the general world of like physics, but give an example of momentum for a real estate investor. Okay, so let's say you're a real estate investor. If you don't know how to analyze a deal and you cannot be decisive about which direction you

want to go in, you don't know what criteria you have, you don't know if it will even cash flow or not, you don't know what houses in that area are worth. If I bring you a deal, there's no way you can have a confident approach to telling me if you want to buy it or not, which means you can't be decisive. There's a lot of information you have to gather about the market, about real estate investing in general to build up momentum, to get to that. fork in the road to be able to burst through, is it yes or is it no. It's okay. So it's very hard to be able to move forward. When you know the market really well, you know the criteria, you know how long

houses are on the market, you have knowledge, you can make a decision pretty quickly. As you continue to make these decisions quickly, this is what happened for me in Florida. I was making decisions fast. Wholesalers and agents were coming to me and saying, hey, I got a deal before it hits the market. Do you want it? Because I would tell them yes or no in a three minute period of time. And if I bought it, I was going to buy it. I wasn't jerking them around. It became so much easier for me to get the best deals faster because I made decisions quicker. And then I was able to do that because I had all the pieces in place. I had a strong team. My contractor got bored to me very quickly. My home inspector got out there to see houses the next day. My lender responded to me right away. Why? Because I didn't

jerk them around. Because I had been consistent in doing deals with them. I had built a momentum with each of those people. All of those came together to create one big force that someone could drop a deal right in front of me and I can say yes or no decisively and then take action on closing on that property and managing it with much less effort than everybody else around me. That gave me an advantage. Now that's just, now that momentum could easily be translated into other areas of life as well. What if I wanted to start a construction company? Well, I'm already rehabbing three to five houses a month. Okay. I could start them working on my own deals as I start analyzing. other people's deals and saying, hey, we can do your rehab for you. A lot of the skills that

go running into a business are developed as a real estate investor running your own business. It's so much easier for me to start a construction company with that background than someone who's trying to start from scratch that's leaving their CPA job that has no idea how this works. Those are some very simple conceptual ideas of how momentum in one area can help you in another. But I really think the best example is your kite analogy, if you wouldn't mind sharing that. Sure. So, like, I talk a lot about, like, when you're, when you're trying to fly a kite, you start running. Let's say you're on the beach and you're running with your kite. And you're, if you're standing still and you just throw the kite in the air, nothing happens. But as soon as

you start making momentum or running really fast, you throw the kite in the air, it has a better chance of flying. If you're running really, really, really, really fast, that kite has a really good chance of shooting up in the air and staying for a while. And so I use that example, like just, just continually moving forward, continually doing that momentum. And the way that I do, let me give you a tangible way that I do that, is by continually asking myself every single day, what is the most important next step that I have to get accomplished? Most important next step, minns.

It's part of my intention journal that we have a bigger pocket, is the MINS, everyday MINS. What is that very next thing that I can do? And even if you're like, well, I don't know how to finance a deal. Okay, what's the very next thing you can do about that? What's the most important next step? Well, I guess I could read a book on No-N-Lumoney-Down. stuff. No, that's not the most important next step. Let's get even more specific. Well, I need to go to

Amazon and buy a book on no and low money down real estate. It'll be here in three days. Great. Now, that's a tangible step you can do. And if you do that, now you got some momentum. And then immediately after you do that, go, what's the next step? What else can I do? Like, and you're just consistently putting little bits of action forward and you being decisive, which were each one of these piggybacks on the previous, so we're being decisive over and over and over and over. And we're just getting momentum. We're starting to run. So we can run through obstacles. when they get there because we're running a lot faster. And then you want to add on that?

I love your example of the train. When it's already going 80 miles an hour, it doesn't take much effort to keep it going there. Really, we hit on this so often in different ways. We have the plane trying to get off the runway example. You were going to write a book called Lift at one point. When you're trying to get the airplane down the runway to hit a certain speed so it'll actually go up in the air,

it's burning a massive amount of fuel. It's going from a dead stop and it has to get moving. And we can all imagine trying to push something from a dead stop up a hill. But when the thing's already moving, it doesn't take as much effort to get it going. Well, as the plane's trying to take off, if you took your foot off the gas in that minute

or whatever the pilot's version of the hand off the throttle, you would crash. The plane wouldn't make it. But once you hit cruising altitude and you've gotten that lift, you can just go to the back of the plane and do whatever the heck you want. Autopilot's going to carry it.

