Part Two of the Ultimate Investment Success Formula
For part two of this mini-series, Theo is telling us about our why, or outcome. It’s important to know what you’re working towards and to also have a plan to get there. An emotional attachment to your real estate strategies and goals is valuable, too. Having that attachment will drive you towards your outcome, so how do you create it? Hit play to find out. Please remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review for even more no-fluff investment advice.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Achieve Investment Success By Establishing Your Ultimate “Why”
Joe Fairless: There needed to be a resource on apartment syndication that not only talked about each aspect of the syndication process but how to actually do each of the things and go into it in detail… And we thought, “Hey, why not make it free, too?” That’s why we launched Syndication School.
Theo Hicks will go through a particular aspect of apartment syndication on today’s episode and get into the details of how to do that particular thing. Enjoy this episode, and for more on apartment syndication and how to do things, go to apartmentsyndication.com, or to learn more about the apartment syndication school, go to syndicationschool.com, so you can listen to all the previous episodes.
Theo Hicks: Hi, Best Ever listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the Syndication School series, a free resource focused on the how-to’s of the apartment syndication investment strategy. I’m your instructor, as always, Theo Hicks.
Each week, we will air a two-part podcast series about a specific aspect of the apartment syndication investment strategy. For the majority of the series, we will be offering a document or a spreadsheet for you to download for free. All the previous documents and previous Syndication School podcast series can be found at SyndicationSchool.com.
You are listening to part two of a two-part series entitled “Tony Robbins’ Ultimate Syndication Success Formula.” If you missed it, make sure you go back and listen to part one, where you will learn the part one of Tony Robbins’ Ultimate Syndication Success Formula, which is “Know Your Outcome.” So you’ll first learn the money question, which is how you make money as an apartment syndicator, and then you will set your first 12-month goal and create an affirmation statement. To help you with that, we gave away a free annual income calculator document. To listen to part one, go to SyndicationSchool.com, and make sure you download that free income calculator as well.
In this part, part two, we’re gonna be focusing on part two of Tony Robbins’ Ultimate Syndication Success Formula, which is “Know Your Why.” We’ll be focusing on setting a compelling and inspiring vision for your future. So, first, we will talk about why you need a vision, which should be obvious, but we’ll talk about it anyways, and then two, we’re gonna talk about how to actually create your vision, so we’re gonna go through an exercise to help you do that. Then we’re going to go over a really cool, helpful concept for helping your approach times when you’re not necessarily achieving the quantifiable goal you set out to achieve. This is a very powerful concept that will reframe the way you look at hopefully everything in life. Then, lastly, we’re going to give away another free document, which is focused on how to follow through and persist with your goals.
Framing Your Vision for Investment Success
So to begin, why do you need a vision? So you’ve already set your 12-month goal for how much money you wanna make in 12 months, so why not just stop there? Why not just go to “Alright, how do I get to that 12-month goal?” which we’ve already talked about, which is raising a certain amount of money, but breaking it down into the component parts of how to actually raise that amount of money. Well, as Jim Rohn says, the “How” comes second, the “Why” comes first. So after you’ve set your actual goal and you know your outcome, the next step in the process is to know your “Why,” which means, “Why do you want to achieve that financial goal?” Because, at the end of the day, that number is not going to be enough to push your through when the times get tough. You need to know why you’re doing this.
Once you have that “Why,” it will create a stronger emotional attachment to that outcome, and we’ll go over why that is in a later part of this episode. Once you have that emotional outcome, then once the going gets tough, you can tap into that emotion, rather than tapping into that material dollar number. That will keep you motivated and keep you on track and keep you from giving up.
So how do you actually create this vision and create this emotional attachment to your outcome? Well, the exercise we have all of our consulting clients perform when they first join us is an exercise that we call “Gotta get yo’ mind right before you get yo’ money right.” This is a 6-statement exercise where you fill in the blanks, and you use your responses to these statements as your “Why.” So what I want you to do, if you’re able to, after each of these statements pause the podcast for 30-60 seconds and just think about how you would respond to that question. The first thing that comes to mind. Kind of just a stream of consciousness for 30-60 seconds. Then, later, once you get home (later in the night or in the morning, whenever you do your writing, or when you have time to write, either one of those), then actually write out answers to these questions, and be as specific as possible. We’ll go over examples of good and bad responses, as well as the reasons why we’re actually reading these statements.
