Is this really worth moving?

I’ve had an Orbitrek elliptical machine for a while and it’s been a pretty good home cardio machine. Since I’ve started mountain biking, I haven’t used it all that much since the 2 hour rides are plenty of cardio. So it went into the “No Move” pile of things in the house.

It’s a pretty large piece (3 ft wide x 5 ft high x 4 long ) or so, so shipping it after an ebay sale would probably not make a lot of sense. Instead, I listed it on craigslist locally. I put up a nice pic and some Grade B marketing copy and waited patiently. In about 2 weeks, it sold. I put a little money in my pocket, the buyer gets a good cardio machine for a great price, and it’s one less thing I have to move. Sweet.

I’ve listed some throw pillows for sale too and plan to get some paintings up there this week. No fees for listing on Craigslist and you get it up there for 45 days. Not bad at all. Craigslist, i love you

I set those goals before my trip to Phoenix in which I said I was an investor reborn. I thought then that I would catch up to my schedule. I recently went to another investor meeting in Orlando, where I was ranked in the beginner group of investors. I’ll discuss this in a later post, but it was a call to arms for me. I looked at this previous post today, because I was thinking I had put some goals up on the internet for all to see.

It was actually quite a reality check to see where I had progressed since setting these goals. It’s funny because in this post, I say that I need to take “MCA” and now that I’ve been doing it for the past couple weeks the results I expected are coming to fruition. I’ve helped a few families since starting this, but I haven’t completed any of the deals that I set out to. I’m behind on my schedule of doing 6 or more deals by June. I will control 2 deals by the first week of July.

There’s no sense in crying about the past. All I can do is acknowledge my mistakes, discover their cause, take means to prevent them, and continue on my journey. What were my mistakes? Mainly letting inaction and fear take hold of me. The cause was that I didn’t find out that being my own boss meant finding a new purpose in getting up every morning. Nowadays I get up in the morning because I am genuinely excited about what the next day will bring. There are deals and people to meet and money to be made. I am preventing from falling into the same inaction by discovering something learned by single cells many millennia ago. Teaming up makes sense. It’s easier for a multi-celled organism to survive than a single celled one. I’ve been teaming up with other investors lately. Some to bounce ideas off, some to partner on deals, and others just to support each other. It’s been amazing the power of a team. The Army talks all about “The army of one”, but that is malarky in my opinion. The real strength lies in the group. Now I am working everyday and looking for every way I can do things smarter and better. Things are looking up and up.

I may not be on schedule for my goals, but I will hit the final one of 12-20 deals. This is going to be easy with all of my partners. Thanks to all of them in advance.

Mr Rohn puts forth that these little conflicts are very important. Mainly because there is not a lot of feedback except from ourselves. When we touch a hot stove, we get strong feedback that this is a bad thing to do and so we don’t do it again. When I open the door for a lady and she thanks me, that is nice feedback to keep doing it. But it is in the smallest of things that success or failure in big things is decided. Eating just one more chip may give short term satisfaction but it in the long term it detracts form a fitness goal. Blowing off one morning of calling people may relieve stress in the short term, but it hurts in the long term of being a business success. We get little to no feedback from the outside world for these decisions, so it is up to us to recognize and decide whether we want the long term victory or the short term pleasure.

We face a million little battles every day, easily won and lost. Will you win on the battle field today?

Someone asked me today if I was nervous about leaving work. I told them I’m not and I’m really not! I gave notice a while ago and have just been hanging on doing a few more things here and there. They have a new website coming out, which few people will be able to see (Why do I keep working on these hidden websites? I need to show my mad skeelz!). My stuff is almost done and I’m working some late hours to make sure of it.

I’m looking forward to being focused on real estate investing. I’m one of those people who are really good at sitting down and getting one thing done at a time. I really lose productivity when I’m distracted by other stuff. Hmm, probably should be doing more work instead of writing this, but nah you readers are important.

I’ve got a lot of things to say about this war thats going on. I’ll put them into an entry this weekend.

Zelda just came out and my copy is waiting for me back in Birmingham at BestBuy. “I’ll be home soon baby!”

One of these differences is massive, continuous action. I added the continuous part because when we talked about massive action, I think persistence is key. Doing everything possible to be successful on every deal. Making sure that you are honoring and respecting your time. These are so important. It’s these things that separate the real winners from the losers.

I’ve met some of the most successful people in the group and I’ve found that they aren’t much smarter than me, much more experienced than me, or much richer than me. Why are they helping 4-5 families a month when I am struggling to help my first? First they are doing the massive continuous action thing. The second is that they are doing little steps to make it easier and easier for them to help more people.

These superstars have built their personal networks, forged strong relationships, and proved to others that they are go-to people. I think it is mainly a result of the the massive continuous action. They are incredibly focused on their goals. I think of the most successful, only one is not doing real estate full time, but that’s because of other reasons.

In order to get more focus in my own life, I’ve set an end date with my work place. It’s going to be the 28th of this month. I realize I just need to apply massive continuous action (MCA) on this real estate stuff. Everything will fall into place after that. I also realize thats how I work best, with my back to the wall and knowing that if I can’t make any money I’ll starve. The gilded cage can be a nice place to live, but I’ll never find my full potential as long as I’m eating the bimonthly meals.

His strategy was basically to do wrap mortgages on mortgages that are over 15 years old. Take over the payments, make money on the spread and lease option the property. I’ve heard this strategy before and I wasn’t too impressed. He was nice enough to sell a package for $99, but I wasn’t too interested. I’ve read a lot of books that do the same thing. Derek has a friend in Florence that’s lost his ass in wraps. Vacancies can really kill you with that strategy.

He said stuff about how people will try to stop you in this business. That really resonated with me, because people have been trying to keep me from doing this. My parents, my girlfriend for a time, and some of my other friends. I think there is comfort in uniformity. People see you doing something different and they want things to stay the same, they don’t want you to change things in your life, because things might either change in their lives or it may show how they’ve missed out on an opportunity. We all hate to think of times where we’ve taken the wrong path at the fork in the road. If we all go on the same path, then no one can find out where the other path led to. Then they can’t tell us that we missed out on the oasis that other path led to.

I’m reminded of a story I heard somewhere of how crabs in a crate only need two inches of box height above the level of crabs. Theoretically, the crabs could climb out, but the crabs hold onto each other, keeping them from crawling out. I guess this is why change is so hard sometimes, the people next to us are holding us back from getting out of the crate. They don’t do it out of spite of jealousy, most of the time it’s out of love and concern. In order for us to really exceed the mean, we have to be ready to see what’s outside of the crate.