It takes very little effort to keep that thing moving, but you are traveling great distances. Okay? So the whole point of business is to get that airplane to the point that it's at cruise control where you're making massive progress with little effort. And the worst thing you can do is to stop before you get there. So how does that new person do this? Let's look at an example of somebody who's, you know, they're 35 years old, 40 years old,

I don't know, 28 years old, whatever. They got a decent career right now. They're making, let's say, $80,000 a year. They don't like their job. They want to get out of it in the next five years. They want to be that millionaire, that financial freedom. They're just getting started. They haven't bought any property yet.

How do they build momentum? How do they get that train moving when they're just getting started? Let's look at the pieces that they'll need. So they want to buy real estate. They're going to need capital. Can they save capital? Can they make capital or can they borrow capital? The first piece that they're going to have to figure out.

They come up with a plan working backwards to do that. Then they're going to need a strategy. What market am I going to be in? Am I going for cash flow? I'm going for equity to later turn it into cash flow. Their time horizon will help determine that. Then they're going to need resources. What people am I going to use?

If you've got a five-year window of time, that's a long time to start getting to know people in the industry and finding out who you're going to want to be on your team. So the first piece I would say is get your budget under control. Know that you are saving a good amount of money and you're making a good amount of money because you're going to want that capital to go put into real estate. You should be tracking that and watching it grow. As you've built up a good amount of money that you're saving, it gets easier to save money. This is what I found. When I'm saving money every single month, Like when I was in college, I was saving $500 a week.

And the longer I save $500 a week, the more fun it became to save. Can I get to $600 this week? Can I save $700 this week? Working overtime wasn't as hard. Like I had momentum in that area of life. It became much easier to do. What was the other piece? Oh, they have to pick their market.

Start asking other people, where are you finding success? Where are there properties that are available? As you know what market you're in, then you've got a team in that area and you're building capital. It's as simple as recognizing what's the best opportunity for me. What's my most important next step and putting properties in contract? You'll buy your first one. Don't buy tenant one time. Buy a property. Manage it. Stop and look and see what went well or what didn't go well. On the next deal, you try to do the things that went well again and you try to avoid the things that didn't go well. On your third deal, you're going to be a little bit more refined. At a certain point,

you will recognize this does not take much effort from me to make a good decision. That is the point where your plane is now in cruise control. When you hit that point, that's when I go completely gangbusters. That's when you can scale, you can borrow other people's money, you can start to go really big because now that plane is on cruise control and you can get a long distance with very little work. So probably the best way that I can describe what that process looks like where most people that we talk to screw up is that because it takes so long

or it takes longer to get that plane off the runway than they thought. They stop all the work that they did. It was for nothing. The plane crashes and they go try to find another plane. Yeah. Yeah. Very, very common tale. If you think property management is expensive,

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You're always asking what's that next step? How do I build more momentum? How do I go faster? How do I do more of this? I'm just continually moving. That leads us to number three. Once you start taking these little bits of action, you might be taking the wrong action. You might be taking action that's not actually helping you get any closer.

So how would you know that you are or no, you're not? And that brings us to the third thing, and that is tracking. So tracking, in other words, is our way of, you could also say like analysis or accountability to yourself. whatever I want to do, it doesn't necessarily mean you're on a piece of paper with a pencil, but tracking is just keeping track of what you're doing. And that means everything from your budget, like how much money exactly are you spending every month and how much are you bringing in?

Knowing that will automatically improve your financial position. It's like the one thing you can do right now to dramatically increase your financial position today and in the future is just to know exactly what you're spending and exactly how much you're bringing in. Like just, it's like magic. Like as soon as you know that, you will start spending less or, you know, comparatively or saving more just by knowing those things. What else is there in tracking, David? Budget's a big one.

And this applies to more things than just money. Like Brandon, when you started tracking everything you eat and acting to tell somebody every day, this is what I ate. How much easier did it become to eat better? Yeah, a ton easier. Right. So if you're not tracking something, what you're indirectly saying is I don't really care about it. You could say that to me, David, you don't care about what you eat because you're not telling anyone. I wouldn't be able to argue with you.

If you want to be able to save more money, you need to be budgeting and need to know what's coming in and what's going out. What you will inevitably find when you start doing that is that you start looking for ways to make more money and looking for ways to save more money to increase that spread every month. And then what I've found is that once the desire to save more money hits me, the obstacles that were getting in my way from earning more start to seem less imposing. that scary conversation with your boss that you've been putting off because you don't want them to say no, you can't get a raise. It doesn't seem as scary when you're looking at that. That shift into a different apartment where maybe you go from working in operations into sales. Like, oh, but it's commission. I don't know. It becomes a lot less scary when you're really driven. So tracking your budget is 100% the first thing. You also want to track the actions that you are taking that are leading to you being

successful. I don't know a millionaire who can't tell me what they're doing in their business and how often they do it to get the result they want. It's just hardwired into their minds. If you asked a professional bodybuilder, what are you eating? They've got it down to a science. This many ounces or grams of this kind of food. And then I do these exercises on this day. Most of them track it in a notebook when they get there. It's very specific because your brain needs that to know how hard you should be pushing. If you say, hey, I can do 10 reps of 200 pounds. It's very easy.