Exercise: Asking Yourself About Your Investment Success Goals
The first one is “What gets me excited about real estate is_____________”
Question two is “Once I achieve my goal, I will benefit by ________________”
Three, “If I don’t achieve my goal, I will be disgusted with myself because I will not get to, or I will, unfortunately, have to ________________”
Four, “Once I achieve my goal, others will benefit by_________________”
Five, “The negative consequences I’ve already experienced as a result of not achieving my goal have been__________________”
And then lastly, “The benefits I’ve already experienced as a result of achieving my goal in the past have been _________________”
Those are the six statements [unintelligible [00:09:30].12] each of those. Hopefully, you paused for 30 seconds and thought about your responses, and then either right now or later tonight or tomorrow morning take the time to actually write out responses to these questions.
Question One: What Gets Me Excited About Real Estate?
Now, why these six questions and why not other questions? Well, the first question, which is “what gets me excited about real estate–” that question will elicit a passion in you. Your responses will tell you what it is about real estate that makes you passionate. This is going to be the core of your “Why.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific part of real estate that you really like, like “I really like underwriting deals,” but think of it more as what does real estate allow you to do in other aspects of your life? Because, at the end of the day, our “Why” needs to incorporate our entire life, not just specific to work. So what gets you excited about real estate? You should be thinking about things that you’re able to do because you are a real estate investor, or what you will be able to do as a real estate investor and apartment syndicator. That’s why we ask question number one.
Question Two: How will I benefit from achieving my investment success goal?
Number two, “Once I achieve my goal, I will benefit by__________.” – that is for you to create an ideal scenario or an ideal life to be pulled towards. You’re here in the present, and you are visualizing an ideal future, and once you have that, now that’s something that you are going towards and that is pulling you towards it. So you’re pulling yourself towards the future you want.
Question Three: What happens if I don’t achieve my goal?
The next question is the exact opposite. “If I don’t achieve my goal, I will be disgusted with myself because I will not get to or I will, unfortunately, have to _____________.” In that case, you’re creating a future, but it’s gonna be an unpleasant future. It’s gonna be a future where you do not achieve this goal. Think of the worst-case scenario possible that could happen to you if you don’t achieve your goal (that’s gonna be specific to each individual) and write that out. The more disgusting it is, the better. Write that out, and rather than having something to be pulled towards, you will also have something that you are running away from. So you have a future that you are being pulled towards, as well as a past that you’re being pushed away from. The combination of those two things should cover both personality types – people that are motivated by positive, or that are motivated by going away from the negative.
Question Four: How will others benefit from my investment success?
The fourth one is “Once I achieve my goal, others will benefit by___________.” For this question, you are thinking of ways that you will be able to help others by achieving your goal. Because most people are motivated by helping other people, and I know that one of Tony Robbins’ six human needs is contribution. He believes that all humans need to contribute in order to be satisfied and fulfilled in life, so this fourth question will hit on that. So by achieving your goal, how will you help your friends, your family, your significant other, your community, the world, your investors? Really, anyone that’s not you, how will they also benefit by you achieving your goal. It puts other people’s skin in the game, and you won’t wanna let them down.
Question Five: What are some negatives I’ve already experienced?
Number five and six are kind of tied together. Number five is “The negative consequences I’ve already experienced as a result of not achieving my goal have been _______________.” —a disgusting, negative, bad future to avoid. You now also have a picture of something in your past to avoid, because it’s much easier – at least in my opinion – to visualize your actual past because it happened, so you’re more remembering than creating a vision for the future. So the bad things that have happened to you in the past by not achieving this goal or another goal, and now you’ve got something else to avoid and be disgusted by, which, again, will elicit that passion to not have that be your future situation.
Question Six: What are some positives I’ve already experienced?
And then, lastly, “The benefits I have already experienced as a result of achieving a past goal have been__________.” Similarly, you are remembering a time you achieved a goal and the benefits that came afterwards. Now you have emotion and a feeling to chase after again, but hopefully this time on a much larger scale, which means much larger benefits.
