I have trained thousands of new real estate investors how to invest in real estate (over 6,500 since 2008). I have also personally flipped over 1,500 houses myself over the past 20 years (since 2003). Collectively with my students in the Partnership Program (many of who are now full time real estate investors) we have flipped over 2,500 houses.

Recently, at one of my boot camps on the break, I was asked an interesting question by one of my new students. The question was this: “What is the main difference between successful students and students that do not achieve success?”

That is a great question.

And here is the answer (which is deceptively simple).

In fact, it’s so simple that most beginning real estate investors completely overlook it! 

I challenge you to read this entire post all the way to the end.

It will take time to do that. It’s easy to NOT read this entire post. After all you have lots of things to do, errands to run, emails to check etc.

However, if you pause and just read this entire post you may just find what you needed to hear today. 

SUCCESSFUL STUDENTS HAVE A CLEAR CONCISE VISION, A GOAL, A TIMELINE AND A PURPOSE

This is the path of successful students (the path I teach in my real estate coaching program)

1. Establish a Clear and Concise Vision And Goal
2. Set A Timeline To Achieve That Goal (that is realistic)
3. Have a Clearly Defined Purpose (what is your why?)
4. Establish Action Steps To Move Towards That Goal
5. Put In The Work, Focus, Be Persistent and Be Patient
6. Understand that You Will Need To Make Many Sacrifices
7. Overcome Each and Every Obstacle That Appears
8. Do Not Quit Until You Have Achieved Your Goal

Example of A Student Of Mine Who Wrote Down Their Goals and Their Vision

My Student’s Goal (This Was Copied From A Current Student) 

I want to own 10 rental properties free and clear with no mortgage by the time I am 55. 

I want to be able to live indefinitely off of the rental income that these rental properties provide me.

When I am no longer on this planet, I want my wife and my children to be able to live off the income that these rentals provide forever.   

I will establish professional property management, along with processes and systems for my rental portfolio to be run as a business. My wife and my children will have clear instructions and training in order to be able to run the rental property business when I am gone.

When I have achieved my goal of owning 10 rentals with no mortgage, I will quit my job and my wife will quit her job. 

At that point, we will have financial freedom and we will have time freedom and we will begin to live the life that we have imagined for ourselves and our family.

We will travel all over the world and visit over 50 countries.

Our life will be a big vacation as we move from City to City, Country to Country and stay in Airbnb’s for months at a time.

We will have friends all over the world. 

We will be free.

We will also own one nice house that will be comfortable for us when we are older and we no longer wish to travel any more.

This house will be owned free and clear in 30 years so that we always know that we have a home to live in, and retire in. This home will be setup as an Airbnb so that when we are travelling we will derive income from this home too. 

We will establish our family with a vision and a goal that will provide income and financial freedom for life 

Goal = 10 Rentals Free and Clear

Goal = 1 Nice House That We Will Retire In

Timeline

We are willing to give ourselves 10 years to achieve the goal of owning 10 rentals free and clear.

We are willing to give ourselves 30 years to achieve the goal of owning one nice house with no mortgage that we will live in. 

We will work hard and do whatever we need to do to achieve our goal and make this dream a reality.

We understand that we will need to change how we spend our spare time.

We will have to read much more and we will have to watch less TV. 

We will start every day with 30 minutes of inspiration by listening to Tony Robbins.

We will attend every boot camp and every coaching event. We will be on every coaching call. We will ask questions and be engaged. 

We know that our jobs are the cash flow that we need in order to fulfill our dream.

We will no longer hate our jobs because we understand that we need our jobs in order to fulfill the buy, repair, rent and refinance strategy which is so crucial to the success of our goal, our vision and our dream. We will work hard to be the best we can be at our job and we will learn to love it. We are willing to work hard at our jobs in order to achieve our dream.

We are willing to sacrifice our spare time for 10 years of our life in order to have the dream life we imagined for ourselves.

We will bring our children with us on this journey. They will learn together with us. Instead of college they will learn about financial freedom.