Your goal is to get to either 11 reps or 205 pounds that you can do 10 times, right? You have a very clear path that you should walk on. If you're not tracking, it's easy to start to believe while I'm working out, what more am I supposed to be doing? And the more specific you can get, I would say, the better. Yeah, that's really good. So for real estate investors, let's talk about some of the things you should be tracking. First of all, I would track things like the number of, I mean, obviously the number of offers you're making.

How many offers you're making in a given week? Now, if you're brand new, you're like, well, I haven't made any offers yet. Okay, well, let's go work up the funnel a little bit. How many deals did you analyze this week so that you can make an offer on them? Like exactly, how many deals did you analyze this week? If you're like, why I didn't analyze any, I don't have any deals? Okay, well, how many deals are you getting across your desk right now? And somebody might say, well, I'm not getting any.

Okay, let's go up the funnel even further. because we've got to diagnose the problem. So what are you doing to get leads right now and how much of that did you do last week? That could be conversations with a real estate agent. That could be emails coming in from that real estate agent. That could be a number of hours spent looking on realtor.com or zillow.com or whatever.

It could be the number of Craigslist posts you reached out to of landlords saying, hey, I know you're trying to rent this property, but do you want to sell it or do you have anything else you want to sell? Those are tangible tactics that you can do. And if you tracked it, you'd probably improve it and set yourself from goals.

Like, hey, I'm going to reach out to 10 landlords every single week. And I'm just going to ask them if they want to sell any of their properties. That's just an off-market strategy you could employ right now that nobody's doing that would land you a deal this year, maybe multiple deals. And if you don't have time for it, fine. Find your like unemployed nephew or something like that and be like, hey, you want to do me a favor? You want to make some money? Here, do this strategy.

Track it. I'm going to check your results. And for every deal you bring in, I'm going to give you $10,000. or whatever the thing is, right? So now of a sudden you don't even have to do the work because tracking enables you to get other people to do the work. It's really hard to outsource things if you're not tracking it or if they're not tracking it because how do you know the dude

in the right thing? So again, those are just a few ways that you can, in your real estate business right now, start tracking your actions to find more deals. So Brandon, I could call landlords on Craigslist. That's not too hard. I'm not too scared to do that. But if I found one that said,

yeah, I would sell it to you. And I even knew what price I wanted all. offer and they took it. I don't know what to do about buying the property. Yeah, you have to give up. I mean, if you can't. That's why I don't do anything because I don't know. Once I get to that point, I just don't know what to do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, a few thoughts on that. Number one, you're never going to know what to do the whole way. Right. You'll never know, like, if you're driving down the road and it's foggy, you can't see a mile down the road. You don't always know what's even a hundred feet down the road. So the most important thing, though, is not to pull over. Like, that would be

silly is to pull over on the side of the road and wait for the fog to go away. Instead, if you just keep driving and keep asking, like, well, what is that next step? What is the most important next step? I don't know what to do next. Okay, well, I wonder if I know anybody who would know what to do next. Is there a real estate agent I can talk to? Is there a real estate investor I could talk to? Is there a, you know, world's largest real estate forum that's 100% free to post on that 24-7 where tens of thousands of people hang out every single week called Bigger Pockets? Could I post the question there? Oh, yeah, I guess I could. everything has an answer. It's all there. The only thing that stops people is that lack of decisiveness

and that lack of thinking like what's the most important next step. If you just did those two things, ask what's next and then be decisive about what you came up with. You're going to get through any fog. You're going to bust through any barrier. Even if you don't know the end result. What do you think on that? What would you add? I think that's a thousand percent right. I would add to it. Get specific about, okay, I don't know how I'm going to buy the property. Well, you're going to need money. So ask somebody like you said. Well, they didn't know. Well, how many did you ask you? Did you track how many people you asked? One of them will say, well, I don't know. I went to the bank and got a loan. Can you track how many banks you called and asked them? Can I get a loan? And if they say no, ask why. And if they tell you it's because your income is inconsistent, are you tracking your income? Can you look for ways to make more income? How long do I need consistent income six months? Great. You got a six month runway before that plane's going to get off the ground. Can you start practicing all the things you're going to need to be good at during this six months while you're waiting to get financing? That is exactly how the millionaires we know break things down so that they're always taking action

and they're not letting little nose or little hangups break their momentum so they stop moving. Yeah, that's really good. Hey, a couple of things on tracking that millionaires tend to do well is one. They track their goals. So every single day, a lot of millionaires I know write their goals on every day. Not everyone, but a lot of them do they have this habit of writing down their goals every day. They track their goals. They track their progress in their goal.