Good and Bad Answers to Your Investment Success Questions
Again, once you get home tonight, or tomorrow morning, take the time to write out some responses to these questions. To give you an example of good and bad, because you want these to be as specific as possible because, again, we’re trying to create an emotional attachment to our outcome, which means that it needs to be specific to us.
For example, to the question about “Once I achieve my goal, I will benefit by__________.”, a bad example would be “Once I achieve my goal, I will benefit by more money, freedom of time and being able to travel.” That’s pretty vague, and it’s not specific enough to help you get through challenges and obstacles that are likely to occur throughout your journey. If you are struggling to raise capital for a specific deal, just telling yourself “Well, if I do this, I’m gonna make more money and have more freedom of time and I’ll be able to travel more,” it’s probably not gonna cut it.
A much better response would be “Once I achieve my goal, I will benefit by more money to buy season tickets to (I’m in Tampa, so we’ll say) the Tampa Bay Devils Rays baseball team for my entire immediate family,” or “I will have freedom of time to work out at 10 AM, three times a week.” Or if you need extra motivation, “to hire a personal trainer to make me work out at 10 AM three times per week.” Or “have more freedom of time to go to all of my daughter’s dance recitals or son’s baseball games.” Or “being able to travel with my wife and kids to Paris and take a picture in front of the Eiffel Tower.”
The Benefits of Goal-Oriented Thinking for Investment Success
Again, do you see the difference between the bad example and a good example? These are things that are specific, that involve other people in your life and are things that you actually want to do, and you’re being specific about it. Obviously, you wanna make more money, but what are you gonna do with that money? Obviously, you’re gonna want more time, but what are you gonna do with that time exactly? So those are the types of responses you are looking for, because those are much more powerful and elicit much more passion.
For the statement about being disgusted about not achieving your goal, a bad example would be “If I don’t achieve my goal, I’ll be disgusted with myself because I will not have freedom of time.” It’s kind of the exact opposite of the previous bad example. Instead of saying you are gonna benefit by more freedom of time, now you’re saying that you’re gonna be disgusted because you won’t have that. Again, not specific enough, too vague, and it’s not gonna give you that motivation you need when the going gets tough.
A much better example – and we can all relate to this, and I’m sure everyone would probably have this be their answer – would be “If I don’t achieve my goal, I’ll be disgusted with myself because I will, unfortunately, have to make the walk of shame back into my W-2 job.” You just visualize yourself, you quit your job in order to become a syndicator, or get into real estate in general – and I personally did this, too. Your boss knows why you left, all of the employees that work there know why you left; maybe they were supportive, maybe they weren’t, but at the end of the day they know that you left in order to chase this real estate dream.
And then you try it out and you fail, and now you have to go back to work and face everyone, face your boss first and ask him for your job back, and then walk back into the office and face all of your employees, and they all know that the reason why you’re back is because you failed. I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel horrible, because not only do I not wanna go back to a W-2 job or a corporate job, but what’s worse is actually having to face everyone at work knowing that I was a failure.
That is the perfect of a good vision to have, and in this case, this is the vision you want to avoid – you wanna avoid that feeling of shame from having to walk into your job and tell everyone that you failed.
Responding to Your Investment Success Questions: Affirmation Statements
Once you actually respond to these questions, now the next step is, similarly to your 12-month goal, create an affirmation statement to keep this vision top of mind. It could be a paragraph form, so you could literally write out “What gets me excited about real estate is________. Once I achieve my goal, I’ll benefit by_________.” Or it could just be a running list of bullet points, however, you wanna approach it. You write that out as an affirmation statement, and you can write it at the same time you’re writing your 12-month goal in the morning, or you can write it out one time and read it to yourself silently in the morning, and at night, or you could read it aloud to yourself, staring at yourself in the mirror. I found that to be a powerful strategy, and it gives you more confidence as well.
Another example – and again, this is for the long-term vision, but also your 12-month goal; we’re talking about the same things now – is also create some sort of vision board. For example, you can create a banner that has your 12-month goal on it, and then maybe you have a long-term goal of how much real estate you wanna control, and then you’re gonna have images representing each of your visions. So you can maybe have a picture of a corporate office, if that’s what you wanna avoid. Or you can put a picture of you and your family on a vacation, or you can even (if you want to) photoshop yourself into a picture at the Eiffel Tower and tell yourself that “In three years, I’m going to actually take this picture and then replace the fake one with the real one.” Examples like that, things that represent your written response to those statements, on a vision board.