While we are building our empire we will treat ourselves once a year to a taste of the life that we have imagined for ourselves. We will take one vacation per year to a destination that matches our dream (Europe). This will help to keep us focused on our goals and to work hard and be willing to sacrifice what we need to in order to achieve our goals.

We will review our friends and family and eliminate toxic and negative people that want to tell us that our dream is not possible.

We will seek out other students as friends and we will join meetings and masterminds with like minded individuals like other students that will strengthen our resolve and keep our dream alive. We will motivate others and they in turn will motivate us. 

Our Purpose (Our Why)

We want our children to have a better life than we did. We don’t want them to have to work hard for money. We want them to have money work hard for them. We want to teach them how to quit their jobs and have financial freedom. We want to teach them how to own rental properties. It is our duty as parents to pass on this information to them. This is more important to us than sending them to college. 

We will give them books to read. We will teach them what we learn.

We will bring them with us to training events, boot camps and Inner Circles.

Our purpose and our why is our children. 

But our purpose and our why is also us. We want to have a dream life and we know that owning rental properties will make this possible. So we are doing this for us and we are doing this for our children. That is our why! 

Action Steps

1. We will both get our real estate license within 60 days.  
2. We will study our target markets and know them well
3. We will learn the zip codes and subdivisions in our target market
4. We will start marketing to our target market zip codes
5. We will put out bandit signs every Friday in our target market
6. We will look for our forever home in our target market
7. We will set up our seller website using the training that Lex gave us
8. We will budget $500 a month towards marketing to motivated sellers
9. We will religiously search the MLS and realtor.com for houses
10. We will register and bid on all of the online auction sites that we have been shown
11. We will attend all of the trainings, boot camps and Inner Circles
12. We will buy our first rental property within 12 months of today’s date

Our Ideal First Rental Will Cost No More Than $200,000

Our First Rental Will Ideally Require Very Little Work So That We Can Minimize the Cash Needed

 

STUDENTS THAT FAIL HAVE NO VISION, NO GOAL AND NO PURPOSE

This is the path of students that are not successful and quit

1. They Never Establish A Clear and Concise Vision (none of the above)
2. They Don’t Take The Time To Think About Their Goals (nothing written down)
3. They Have No Timeline At All (or want success tomorrow)
4. They Never Establish Any Action Steps 
5. They are Not Willing to Sacrifice Their Spare Time
6. They Hate Their Job and They Hate Their Life
7. They Blame Others For Their Lack Of Success
8. They Are Not Willing To Put In The Work
9. They Are Not Focused and Not Persistent
10. They Do Not Overcome Obstacles And Give Up
11. They Quit Easily and Move on To Something Else

Do you see the difference between someone with a plan and someone with no plan?

Now ask yourself – do you have a plan? Do you have a clear vision of your goal and how you are going to get there? 

Are you willing to sacrifice one hour of your life by sitting somewhere quite (with no phone and no distractions) and simply writing down your plan of how you would like your life to be?

NEVER GIVE UP

 Simply refusing to quit will get you 99% of the way there. If you never quit, you will slowly move forward. Babe Ruth said “You just can’t beat the person who won’t give up”. Be the person that doesn’t give up.

Way too many new real estate investors quit before they even get close to overcoming the learning curve. They attend a boot camp or two, and after a few months if they are not making money they quit. Don’t be that person. I spent six months driving around looking for deals and made zero money for those six months. I was working from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day and I was not managing to find a deal or make any money. But I never quit. I never ever considered quitting. And one month later (in month 7) I got my first deal and I made $17,000. Six weeks after that I found another deal. Ask any successful real estate investor how long it took for them to get their first deal. Most will say 8 months or longer. I have never met a real estate investor who figured it all out in a month or two. So not quitting in the first few months is important. Having motivation and to always be learning is very important too. That is why I focus on this so much at my boot camps.

Quitting is easy. It’s comfortable. Staying the course is hard and takes discipline and sacrifice.  