So where are they actually at? If they want to know that if their goal is to get a, you know, if your goals make a million dollar net worth, what's your net worth today? Track that every single day or at least once a week. Track where's your net worth at right now. So by tracking things, they tend to naturally improve. So track your goals. Also, track your habits. I'm a big fan of this. In fact, that journal that we put out of a bigger pocket is called the intention journal. And you don't need the journal to do this, but it's helpful, but you can do it on a piece of paper. Take a piece of paper out. In fact, do it right now, everybody. If you're not driving right now, do me a favor. Let's do a little

practice together. Get out a piece of paper. And then I want you to make like, let's call it like five horizontal lines on top of each other. So five lines going across the page. And now I want you to make like, I think it would be like seven lines up and down. So you're making kind of a criss-cross pattern, right? You have a bunch of little squares. Now on the far left left, far left column, because now you have a bunch of columns, right? The far left column, right down in each square on the far left column, what are some of the habits that would help you get the life you want to get? So for example, one of those habits that you want to build in your life might be reading 10 pages a day. You just know if you could just read 10 pages a day,

you would be smarter and therefore more successful. So write that down, 10 pages of the day reading. Maybe one of them is you want to drink a gallon of water day. Write that down. Maybe one of them is you going to get up at 5.30 a.m. every day. Because you know if you just got up a little earlier, that would get you time to focus on your goals every morning, which would then get you time to, you know,

like to know what your most important next step is, which gives you time to make those calls that you need to, blah, blah, blah. Like, whatever habit you want to develop. Like write those down on the far left column. Now, the next columns over are for the days of the week. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And then all you need to do is write down in each of those if you did it. So like, today was Monday, go through the, at the end of the day or the next morning,

write down, did you do those habits yesterday? Did I read my 10 pages? No, put an X. Did you do it? Put a check mark. And then at the end of the week, add it up. So this week, I did four days where I read my 10 pages. Great, four out of seven, like whatever your goal is.

Like the girl is seven a week. Okay, I did four out of seven. The next one down, drink a gallon of water. I did that five days this week. Okay, write that down, five out of seven. So what are we really doing here? We're tracking the habits that get us to the result that we want in life, whether it's your fitness, whether it's your real estate,

whether it's your business, whether it's your relationships, maybe like on my habit tracker, I have date nights with my wife. I have date nights with my daughter, like where we go out and do something together. So I track that stuff because as soon as I track it, and it takes less than 10 seconds every day to do this. I'm just like, check or X. Now at the end of the week, I can add up, and I, what's really cool is I now have a gamified version of my tracking.

So I can be like, hey, out of 75 total possible points for the week, I got 58. I wonder if I can get 59 next week, right? And all of a sudden, we're tracking our habits and we're doing it in a gamified way where you're playing a game with yourself. And the more you can get on these, the closer you get towards the version of who you want to be someday. So that's the habit tracking process. I'm curious if you are able to check off maybe 35 of the 70 things you want to do,

do you find that that helps you build momentum to making the other 35 easier to do? Definitely. Yeah, definitely. I mean, just the act of writing this stuff down builds momentum. And then by tracking, it's like, that tracking is a way to build momentum. Tracking's also, yeah, right? It's also a way to be more decisive because now you know exactly what you want, you can go after it. And so all four of these things today connect with one another.

Well, here's what I want you to think about. Has anybody here listening ever been in the situation where they got tired of their room being dirty? So they cleaned up their room. And then they thought, you know what? This feels really good. I'm going to go clean out my closet. And then you cleaned out your closet. And then you said, you know what? The kitchen's a mess. The act of now cleaning up the kitchen is almost exciting. You're like, I'm going to get after it. I'm going to clean it up as opposed to when you were watching dancing with the stars with your feet The thought of cleaning your kitchen felt like lifting a thousand pounds. That describes momentum.