You can also create a [unintelligible [00:19:53].27] and just write out your statements, or you can do what Joe did, and you can dedicate an entire wall in your office to a vision board. In that case, you can post anything – you can post brochures from properties you’ve bought. I know Joe has the email he sent when he quit his job posted on there. Pictures of certain events that happened in your life that you want to repeat, as well as things in the future that you want to have happen. So the vision board on your wall [unintelligible [00:20:20].21] anything.
Keep Focused on Your Vision in a Way That Works for You
Another example of a way to keep this long-term vision top of mind is to record your voice of you reading your vision, and then listen to that on your headphones on repeat while you’re taking the dog for a walk, while you’re working out, while you’re on your way to work between podcasts… those are just a few examples, whatever works best for you, but the idea is to have some sort of reminder of this vision on a daily basis in front of you.
Another example is to have post-it notes on your monitor, so every time you are at your computer, the post-it notes are right there in front of you and you can read them every hour, or every once in a while. So that’s for your vision.
What if You Don’t Reach Your Investment Success Goal?
What happens if you don’t hit your goal? What happens if you set a goal to make $100,000/year for the specific reasons you went over and the specific reasons you created in the “gotta get yo’ mind right” exercise? What happens if you don’t hit that number? Well, that’s where this very handy and powerful concept of 50/50 goals comes into play. If you’re a long-time listener of the podcast, you should know what this means, but just as a refresher, what 50/50 goals is a concept where 50% of a goal’s success is based on achieving the actual quantifiable outcome – in this case, achieving that 12-month goal, or the vision you set out for yourself – and the remaining 50% is on identifying a lesson or skill learned in pursuit of that quantifiable goal, that you can apply to your business to improve your results long-term.
For example, let’s say you set out to make $100,000 in the first 12 months, but you only made $65,000. On the surface, that’s a failure, because you set out to achieve one goal and you only completed 65%. So I guess it’s not a failure, I guess it’s a D, if we’re going by the grade school grading curve. That’s if you look at it through the lens of 100% of the goal’s success is based on actually achieving the quantifiable outcome. But if you apply the 50/50 goal concept, you say to yourself “Okay, so I’ve made $65,000 this year, which is not what I wanted to make. However, what are some lessons that I learned, or skills that I’ve obtained in this past year that’s going to be worth more in the future than that $35,000?” One example would be experience. If you made $65,000, that means you actually did at least one deal, and since it was your first deal, you likely learned a ton of things from just going through that first process of underwriting, submitting an offer, doing due diligence, raising money, and closing. In my opinion, that’s worth way more than $35,000.
At the same time, through that experience, think of all of the different lessons you learned – the ways to improve your underwriting, your due diligence, the way you identify deals, the way you talk to investors, the relations you actually created with new investors that you brought on, the team members that you found throughout that time, or the relationships that you strengthened with your investors and your lender for actually completing a deal, and your broker for closing on the deal – and then all the new skill sets you learned, as well. All those things combined are worth way more than $35,000 in the long run. Because they’re gonna make you countless hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars in the long run if you stick to it, but the only way to stick to it is to be able to pull out the benefit and not get discouraged because you failed to meet that $100,000 goal.
How the 50/50 Goal Mentality Can Help You Achieve Investment Success
Essentially, what this does is it automatically reframes your mind to the glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty mentality. And, in fact, it’s more of a glass is overfilling mentality, because it forces you to focus on the good, and the positives, and not on that minor negative of not achieving your goal in 12 months, because 12 months is just a small percentage of your life and your business.
At the same time, in tandem with this concept, you need to reframe your mind, especially for apartment syndications, you need to reframe yourself to think in terms of decades, and not months or years. Yes, it’s important to make sure you’re hitting your monthly goals and your yearly goals, but what’s more important is to make sure that you’re acquiring the experience and the skills, and you’re forming new relationships that will help you be successful for decades to come in the future. When you look at it that way, again, it forces you to look at things through this 50/50 goal lens, because in 10 years from now, if you’re making 10 million dollars a year and doing hundred million dollar deals, then you missing a goal of 10 years ago by $35,000 isn’t gonna mean anything at that point. So it forces you to think, “Okay, well what lessons and skills that I learned that I can apply to my business in the future to help me achieve my future goals?”
