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You’ve got big plans, goals and dreams….but are you ready to pursue them? Humans crave comfort, and comfort comes from perceiving that you’re “ready” for whatever you going to undertake next in your life. But do you need to wait until you’re ready? Is waiting until you’re ready actually hindering your progress? In this episode, Jeff discusses the illusion of readiness, and offers five reasons why you should NOT wait until you feel “ready” to pursue your next endeavor—whether that’s buying a rental property, starting a business, leaving your job or anything else.
Episode Transcript
So you want to do something big. You want to buy your first property or you want to buy your 10th property, or you want to leave your job so you can be a full time real estate investor, you want to start a business. But are you ready? Well, probably you feel like you might not be ready. But in this episode, I’m here to tell you that being ready is way overrated. I don’t think you should wait until you’re ready. And in this episode, I’m going to tell you why. Let’s cue up the theme song. We’ll jump right in. Welcome to racking up rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chests of capital or insider connections can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans, nor are we posting WE BUY HOUSES signs we’re just looking for quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people oriented dealmakers, we sit down directly with sellers to work out Win Win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media, this show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio. Thanks for joining me for another episode of racking up rental show notes for this episode can be found a thoughtful rt e.com/e 160 To please do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe or follow button your podcast app, it not only helps make sure you don’t miss any future episode, but it tells the platforms that you are listening. And that makes them want to spread it to other thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs who are looking for stuff like we talked about here. Thank you so much for doing that. And onward with today’s episode. So currently, my wife and I are thinking about buying an Airstream trailer, we’ve been wanting to do this for a while we’ve been talking about it and brainstorming. For a while we have a little bit of a vision for taking off for a couple of months out of the year or a couple of months at a time, maybe multiple times per year, and just see more of a country going to more national parks and, and doing things like that. And it wouldn’t necessarily mean that we weren’t working, but we just be integrating work into that type of a lifestyle. So you know, those trailers are not inexpensive. And with that comes other stuff you need, like you have to have the right vehicle to tow the airstream, especially if you have a bigger one, you’re gonna need a place to put it, you know, when you’re not driving it around, that’s going to cost money. There’s going to be costs incurred with, you know, the the nightly fees at RV parks and campgrounds and things along those lines. So it’s not going to be an inexpensive type of endeavor. And so I think we’ve kind of had this little bit of a mentality that says, Well, we’re thinking we might want to do this in a couple years, we’re not quite ready yet, you know, the business, we still takes a lot of day to day work and our rental portfolio, we’re working on a few different things there. We’re not really ready yet. And we’ve kind of come to this realization recently, that it doesn’t really matter if we feel like we’re ready. And the more that I think about it. When I think about all of the productive, entrepreneurial advancing that I’ve done in my life, it’s actually come as a result of not necessarily feeling ready or waiting till I was ready. I used to have this vision in my mind of like a ladder. And I always felt like I would take a step onto a ladder. And before I even put my foot down on that step, I was actually already looking at the next step. And that made me feel like kind of different actually, I felt like most of the other people around me, they’d take a step up onto a ladder in life, and they’d stand there. And wait a minute, wait till they felt good. And then they take another step in in life, but I felt like I was always the person who’s kind of pushing for the next step before I was even really ready to do that. And so as we thought about this Airstream thing, we thought, Well, why would we do anything differently now than what has helped me and served me so well? In the past when it comes when it came to leaving my own job back in about 2003 Leaving my own job, starting my own business, buying our first house buying our first investment property was shutting down the business that I started in order to pivot towards real estate. None of that stuff I really felt ready for, but I’m really glad that I did it. So let’s talk about the idea of feeling ready. I think it’s really just human nature that we want to wait until we’re ready. Why I think just Simply, probably the word comfort describes most of it, we want to feel safe. We want to feel safe in where we’re going, and what we’re doing next, especially if we’re leaving something that feels pretty safe and comfortable. Now, we want to know that the next step is going to feel equally safe and comfortable. Right. And this applies to everything. Like I said, quitting your job to start a business, maybe having a baby, starting a family, buying your next property, maybe taking a trip, maybe it’s retiring, maybe it’s buying some kind of a big toy, like an Airstream or a boat or something like that. We want to feel ready, because ready feels comfortable. But what is it that really prevents us from feeling? Ready? I would say it’s probably our perceived lack of one of three things or a combination of three things. First being money. Secondly, being time, and third, being knowledge, or experience, right? Think about that? Isn’t that what prevents us from feeling ready? We feel like oh, no, I’m not quite yet. I don’t really quite have the time. Set aside right now I’m pretty busy with these other