And that is what tracking can help you do. It can make it so doing things that at one point felt difficult and laborious now feel lighter and easier. I do this with laundry actually. When I like my wife will wash all the clothes and show this like have like three days with or three like loads worth of laundry on the middle of the floor, me and my wife, my two kids. There's a ton of laundry. Towels and everything. So what I'll do is I know that I should do the laundry and fold it for her so she doesn't

have to fold it. And so I'll be sitting there on the floor for a minute, like playing with the kids. And I'll tell myself, I'm just going to fold my socks. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going to find my socks in this pile. I'm going to fold my socks. And or I'm just going to grab my jujitsu outfit. Just my jujitsu stuff, just because I need that for later. So I'm going to just pull that out of the pile right now. And as soon as I sit down and do my jujitsu clothes and I pull it out of the pile or my socks, and I'm like, well, I'll just do my shirts as well. I mean, my shirts are right there. I'll just fold those. Let me just get the towels out of the way because then the towels are done. And as I all of a sudden, like 20 minutes have passed and the entire

pile is done because I built momentum. And so take that and taking, right, that's a good analogy, right? So taking that to your, we're going to call it the laundry principle and we're going to write a book called the folding laundry principle. You heard it here first, folks. That's awesome. This works in practical ways too. Are you nervous about analyzing your own deals? Ask someone else if you can analyze theirs. Can I analyze your deals for you? Okay. You start doing it and now it seems like second nature analyzing your own isn't so bad. I really think this is why a lot of people take the skills they learned at their W-2 job, and that's the area of real estate investing that they feel the most comfortable in. They already have momentum. They're comfortable with spreadsheets

or they're comfortable with networking or whatever it is. So that's another question to ask yourself, is where do I already have some momentum that I can apply into this world and then track that? Because you're going to be much more excited about what's going on. But I promise you, this is what the people that Brandon and I rub elbows with talk about constantly. Yeah, very much so. let's move on number four here. The fourth trait, skill, thing, step, whatever we want to call it, is what we call mastery. And when I say mastery, what I'm kind of referring to is the various different activities

you do to become world class, to become an expert. Because in today's economy, like especially in real estate, you cannot be just mediocre forever and hope to succeed. I mean, maybe you buy a couple properties and let them pay off over 30 or 40 years. Yes, you will become successful over 30 or 40 years. But if you want to do this whole millionaire journey in like five years, six years, four years, you got to be good. And so what we mean by mastery, it's a process of becoming increasingly better.

You're never going to become a master. But mastery is a verb. I guess it's an action you do. You're continually being a finding things you can do to become better and better and better. And like tracking is a piece of that. And the other things we talked about today are also a piece of that, like, you know, momentum decisions. But mastery really is more than that.

In other words, it's continually asking yourself, what did I do right last? What did I do right with it? What did I do wrong with it? How can I improve? People often ask why the Bigger Pockets podcast took off and why do we have over 100 million downloads now? And the short answer is like, I mean, yeah, we were decisive about it. We tracked a lot of stuff. We had a lot of momentum going, like we built momentum.

We've never missed a single week in eight years of doing this podcast. In fact, today is, I think, the eighth year. anniversary of the Bigger Pockets podcast today. We've never missed a single episode ever. That's momentum. But you know what? It still doesn't matter if we weren't every episode saying how do we do better next time? How do we improve our audio?

How do we improve our video? How do we be better asking questions? How do we get better quality guests? That's the mastery thing that we're continually trying to get better at. What about you got, David? What do you got? I would say that when you and I started doing the podcast together, all of our conversations were about that topic.

Everyone, yeah. What do people like? What are they not like? can we make it better? What's making this difficult? How do we smooth that out? So that's an example that this is how millionaires think. Because we didn't come in here like, I'm a millionaire. Somebody needs to fix this for me. We came in here and said, okay, we think like millionaires, how do we make it better? And so this applies to anything. But when we were talking before the show, we both acknowledged, I don't know anyone who's a millionaire that's not super good at whatever

that thing is they do that made them a millionaire. They're really good at what it is. So I would say I like to use the, I'm not a hardcore martial artist, but I like the concept of martial arts because it makes this a really easy concept to understand. I wrote about it in Burr is you want to become a black belt investor. The Burr method allows you to continue to keep buying properties because you're recycling capital, which gets you more repetitions and repetition and build mastery. That's what I really like is it's not just, I mean, Jerry, our instructor,

could show you a move and say, here's how you do it. That doesn't mean you've mastered it. you have to do that thing a lot to start to build up what mastery is. And that's what we're really getting at when we tell people analyze 100 deals. We're not trying to be a jerk. What we're doing is we're recognizing you need to develop mastery. The Bigger Pockets Calculator is a very easy way to get 100 repetitions into where you can learn something. You need to call X amount of people.

It's not that we're trying to make it hard for you. It's that we recognize you're going to get better at talking to people on the phone if you keep calling them. Our buddy Andrew Cushman, he's not the most networky type of a guy. He was an engineer, chemical engineer. And I believe he made over 4,000 calls and tracked every one of them before he got his first flip. I can promise you, Andrew was much better at talking to people on the phone after 4,000 calls than he would have been when he first started. He was on his way to developing mastery. And now, I mean, his master is really with multifamily property analyzing him.