Confucius said “It does not matter how slow you go, as long as you do not stop”. This quote demonstrates the importance of having perseverance, patience, focus, and discipline. Perseverance is a vital virtue to develop in life because it is closely related to personal development. You will only improve by failing. When you fail, you learn from those experiences and you get better. That is part of overcoming the obstacles. What most people do when they fail is they quit. The reason they do this is because they never imagined their would be any obstacles. Understand that you will need to overcome many obstacles to succeed. 

Students that fail are often in a rush to “make money”.

They will skip reading my Home Study Course, they won’t read the books that I provide and they don’t watch all of the trainings and videos on our real estate training site. We know this because we see how many times our students login and we also see how long they spend on our training site, on our coaching calls and on our webinars. And we have noticed a pattern. The students that don’t attend and are not present are the same students complaining about not getting a deal. 

The basic foundation of understanding wholesale real estate is very important

ATTENDING ALL OF THE TRAININGS, BOOT CAMPS AND COACHING EVENTS IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT.

In order to be willing to sacrifice your spare time to learn you MUST have a vision a purpose and a why. 

If you don’t, you will quit.

I often tell new students that come in to my training program to “slow down”.

This is not about a “rush to make money”. 

This is about you learning how to achieve financial freedom.

Start with READING THE  HOME STUDY COURSE

Then login to the training site and start going through the action steps. 

Follow the order that is given to you. This takes discipline. It’s easy to quit reading and skip ahead.

It’s also foolish to do that. You won’t build a good foundation and understanding of the information if you don’t absorb all of it.

If you start doing this, you will see results.

And if you don’t – well then you won’t.

So having a vision, a goal, and a purpose is very important. Pick a time during the next few days where you can be alone and uninterrupted for one hour. Do not have people that you know near you or have your phone turned on. This means you cannot do this exercise at home since their will be distractions from kids, family, pets etc. Go somewhere quite. I like to sit and look at the ocean when I think. 

Take a notepad and think. Ask yourself “how do I want my life to be in 10 years”? And then start writing down what comes to mind.

Then ask yourself what you need to do today in order to make that goal and vision for 10 years from now possible. And then ask yourself why you want this and how badly you want it. And then ask yourself what sacrifices you need to make. What changes do you need to make TODAY? Write all of that down. If you are my coaching student I can review that with you.   

As you read the training materials, and absorb the information, your vision and your goals will start to take form. They will go from a dream to a reality. They will become so real that you will know and understand that they are achievable. And when you get to that point, you will be willing to make whatever sacrifices you need to make in order to achieve that dream.

How does this relate to you as a real estate investor? Why can’t you just learn about real estate and forget all this goal and vision stuff?

That’s a great question. And the answer is because you cannot achieve one without the other.

I see new students struggling to establish their vision and goals. They spend their first few months going back and forth between wanting to be a landlord, wanting to fix and flip, or wanting to be a wholesaler. They are looking for “instant success”. Some of these students get very frustrated as they go back and forth between these different goals (because they don’t have a clear and concise vision). The more frustrated you are, and the more you go back and forth, the more likely you are to quit.

Start slowly by first figuring out your vision, your goals, your dreams and your action steps. Give yourself a timeline. Review the goals and action steps of the student above. These are very clear and very doable.

VISION

The first step is the vision. Imagine yourself as a real estate investor 10 years from now. Imagine that you are successful beyond your wildest dreams and you are now a multi millionaire. Now how did you get there? What was your focus and your vision over the prior 10 years? What did you do for ten years to get you to this place? What were the action steps? Imagine those action steps. Imagine the vision you had when you started. When you think like this, it becomes easier to establish your vision. Once you have your vision then you can move on to your goals. Start out by thinking about who you want to become. That will give you purpose. That will give you your why!

GOALS

Do you want to buy hundreds of rentals and retire a multi millionaire? Do you want to buy ten rentals or 5 Airbnb’s and then retire? Is that your goal? Do you want to learn how to wholesale real estate and quit your job and be a full time wholesaler? Is that your goal? Do you want to fix and flip 4 houses a year to make $100,000 per year to replace your income? Is that your goal? My suggestion is pick ONE GOAL to begin with. When you master that goal then move on to the next. understand that a goal is not the same as a vision. A vision is what you ultimately want to become. A goal is a stepping stone on the path to your vision. Your goal is broken down into small action steps. Personally, I recommend that your goal should be focused on financial freedom. Learning how to wholesale or how to fix and flip may allow you to quit your job. It also may allow you to make ten times more income. But if you want to create wealth and financial freedom, you are going to need to learn how to buy and hold real estate for the long term. That is what will create true financial freedom and more wealth than you can ever imagine. 

