5 Questions from the Audience (Time, Misconceptions, Mantra, & More)

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. So I get a lot of emails and dms and comments with people just asking really great questions all the time. And I do my best to try and respond to as many of these as I can, but as we continue to grow, I can’t get to them all. But I still really appreciate the questions and you guys ask some really great ones. And recently I realized, you know, I should probably just do an episode here where I take some of the questions that I’ve gotten recently that I thought were the most interesting and just talk about them here. Because if one person gets value out of it, there’s a very high likelihood that more people will get value out of it. So here’s some questions. I think I have five questions from fans and from the audience that have been sent in.

So number one is, what has been the biggest waste of your time? It’s a really good question. So I’ve talked about this in other episodes where often the thing that separates successful people from the less successful people is not necessarily that the successful people do more, it’s that there’s certain things that they’re not doing. And I think one of the quickest ways that you can put yourself on the path to success is by identifying those two to three things in your life that you know are pulling you away from your greatness. Things that are like, time sucks that you are pouring yourself into. And you just realize, okay, if I cut those things out of my life just from all the time, I would free up from no longer doing that. I would accelerate towards my goals. And so I’ve done an episode, and I’ve talked about that in the past. For me, the two things that I find I waste the most time on is one is chess.

I play a lot of online chess. And so chess is something that’s very near and dear to my heart. I grew up playing it with my dad. It’s something that we bonded over, and it’s something that is very core to my identity. I love the game, but if I’m being totally transparent and honest, I play so much chess at this point that it’s not about the game and improving. It’s more about mindlessly numbing out because I can play it on autopilot in a lot of ways, or it’s just like no different than playing a video game. So I use a lot for rest and relaxation. But I can also find myself, if I’m not careful, slipping in a game or two in the middle of my workday.

And next thing I know, those two games spiral into five games, and that takes up a lot of time. And so cutting out chess is one of those things that definitely moves me forward. If you’re listening to this and you play video games, then that might be the thing for you. It might be video games on your phone, could be like Xbox 360. That’s a thing that people still play, right? The other thing that I spend a lot of time on, that I waste a lot of time on, and this one I can kind of justify as being, oh, this is necessary for running a business. It’s not. Spoiler alert. It’s not.

It’s just a lie I tell myself is that I used to much more so. I still do it a little bit, but much more so. Past is compulsively checking analytics, whether that’s on sales pages or seeing how a post is performing on LinkedIn or how a video is doing on YouTube. It used to be a compulsion where I would be pulling open analytics windows constantly, and that is just a complete waste of time because it’s not going to really change anything. The information you can trick yourself into believing collecting more data is going to help you, but it’s really not. It’s really just trying to get that next dopamine bump and hoping maybe this time we’re going to see a spike of impressions and engagements and that’ll be awesome. And when in reality, most of the time you don’t get that bump and so you just kind of leave feeling like, oh, I’m doing terribly. This is what casinos, how they get gamblers hooked is with intermittent reinforcement, which isn’t to reinforce you every single time you go and pull the lever.