He's the best I've ever seen when it comes to that. You have Walker that works on your team. He's an analytical genius. Do you think he does that seldom? Or do you think that's something he does a lot? Tons of it. Tons of it. Yeah, the repetition is so important.

So matter what you're trying to do, how can you build more reps in continually to get better at it? And then the next part is like, you know, I guess going through how, like, how can you specialize? I'll even say the repetition like goes deeper. How can you specialize in something that you can then get the reps in on? For example, like, I want to just do real estate. Well, remember earlier we talked about the crystal clear criteria. Like, if you're like, no, I'm.

I'm going to be the duplex guy in Houston. That's what I buy is duplexes in Houston that need work. I want to fix them up. Duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes. We'll combine all of them. Like small multi in Houston. I'm going to be the best investor at that. And then you get your reps and all that.

Do a bunch of them. Analyze a bunch of them because that's how you're going to build mastery in that thing. Before you start to expand to other things, people hear like David and I do a lot of different things, that's because we've been doing this for so long. When you're first getting started, like you need to become a master at something before moving on to something else. Or we're going to team of other people who are masters at that thing

that can do it for you. But like mastery is not an option in today's economy. You've got to be good at this stuff. So get the reps in needed to become a master at it. That is a great point. I mean, if I thought,

how do you know when you develop mastery? I would say when you can conduct that action with very little effort and it doesn't, it's not hard. Okay. So you take a martial artist who knows a certain kick.

They're expending so much less energy. There's so much more. efficient and they can do it without even thinking about it. That's what mastery would look like. So when I have an agent on my team that's like, David, can you help me figure out how to comp this house? What would it be worth? I've done that so many times. I've talked to so many appraisers. I've dug into understanding how that works that you could throw a couple of curveballs at me and they don't really throw me off. I can adjust to it very quickly. When I was new, I would have felt massive anxiety. I'd have been thinking the whole time. I don't know if I'm doing this right.

I would not have felt confident. So it was the mastery that built it. And then I realized, okay, I can move on to the next bridge. I've learned it. The next bridge is teaching other people how to do it. It really can become that simple. But if you're avoiding the work, you're never going to get there. Yeah, that's really good. And let's go back to the blackbell analogy real quick.

Imagine like you're a, like, yeah, you're a martial art person and you got a white belt. You just got started. Like, imagine, let me even rephrase this a little bit. So take a black bell. For example, Jerry, the guy who teaches jujitsu to me and David. So Jerry, did he become a black bell? by continually fighting white belts, by continually finding the easiest person to fight.

Just so he'd feel really good about himself. He's like, ah, I got that white belt again. So when he became like whatever, when he moved up in the belts, in order to get better, he had to increasingly fight harder and harder people. And so part of mastery is not resting on what you currently are good at. That's so good.

It's asking yourself, what's hard right now? What's challenging? So in my effort to become a more mastery level real estate investor, I moved from, yeah, originally it was a single family, then small multi, then medium sized multifamily, like apartments, then mobile home parks now. And then the skill changed from like the thing that I'm trying to get better at now is not necessarily analyzing deals. I was I was the guy who did everything.

Then I shifted the next level, the next belt for me was not even real estate. It was management or leadership or, you know, like hiring. Like those are the next level. So I started reading books on that, sort of studying that, started talking to people about that. So I continually moving up belts and sometimes it takes you even out of the niche you're in, because like, which was real estate, now I'm leadership. It's a different, but it's all the same thing. That's what I needed to get to a higher level belt when it came to real estate.

That's so, so good. And that really is why we recommend the stack. Because the stack forces you out of always rolling with the white belt every single time. Why don't you explain what that is for those who don't know? The stack is a concept where if you're having trouble, building momentum. Wow, this is all coming together so good, isn't it? You buy a house. What I recommend is people start with a house hack. That is the easiest way to get yourself into real estate investing. Once you bought a house hack, then you buy an investment property. Once you've got that, you buy a duplex,

then you buy a fourplex. And this is every year. The next year, you'd buy it eightplex, and you buy a 16. And your jumps are big enough that they're challenging, but they're not so big that you would drown. To go from 16 units to 32 is challenging, but is manageable. Not go from 16 to 700. or something in the next step. When you're, well, I don't need to go with another jujitsu analogy for that one. But that is how you ensure that you are improving. You're always taking on a bigger challenge, which will force you to get better. And that's a very important component to a developing mastery.

Yeah. What's cool about the whole stack thing, too, is, yeah, it's like you buy that single, you buy that house tack. You gain a little bit of knowledge and confidence. Then you buy that house, like, by itself. And now you got more knowledge and experience and confidence. And you got other people going, oh, look at that guy. He's investing in real estate.

