Episode #095 - Why SETTING GOALS Will Change Your Life!

Today hosts Braden Cheek, Brian Duck and Joel Thompson discuss the power of goal-setting and utilizing your subconscious mind to make your dreams come true.

Ready. Yeah. What is up everyone? And welcome back to how to invest in commercial real estate. And we thought it would be fun to do kind of a cool topic today because it's probably right around the time everyone is starting to give up on those New Year's resolution goals. So we wanted to hit february hard with just a reminder of why goals are important. Uh a way of looking at them, a perception and and more of a motivation to say, keep on fighting. You know, we, you finished the first month strong, probably you probably came out of the new year with um ambitions, you know, I know, jim sales and memberships go crazy. A bunch of people want to, you know, start a new diet or start working out or maybe this is the year you're spending less money, maybe this is the year you're investing more money or making that jump and we just want to give you some motivation to to stick with it and maybe some tips on how we stick with it. Yeah, and we don't always stick with it. I don't want to act like that. We always, you know, write goals and we always achieve them. We always do everything we've lined out to do. This is an encouragement for us as well. Uh actually, I was thinking as we were preparing, I don't write my goals down, I need to uh I need to be better at it myself.

We're sitting here prepping the episode, thinking about how stupid we are like, damn it, We don't even take our advice. We we have though in the past, at least I have. And so hopefully we can, we can motivate you guys today and talk about what worked for us and what's worked for a lot of other people on really changing their life through goal setting. Yeah, so I think the first thing is, is the dream, right? Like there's there's a lot of steps, but I think for a lot of us, we we fail to write something down that's a bit ambitious. So I think my first tip is, is set something ambitious, sit down, talk with the important people in your life that that can help and support and motivate you and come up with something that you really want to do that you think is achievable and and write it down. So let me, do you guys write your goals down. Do you do you have goals right now that are written down that you review? I'm really bad about personal goals. Like last year we had personal goal to invest a certain amount of money and and and we did good at that, but like personal goals to eat, healthier workout. I mean obviously I'm not killing it over here, but business goals, I'm way better about writing down.

So like last year in criteria and the year before that we had great criterion acquisition goals and we go out there and we break that down and say, okay, this is this much a quarter or whatever this many means we have to have. But yeah, my personal goals are lacking to be honest, I need to get better about that. Yeah, I've got a few, um, you know, but a lot of my major goals and what we want to focus on today is what I set back, you know, a couple of decades ago that really transformed the direction of my life. And so, you know, some of those goals were, and the main driving goal and let's get into the first point for me, the main driving goal when I got ahold of goal setting was to retire early, quit the day job. Okay, that was my driving purpose and like a long term, yeah, I had other goals, but that was the one that that really directed my purpose. So the first thing we want to encourage you guys to do is you've got to uh decide on a purpose and have a vision if you don't have that, you don't know where to go, you don't know what to be doing.

And and so think about, we're gonna do some exercise today, but think about, you know exactly what you want to have in each area of your life. And that will help you start this goal setting process. Uh so you can think about monetary goals, you can think about education goals, your family, life, your physical fitness, health, and so you're gonna, you're gonna begin to write those down. But the key uh will be, and we talked about this earlier is idealizing your best life and allowing yourself to be free to think about what it is that you want out of this life. And I know we've talked about it before, but we're gonna do it again because it's just so powerful. Most people don't ever allow themselves to ask what's possible and to allow themselves to have what they really want to have. And so during this process of setting your goals, that forces you to think, What do I want out of this life, who do I want to be, what do I want to have? Uh and if we can get you to do that, then you're gonna, your true self will come out and you'll get stuff on paper uh that will that will give you purpose, that will be your vision.