So that second 50% of the goals is similar to the compound interest effect. You’re going to earn more money in the long-run by applying these concepts, but also identifying all of those lessons and skills that you would if you actually hit your goal. So again, all those lessons and skills you learned will make you more money in the long-run than that $35,000 gap. Maybe you found a big-time investor on one of your deals that you didn’t know; maybe they invested 50k in your first deal in that first year, but then they came back and said, “Oh, you did a really good job on that first deal, and now I’m willing to invest 10 million dollars in your next deal.” That’s not accounted for in that $65,000 you made that year.
Maybe you found an amazing five-star property management company who helps you cut certain expenses in the future that make or break a deal when you’re underwriting it. Or maybe based off of a specific deal that you bought that made you that $65,000, maybe it’s a smaller deal, but you identified a specific value-add opportunity that you hadn’t thought of before, whether it was operational or a physical improvement of the property, that you now are going to apply to a much larger property that helps you win the bid and buy the deal.
The Power of Changing Your Mindset
Overall, this 50/50 goals concept keeps you motivated in the face of failure. Because, if you have two investors who set the same goal and achieve the same less than desirable outcome and one quits and one improves, what’s the difference between those two? Well, one person quit because they didn’t hit their goal fully and, since that’s what they’re basing their success on, in their minds, they’re a failure. And, over time, that wears on you until they quit – whereas the person that improves and does better after failing is the person who has this 50/50 goals concept in mind, and instead of focusing on that $35,000 gap, they focus on the lessons and new skills that were learned.
I know I talked about that 50/50 goals concept for a while, but it is a very powerful mindset shift that you can apply to your apartment syndication business, but it’s something you can also apply to your day, or your week, or your month, or you can apply it to your relationships, to working out – you can apply it to anything where you set out to do something and don’t necessarily do exactly what you wanted to do, which usually is the majority of the things we do in our lives, to be honest.
So before I end, I wanna just offer one extra piece of information on goal setting, because this concludes part two of the Ultimate Success Formula podcast series where we focused on goals. This is another Tony Robbins resource, and it’s going to be about how to follow through and persist with your goals. It’s a free document that you can download in the show notes, or at SyndicationSchoo.com. In this document, you will watch a 35-minute video of Tony Robbins, and then you will perform the four-part goal-setting exercise that he lays out at the end of the video. It’s kind of similar to the “Gotta get yo mind right”, but a little bit different, and it’ll have you think about your “Why” a little bit differently.
First, I recommend completing this for your syndication business, but again, similar to the 50/50 goals concept and the Ultimate Success Formula in general, you can use this for other goals as well – your personal goals, your fitness goals, your relationship goals… because at the end of the day it’s all connected. If our personal life’s in shambles, we’re really out of shape, and we’ve got really bad relationships, then we’re not gonna be able to allocate enough focus to our syndication business. That’s why it’s important to have your personal life to be in shape, and to make sure you’re constantly working on improving your relationships, because that will ultimately leak over into your syndication business.
Keep Listening for More Advice on Reaching Your Investment Success Goals
That concludes part two of the Tony Robbins’ Ultimate Syndication Success Formula. In this episode you learned how having a vision creates a strong emotional attachment to your outcome, and you performed an exercise to help you formulate this vision. Then I gave you some examples of how to solidify this vision and your 12-month goal in your mind, and then we had a conversation about the powerful 50/50 goals reframing concept, where 50% of the goal’s success is based off of achieving the actual quantifiable outcome, and the other 50% of the success is based on identifying areas that you learned the lessons, or you learned a new skill set or something beneficial that came out of that process of striving to achieve that quantifiable goal.
To listen to part one, where we went over setting the outcome and knowing your outcome, and to listen to other Syndication School series about the how-to’s of apartment syndications, and to download this free document, the Tony Robbins’ goal setting exercise document, as well as all other free documents, visit SyndicationSchool.com.
If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on iTunes, and thank you for listening. I will talk to you next week.