Oh, look at her. She's making progress. Then you buy the duplex. And don't get caught up on the exact numbers here, people. But now you gain even more. And so when people are like, I think people oftentimes get overwhelmed

that looking at the bottom of that stack or that pyramid, you could call it, because they're looking like, how could I ever buy a 50-unit apartment? I don't have any money. People who are at that level don't have that question. Because once they get to that level,

they have the internal identity that can handle those questions. You haven't earned the right to have those questions yet. And so your question is how do I buy the house hack? how do I buy the single family house? How do I buy that small multifamily?

So at each level, you kind of like you're growing, but it's not impossible to get there. Because you've earned the right to buy the duplex once you bought a house. And you could start with a duplex. I don't care. That's fine. But the point being is it gives you like that confidence at every level and it gives you that momentum as you drive deeper and deeper.

That's the key is you don't have the momentum to take down a 50 unit deal most of the time before you bought a house, which is why you shouldn't be looking that far ahead. Yeah. Unless the only way around that way, right, is you go and hitch hitch on to somebody else's momentum. There you go. And you get a piece of them. That's the only way I recommend ever jumping into like a 50 unit or 100 unit property right away.

Because you don't have the momentum. You don't have the identity to have those problems yet. But if you can find somebody else who's done that, then you can definitely skip some levels and get their speed. Basically jump on their train and learn from them. You're going to give up part of the deal. But if you're in a hurry to build financial independence, like a real big hurry, is really the two ways to do it is either go through that stack process

quicker than normal. So instead of buying one a year, maybe buy one a quarter. So quarter one, you're going to buy a house stack. Quarter two, you're going to buy a single family. Quarter three, you're going to buy a duplex. Quarter four, you're going to buy that fourplex.

Next year, you're going to have, by the end of two years, you're going to be up to like 50 units. And then a year later, you're going to be at, you know, 200 units or whatever that is. 300 units, 400 units. So that would be one way to go very quickly.

It's just, it's hard to learn the lessons in a quarter. And so that's where, like, I think five years at a totally reasonable time to be able to quit your job and become a millionaire, doing it in two years, then you have to go the alternate route of jumping onto somebody else's train. Which is something millionaires do as well. Not all of them, but many of them do partner with other people. Another really important component to mastery is what we call pattern recognition. This is something millionaires are really good at. You get enough reps in and you start to recognize

this thing works and that thing doesn't. So when you're saying, I get a question all the time, Brandon. David, how do I find a good real estate agent? When you don't know what a good real estate agent looks like, you don't find one. You're just hoping to get lucky. I don't have a hard time finding a good agent because I can tell within a three-minute conversation if that person's good or not and how good they are. You take a person that's been doing jiu-jitsu forever and I've heard them say, the second you touch me, I have a really good idea how good you are, just from the way that the contact is made. So I noticed when Brandon and I were rolling, and I was getting my very first experiences with Jiu-Jitsu,

he's got a really good triangle. And there was a point where he put me in it two or three times in a row, and on the second or third time, I recognized every time my hand goes on the mat next to him and he gets a certain grip, it's coming. My mind recognized, oh, there's a pattern. This is what keeps getting me. That made me better because now either I don't let my hand go on the mat that way,

or I'm prepared when Brandon would grab it. Business works just like that. There's a certain part of town where you'll notice more deals are popping up or the cash flow properties aren't in that area. They're over here. There's savviness that you develop with who you're dealing with, if they're being honest or not, that you cannot get if you're not getting in repetitions.

That's so true. I got nothing added. That was great. Yeah. All right. So that's really all I got from Master. Anything you want to cover on before we get out of here? Yeah.

The last thing I'd say is what we call the four stages of mastery. And I'll go through those really quickly. The first is referred to as being unconsciously incompetent. And that's when you don't know what you don't know. That's how everyone's starting off is, is they want to get into real estate investing, but they don't even know where to start. They don't know if it's easier, if it's hard, there's no way to know. The next stage is you are consciously incompetent, which means I'm aware that I don't know

anything, but that's good because now you know where to start. You know you're incompetent and you know what areas of knowledge you need to gain. The third step is consciously competent. This is where the plane is now up in the air, but you're still flying it. you can do a good job, but it takes your own focus. It takes a lot of effort to make sure things go well. And then the fourth step is unconsciously competent. This is where you've done it so many times that you don't even have to think about it.

The plane is on autopilot. It is flying itself, right? These are the guys that you see that are blindfolding themselves, wrestling with somebody in chukitsu and winning every time. They are so good they can just tell from feel what the other person is doing. what my recommendation would be is to ask yourself, where are you here and what would you need to do to get from one step to the next?