It’s to reward you the first time and then reward you the fifth time and then reward you the 50th time. And it gets longer and longer, the intervals between your rewards. And that’s kind of how the analytics feels at some points where you go in there and sometimes you are rewarded and you’re like, hot damn, we did great. Most of the time you’re not. And so you’re kind of always in this feeling of low grade anxiety and you’re compulsively checking, thinking like, oh, maybe this time it’ll look different and it’s just such a waste. And if you’re at that point with your business, checking your shopify store and seeing like, did I make a sale? Did I make a sale? It’s like, nope, get back to work. Get back to doing the things that will actually drive the sales. Like looking at the data isn’t going to get you more sales.
So that’s a good question. What’s the biggest waste of your time? Okay, here’s another one. What’s a misunderstanding that people commonly have of your business? I’m going to talk about syndicated real estate here. What we do at Invictus Capital, I think more so than I could talk about the other businesses. But this one’s interesting because I think a lot of people believe syndicated real estate is a great way to build a really huge portfolio and get rich really fast. Because if you’re not familiar with syndicated real estate, the way it works is a group like myself and Invictus Capital. We have in house property management. We go out, we source the deals, we find them, and then we finance them, we manage them, and then we bring in investors alongside of us to co own the deals so you can pool together.
We’ve raised $40 million of investor capital over the years, and we own about 80, $85 million of real estate. So that’s a great way to scale. People believe, though, that means you’re going to have a lot of cash at the beginning. But the truth is, syndicated real estate, as with all real estate, is not a get rich quick scheme. It is a get rich slowly but surely scheme, and it’s a great one if you can buy the time. But to really be successful in syndicated real estate, you need to have sufficient cash flows and reserves and savings in your other areas of life to be able to pour yourself into that business. Because we might be getting two, three, four, or $500,000 check when we close an asset at the beginning. But that typically needs to last us three to four years before we can get to a capital event and start recouping capital gain, like our share of the equity portions of the deal.
So that’s a big one, I think, is people will look at big syndicated real estate and think it’s like way sexier than it really is. And for most people, I do not recommend it, honestly. All right, if your 80 year old self looked back, what would they say you’re doing too much of? I think right now I’m probably doing too much admin and too much of the nitty gritty, putting things together, posting things on the different platforms. I think I need to be doing better about outsourcing the stuff to my assistants and taking that stuff off of my plate. There’s too many day to day minutiae things that I’m still getting bogged down in. That is taking me away from the pure act of creating and having a free mind. To be able to do that and to focus on the things that only I can do. That’s a big one.
Think. What’s your recommendation? I love that question, by the way, of putting yourself in the 80 year old frame and asking yourself the position from the future, what’s that person who’s looking back on my life because they have full knowledge of you and what you’re doing, what you’re capable of and what’s to come? What would they say you’re doing? Right and wrong. I think that’s a great frame, by the way. Okay, what’s your recommendation for somebody starting a podcast? This is simple. Just do it. Just do it by the end of week. Start right now. You can start a podcast with nothing more.
I’m still using the same microphone that I started with five years ago. It’s the same microphone. It’s the same microphone stand. I use a different camera. But like this podcast fundamentally has not changed from the equipment standpoint now, from how my team edits and distributes and all that stuff. Completely different. Freed up my time quite a bit. But for you, where you’re at right now, if you’re thinking about doing a podcast, you need to understand that movement creates momentum and that creates motivation, which translates into progress.
And so you need to just get momentum right now while you still have the motivation, while you have the kernel of the idea, the longer you wait to take action, meaningful action towards this goal, the less likely it is that you will achieve it. So, number one, set the goal of I’m going to record an episode by the end of the week and then post it. That’s it. It’s so simple. Spend an hour researching how to post, go to buzsprout.com, create your account, get your audio file, clean it up, learn how to do that. It’ll take you a couple of hours. Spend this week your one goal. If you spent an hour every single day, you would have a podcast episode by the end of the week.
Will it be very good? No, it will be terrible, and nobody will listen to it. And that’s okay, because the second part of my advice here is you need to commit to doing at least 100 episodes before you even bother looking at the analytics. You need to be prepared to do 100 episodes before you look at the analytics and you judge whether or not this is a good use of your time. When we started the multifamily investing made simple podcast back in 2020, it was really good for us that we didn’t look at the analytics all that closely until around at least 100 episodes in. And it was because I said, I’m not going to look at the analytics until we’re at least two years in. We were doing an episode a week, so it took us about two years. We actually got there a little bit faster. But it’s a good thing I didn’t look before that moment, because the analytics were atrocious.

Practically nobody was listening. It was bringing in investors to our funnel. But if you were just judging it purely based off of impressions and how many downloads you were getting, we probably would have gotten discouraged. So you need to not get discouraged and realize that your content is going to suck in the beginning, that there is not anything worth listening to. And so you need to put in the reps so that you can improve and get the skills so that people will find it valuable, able to listen to in the future and just recognize that comes with time and energy. So you need to start the podcast. Don’t wait to try and get it perfect. Just get it out there, start posting it, get your hundred reps in, and then make a decision about, okay, is it time to pivot? Maybe start a new podcast now with your newfound skills? Or delete all the old episodes and start a new.

The only way to build something is by doing it. So stop thinking about it, stop planning, just take action. The risk here, the downside, it’s zero. There is no downside. Just maybe some wasted time. But whatever. You’re learning a skill, you’re learning something about yourself, and you’re building something. And I believe time spent creating is never wasted.

So just go do it. That’s my advice if you want to start a podcast. If you had to create a mantra, this is the last question, by the way, if you had to create a mantra for how to approach life, what would it be? I was really impacted a couple months ago, maybe it was middle of last year in 2023, by a book that the Steve Jobs archive put out called, I think it was called in his own words. I can’t remember what it was actually called, but it was a book about Steve Jobs in his own words, from his speeches and from conversations, emails, and things that he had had with people. So it was about him in his own words. And in there, there’s an email that he sent to himself, because that was back before we had apps that could take notes and track these things for us. Back then, you just send yourself an email, and in there, there was this phrase that has resonated so deeply with my soul over the last year or since I read it maybe six, seven, eight months ago that he says make something wonderful. There’s more to the quote.

I don’t have it in front of me so I can’t quote it entirely, but simply make something wonderful. And I think if you just wake up every day with that as the goal today I’m going to make something wonderful. I think that’s going to lead you down a path that’s well worth walking. So that’s my mantra. Make something wonderful. So those are the questions. That’s what I got. I appreciate you guys always, forever.

Thank you for dming me, shooting me comments and emails and sending me these questions. Keep them coming. I’ll try to get to them as best as I can, but no guarantees. So thank you for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.