SAMPLE GOALS

For example of a goal, you could decide to first learn wholesaling and how to market to motivated sellers, find houses and get them under contract. Then learn how to flip these houses to other investors so that you can increase your income  That could be your first and primary goal. Then when you have achieved that goal (however long that takes), then you could move on to your next goal which could be saving enough money to start fixing and flipping houses. You could have a goal of saving up $50,000 in order to do your first fix and flip. That could be your second goal. Your third goal could be to become a landlord and own rental properties. I recommend that you consider doing that last one first because if you have good credit and a good job it’s the easiest way to get started for most new investors. It’s called the Buy, Repair, Rent and Refinance Strategy. Make sure you understand how it works because it is the key strategy that you can utilize to create wealth and financial freedom. Click Here To Learn More About The Buy, Repair, Rent Refinance Strategy

The biggest challenge for new investors is coming up with that vision and goal. Many beginners go back and forth and are not sure which area of real estate to focus on (wholesaling/fixing and flipping/rentals) This happens because they are not focusing on their vision and their purpose and their why. Your vision and your purpose and your why will help you establish your goal. Think about your 10 year vision.

When you focus on that vision, everything becomes crystal clear. And once everything is crystal clear you have purpose and passion. And then establishing goals and action steps and overcoming obstacles becomes a piece of cake. At that point you are a man (or woman) on a mission! Just remember to never ever quit before you have achieved your goal. This will be difficult to do if you are comfortable. You need to get uncomfortable and out of your comfort zone. Everything starts when you get out of your comfort zone.

So your first step is to get out of your comfort zone and to start taking massive action.

For some people taking massive action may mean writing a big check to sign up for my coaching program. For other’s it may mean quitting their job, or making other big massive changes (personal and financial) in your life. Either way, when your back is against the wall, when you have burned your ships then failure is no longer an option. That is what I mean when I say “get out of your comfort zone”. Evaluate everything in your life. Look at your present situation and ask yourself how you got there. And then ask yourself how you are going to get to your goal. When you do that, you will realize how much you need to step out of your comfort zone.

Your vision is actually the step that should take the MOST TIME for you to figure out. It is also the most important step because that is where you will focus ALL of your time and energy. It may take you six months to figure out your goal and your vision (and that’s ok). Your vision and your goals may change over time as well (that’s fine too). Some of my most successful students took almost a year to figure out their goal and their vision. Now they are multi millionaires. Imagine if they had quit in their third month. They would not have financial freedom. So be patient with yourself. It takes time, knowledge and persistence.

Focus on your current vision, your current goals, your current action steps and then when you know what that is, then it will be crystal clear for you and your journey will be easy.

Once you have your vision, setting goals and action steps become simple. And then at that point all you need to do is focus, put in the work, be persistent and never quit until you have achieved your goal. Give yourself a realistic timeline and be PATIENT. It will take time for you to overcome the learning curve. Most of my new students need at least 6 months to get through this learning curve timeline. That is why we offer our Partnership Program at $97 a month. Once you are in the program I want you to remain in the program until you achieve success. Once you have your vision, implementing action steps and taking action could take another 6 months. That is why I don’t want you to quit. And if you are persistent then that is when the magic begins to happen (unfortunately if you quit after a few months then the magic will not be happening for you).

So that is a pretty long winded answer to the difference between  my students success and the ones that fail. It is really that simple. As Babe Ruth says, It’s hard to beat a man (or woman) who never quits. But in order to have that solid focus and purpose, and why, in order to not give up every time you have an obstacle it helps if you have a vision. So start with the vision.

Ask yourself what your vision is.

And then more importantly ask yourself why!

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