And you're not going to get out of unconsciously incompetent the first step if you don't start taking some kind of action. If I never got on the mat with you and Jerry, I don't know if I can do jiu-jitsu or not, and I don't know what I even need to learn. I might think I could beat a black belt if I've never done it, right? And you could actually get hurt in life if you're walking around unconsciously incompetent

And investing is not different. You can jump in and put money into somebody else's deal, having no idea if it's a good deal or they're a good person, hoping it works out. That is not how you should be investing. So work yourself through those four stages and understand that mastery is something that millionaires all strive for. And there's no reason everybody listening shouldn't be doing the same. Yeah, that's really good. And one point to make on that four stages of mastery is that it's really easy to be excited during the first stage. and then it's very easy to lose that in the later stages.

So in other words, like, you start out, you're like, I don't know what I don't know, but I heard this podcast on real estate, and I'm going to become a millionaire. Like, you're unconsciously incompetent. You don't know what you don't know, you don't know anything, and you're really excited about it. Then you dig into it, and you become consciously incompetent, right? Which means you know that you don't know anything,

and you realize it's going to take a lot longer and a lot harder than I thought. It's really easy to lose momentum there and to lose heart and to say, oh, you know what? I'm going to go on to this new thing. thing. I bet I could start a Amazon business or I can go and do this MLM and sell candles or essential oils or some crap like that. And then you move on to like the next thing because this, these four stages apply to every business you're going to go into or every wealth building thing or every skill you're going to try to build for yourself. They're always there. And so when people, if you, if you've jumped around from

thing to thing to thing to thing over the last five, 10, 20 years of your life, it's probably because you give up every time in the consciously incompetent section. But if you work through that, that getting yourself to consciously competent. Now you know what you're doing and you're doing it well, but you're still trying. You're still having to work at it. You're still to say, okay,

I'm going to analyze this deal here. I'm going to do this number here. I'm going to make this offer here. I've got to figure out the financing. Like, I got to work through that and you do that enough and you keep heart through that part. Then the happiness and the ease and the fun comes back in the fourth field, which is the unconsciously competent.

It's natural. Like, I'm unconsciously competent right now when it comes to like buying small multifamily. Like I do it in my sleep. I could like, like you can just show me a deal like, but yeah, that's fine. Let's do it. It's all pretty easy because it's just, it's naturally. Now, if I'm going to go and buy, let's say, a 50 unit apartment building this year,

I'm not there right now. I'm probably consciously competent or I can do it. But I'm just so into mobile home parks that buying an apartment building would take some additional effort for me. I'd have to really think through. I'd have conversations with Andrew Cushman and others that are, you know, Brian Murray and asking, okay, what are the next? Am I doing this right? Okay, I got to make sure.

So anyway, my point being in my, my long-winded point here is understand that there are emotions involved with each stage here. And that's completely normal. Don't give up and you'll get through the fourth side of it. And that's where a lot of millionaire success is found. That is fantastic advice. I didn't think to say it. I'm so glad you did that there's excitement when you're unconsciously incompetent and it goes away.

One of the favorite quotes that Gary Keller made last year that I liked was he said, something along the lines of people get bored of doing what works. So they start looking at what doesn't work and trying to make. make it work. Yeah. And that is, I see that in my own life all the time. It's not exciting when you're unconsciously competent, right?

But that's what you work to get, man. That thing's on autopilot. Double down, take advantage. That's the point where you can start building another bridge. But don't, don't let your lack of emotional excitement dictate the decision you make. If you're tracking your numbers,

you can keep that excitement and you won't lose that momentum. Yeah, such a good point. All right, man. Well, this was, this was a good episode today. We'll keep it on an hour long.

it looks like and we'll get everyone out of here, get on with your day. Go take some massive action today on something that we talked about today. Find a way to put these four principles into your life. David, as you take us out, you want to review the four real quick and then get us out of here? Yes, sir. So the first one is be decisive. Make a decision. It doesn't have to be the best decision. Just a decision is better than nothing. The next is going to be build momentum. Look at how you can build momentum with what you're trying to do or what momentum you already have that you can apply to your new goal of real estate investing. The third is tracking. Track both your personal budget. Track the steps that you are taking,

the actions you are taking to make something happen. And then track what worked and what didn't work. And the fourth is develop mastery. Get repetition in, start to recognize patterns, get more efficient at what you're doing. And you combine all these together and you will become a millionaire. There you go. I love it, man. Thank you for joining me today. And happy new year and go crush it in 2021. Thanks, Brandon. You too. It should be a fun year. This is David Green for Brandon, Unconsciously Competent Turner. Signing off. 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. Be sure to join the

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