Getting the experience you need to become a successful real estate investor can be a bumpy little road to begin with. You will have to get yourself to take action in areas that you have never operated in before, and you will not always feel comfortable in the beginning.
Someone will ask you a question, and you’ll have no idea what the answer is. Someone can ask you to produce a document, the whereabouts of which you have not the vaguest idea. At first it can seem just awful and you may want to run away and hide somewhere. Please don’t.
Learning has to involve making mistakes. If you are not making mistakes or if you don’t feel lost once in a while when you get started, then you probably aren’t doing enough to move forward. Becoming proficient is about spaced repetition and successive approximation.
Spaced repetition means that you do the same thing again and again, like doing cookie cutter deals with houses. They are called cookie cutters because you do them one after the other after the other, each one like the last one. An example is that you get used to asking the seller what is the least amount of money they will accept for the house and not be embarrassed in the least. But when you start out, that can seem a little awkward.
Successive approximation means that little by little, day by day, phone call by phone call you learn to be successful at doing what you want to do in real estate investing. So you blew a phone call, so what? So you froze up during a conversation, so what? So you are in a negotiation and you just felt listless and uneasy and wanted to find a rock to crawl under, so what?
Stop anyone you see who is making money in investment real estate and ask them to tell you what it was like when they were starting out. Most of them will have story after story of failures and shattered dreams and unfulfilled expectations. They will also tell you of the deep impression that the experience made on them and how it strengthened them.
We learn from our mistakes. There is no progress without mistakes. If you are not making enough mistakes, then you are not doing enough, you are not taking a sufficient amount of action to reach your intended outcomes. Take it easy on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up because you messed up a phone call or a conversation.
The thing about making those mistakes is that in the beginning, you can feel like you aren’t doing anything or learning anything at all. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is in these times of tribulation that we are learning the most and growing the most. Ask anyone who has had this dark night of the soul and they will tell you that they learned the most during the time when it did not appear that they were moving forward at all. They turned it over and over in their mind and kept working towards a solution. They realized that if they kept going, they would eventually master what it is that was vexing them.
Make some mistakes, get used to it. Become comfortable with laughing at yourself and forgiving yourself for the missteps. Make a game of it, like finding out how many “No’s” you can get in one day on the phone knowing that with every “No” you get, you are statistically closer to the “Yes” that you need to make a deal.
So get out there and make a few mistakes. It will not be the death of you. If you get knocked down, just get back on your feet, put your hat back on, brush the dust off of your britches and try again. It is not the end of the world. We’ll be here to help you and to inform you, and you can count on that.
Today, there are two ways we can help you and you can help yourself. First, you can register for the webinar that takes place tonight entitled “Cash for Keys” with Coach Pat. In this webinar, Pat will reveal how to turn “dead leads” into cash. Just go to http://www.myhousedeals.com/cashforkeys/blog to register.
And second, you can start your free trial to myHouseDeals.com and gain access to dozens of wholesale deals and motivated seller leads in your area, many of which are discounted by 20-40%. And when you start your trial, you also get access to a free real estate training course that shows you how to thrive in today’s market. To begin your trial, just go to www.myhousedeals.com/freetrial.
Until next time, happy (and profitable) investing!
Doug Smith
President
myHouseDeals.com