things are you I’d really like to do that I just I’d like to buy my first property and my next property, but I don’t have the money put together. Or, you know, my credit isn’t quite right, I haven’t saved up enough and have enough reserves, or, you know, I’d really liked to start this business. But I don’t really know enough yet about running a business or about how I get clients for this new business, or whatever it is. And so I think our lack of readiness comes from that perceived lack of those three things, money, time, and knowledge. But I think waiting until we’re ready, is overrated. And I want to give you five reasons right now, to not wait until you are ready for whatever it is you want to do next, right. So as you’re listening to this, I’m betting I’m betting that there’s something in your mind that you can’t help but think about something that you want to do that you’ve been kind of putting off because you feel like you’re not necessarily ready. I bet that that’s just popped into your mind without you even trying, because how could it not. So I want to give you five reasons to not wait to do that thing. That whatever it is to wait to do it until you’re ready. The first one is, it takes longer to get to the result that you want to have. And you accomplish less overall, just as a simple example, if there was an entrepreneur who started their first business when they were 64. And an entrepreneur who started their first business when they were 24. The entrepreneur who’s 64, even if they get really quick results, they’re still, you know, 6566 years old, by the time they see results. And that leaves them less runway after that, to accomplish more things in their life. But the person who starts earlier, even if they didn’t feel ready, will get the results sooner, that person might be seeing results at 25, age 25 or age 26, perhaps, and now still has, hopefully another 50 years ahead of them to keep creating results. And so nobody, I don’t think really many people look back on life and say, I really should have waited to start that they most of the time, when they get to be an older age, they look back and say I wish I had started sooner. So reason number one to not wait until you’re ready is that it takes longer to get to the result. And overall, you have less time to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Number two, and this is a big one, you don’t grow as much. When you wait until you’re ready. Doing things that you’re not ready for is one of the main catalysts to growing as a person.
You want to grow as much as a person and I can tell you that it’s absolutely taking the next step up the ladder that I wasn’t really totally ready or prepared for that has helped me grow so much. I think back to times, even when I was a kid, I remember that when I was in the middle school, I got the opportunity to be transferred up to a higher math class. And so I had to take a test to get into that math class. And and I made it but I went from being the kid who understood math the most in his class, to suddenly being the kid who understood the least in the more advanced class, right, I went from kind of being like a big fish in a small pond. In you know, the math class that I was in to suddenly being the small fish among a lot bigger fish in the more advanced math class. And the stress and the strain of that actually forced me to learn a lot more. I remember the same thing actually was happening in almost the exact same time. But in my career, you might say as a soccer player. I was playing had uncovered park and rec league and I was really good in that context. But then when I went to a select team were actually had to try out. And I had to be selected, I was suddenly the worst kid on the team. But being the worst kid on the team, was the thing that pushed me to grow so much more. And I saw much faster advances in my own skills and development as a soccer player in that period, because I was not really ready to make that jump, but not being ready is the thing that spurred all the growth. So reason number two is you don’t grow as much. Here’s Reason number three. I think that readiness is kind of an illusion, I think that you are probably way more ready than you think you are right now. Right? Now, I am not a parent, as you might know. But my understanding from talking to lots of other people who have kids is that none of them really felt totally ready to have their first kid. But once they got into it, they realized that they could handle it, even if they were kind of freaked out at first, and that they actually were more ready than they probably thought they were even though they didn’t feel that way. Well, I would argue that in any other endeavor in your life, whether it’s buying your next property, your 10th property, you’re starting your business, leaving your job, whatever it is, you’re probably more ready than you think you are, you’re probably more ready than you’re giving yourself credit for, as well. So if you are seeking readiness, stop and ask yourself the question, what if I am more ready right now than I actually think I might be. The fourth reason not to wait until you’re ready, is I would say perceived readiness won’t help you as much as you think it will. If you wait until you think you are ready, does that really prepare you better to take on the challenges of whatever endeavor you are undertaking? I don’t think it necessarily does. In some ways, your higher perceived readiness actually might decrease kind of your overall sense of urgency to, to figure it out, to get in there and to put yourself in a tough spot and to pit yourself into a corner so to speak, and force yourself to figure out how to get out of that. I think that when you feel ready, it doesn’t actually always serve you as well, as you think it does. I would argue that from a real estate investing perspective, buying your first property after a year of studying does not necessarily mean you’re going to do better than buying your first property after six months of studying. Even though you might feel more ready. At that point, because of your knowledge, maybe you’ve saved up a few more dollars, maybe you’ve you know removed a few things from your schedule. So you feel like you have more time, I would argue that that won’t necessarily make you a better or more prepared investor. In the fifth reason out of these five, and you might balk at this and I understand being ready is boring. Being ready is less exhilarating. Now when you’re talking about entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship is fun, and it’s exciting. And entrepreneurs can get bored with what they’re doing. And if entrepreneurs get bored with what they’re doing, it is the kiss of death, asked me how I know. I know from personal experience in lots of different contexts of this topic that as soon as you get to use to something as an entrepreneur, as soon as it gets too easy, you start to check out mentally, and that’s a bad thing. You don’t want your next endeavor to be boring, you don’t want it to be not exhilarating. You want to learn and grow and have it be exciting. So it holds your interest. So that you can be on a path of becoming the best at it the possibly can be. So those are my five reasons. So here’s what I want to encourage you to do. I want to encourage you to upgrade your thinking and your your mentality on readiness from being ready to being prepared when the right opportunity shows up. Okay, let’s go back to this Airstream example that I gave you at the beginning, my wife and I have decided that our ideal timing is that if we could just wave a magic wand that the perfect trailer came along, it would probably come along and we buy it about five months from now. Why? Because we can’t realistically use it too much between now and five months from now for seasonal weather reasons and other trips and things we have planned. If we bought it today, it would just be sitting around for a few months and we’d be paying for storage and all that. But we also have decided that we need to avail ourselves to the serendipity of the right opportunity showing up so we are keeping our eyes and ears open. We’re looking at the listings. We’re going to go see the trailers we’re going to have To our our mind, open to the fact that if the perfect opportunity presents itself, we will be prepared to take advantage of that opportunity. Even if we’re not 100% Ready to take delivery of it right now, we’re going to be open to the idea that maybe serendipity will happen and the perfect opportunity and perfect trailer, the right price, the right negotiation, whatever it might be, might show up. And so our goal is not to be ready it is to be prepared. My friends, I tell you that comfort is overrated, and comfort, holds you back. There’s no growth in the comfort zone. Safety itself. Safety is an illusion, we’re never, we’re actually never safe. There’s just different periods where we think we are safe. But we’re never actually more safe at one point than another, we just think we’re more safe at one point than another. And that mentality can really mess with us because we feel like we’re stepping out of safety into danger. But the truth is, we’re never actually safe anyway, we just perceive that we’re safe at certain times, you’ve heard that expression job, the security, well, a lot of people who have jobs feel safe and secure because they have this job. But it doesn’t mean that they’re actually safe and secure. They could certainly lose the job the next day, there’s something could happen economically, something can happen with their company. They’re not as secure as they think they are. But they feel that way. And then they act accordingly. But safety and security is actually an illusion, I was thinking about readiness is a little bit like eating. So when I was a kid, and actually, I mean most of my life, I have struggled to like not gain a lot of weight. It’s always been a battle for me. And I remember when I was a kid going to the normal sort of pediatric appointment. And, you know, the doctor said, Look, you really should have a big glass of water about 20 minutes before you eat a meal. Because it takes a few minutes for your stomach to tell your brain that you’re full, it takes some time for that message to travel. And I was thinking about that sort of like readiness. We’re sitting there waiting for our brains to feel ready. But we’re actually maybe already ready, just like we were already full when we ate half of the hamburger in front of us at dinner. But it took a while for that message to get to our brain. And so we kept eating and then all of a sudden were to full well, what of readiness was similar? What if you’re actually ready right now, there’s just a delay in that message getting to your brain, you might be well past ready, even right now. So stop worrying so much about whether you are ready, you are more ready than you think you are. And readiness is not as important as you think it is. So get out there and start taking action towards the things you want in your life. Today. That is it for today’s episode of racking up rentals. Again shownotes can be found at thoughtful our e.com/e 162 Please do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe or follow button and whatever podcast app that you’d like to use and take a second to rate and review the show. If you think I’m doing a good job. I love a five star rating at a review that you think is an honest reflection of your perception of the show. I see all of those and I’m very grateful for every single one. Did you know we have a Facebook group for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs as well trees, thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs. It’s called rental portfolio wealth builders and we’d love to have you join us there,
look it up on Facebook or just go to group dot thoughtful rt.com. And you can find the group right there and you can hit that blue Join button. If you liked this episode, please take a screenshot of it on your phone. Post that screenshot to Instagram show people what you’re listening to and tag us. We’re at thoughtful real estate. Well, I’ll see you in the next episode. Until then this is Jeff from the thoughtful real estate entrepreneur signing off. Thanks for listening to racking up rentals where we build long term wealth by being a win win deal makers. Remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.
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