But if you're just gonna ride like I want to work out more that that isn't gonna, that's not a driving life for us, like what is the goal of my life for the next 10 years, the next 20 years transforming me into somebody else for me, I was working the day job. Uh and I never thought that, that there was a way out of that day job where I could have complete freedom over my time until this goal setting process happened in real estate presented itself. And and so I'm not saying real estate has to be your avenue to get to whatever it is you're wanting, it may not even be retiring, but here's the thing and I'm talking a lot, but I think it's 74 75% of americans are unhappy at their job and so you guys, I'll let you guys opine on why so many people are unhappy at the thing they do most in life, There's a lot to unpack there, but I got to start with Opine, sorry, should I use a different word, what's your opinion? Um you know, there's a lot in there and I think we've heard it put a lot of ways, you know, the, the fancy gurus in the seminar say, find your, why I find, find your who, you know, there's all these fancy things, but practically speaking for me, it's, it's kind of like a super long term goal, you know, what do I want to accomplish in my life, my working life, what do I want retirement to look like kind of super long term And then from what I'm hearing, it sounds like you're breaking that down, it's okay, you know, by 10 years, I should relatively be at this level if I'm on track and then you have these kind of spokes off the wheel, it seems like, okay, this supports my long term life vision, that's a good goal, that gets me to where I'm going.

So it seems like you're saying they're all kind of tying in, but we need to start with the big picture here. We need to know what we're working towards. I think the specifically for your questions as to why people are unhappy with their jobs. I think people um they know they need to make money, they take, you know, the first thing that comes along or, or maybe they only have two or three opportunities, they take it and they're thinking, okay, I'm gonna do this for a little while and then, but I'm gonna keep looking, you know, I want, I want to do something else later on, but they just kind of fall into that trap of being comfortable. Uh now they have a bunch of bills, they're probably living paycheck to paycheck, which is very common and they, You know, they wake up and you know, 20 years later they're in some job or 10 years later than some job that they don't really enjoy. No, I think you hit on the head because they didn't have goals that they were, that were defining their life and they decided their actions. Yeah, they end up and so did I, like I graduated college with an engineering degree and I didn't really have a purpose other than that, like I was just like, okay, I have this degree, let's go get a job that pays me money and and that's what I did.

I interviewed with a few different companies. They, I got two or three offers and I blindly picked one, that's that's exactly what, it's almost like you went into uncharted territory, past your goal. Your goal at that time was probably graduate college and get an engineering degree right? Like, okay, don't get kicked out of school. Don't flunk out. Don't waste all this opportunity, get your degree. And then I was like, okay, I'm here now. What? And make maybe we didn't set that Broadvision enough. So it's, you know, you just go get a job, you go get some cash flow, we all want cash flow. I mean, it's it's natural, you have to have it to feed yourself and drive a car. And, and the job is the easiest first thing to get. Yeah. Most people that don't have a goal besides, let's say get a job. And so were graduate college. Yeah, they've got all this disposable income, but no purpose for it. And so they end up spending it on anything and everything that they need and want, because there's no purpose for the savings. There's no goal amount for the percentage of savings. You know, there's no end goal for the savings, like, oh, I'm gonna save, I'm 23 I'm gonna say until I'm 65. That isn't meaningful for people, there's no use for that money.

There's no real purpose and I can always save more later. Once again, it's about, they're just kind of meandering. Well, you know what their goal is. I want a new car. That's that's, that's their goal and it just kind of in the back of the head. And then when the money comes along, that's, that's what they do with it Well. And kind of going back to the beginning and my point about the personal goal, I had, me and my wife had a goal to invest a certain amount of money last year and it's because we sat down and create a long term goal. How much money and cash flow do we want in retirement? What is that number? What return are we able to earn? And then we discounted that back to how much we need to invest, earning that to get this amount of money in four years. And that's a really a good example of, of a, of a goal that you thought out, you were very specific about it. Um, you, you have a defined purpose for it. And so yeah, that's, that's really good. I think that's when you set a goal, I think that's what you need to do. You gotta be really specific, it's gotta be measurable. And I think that's the next, I think that's the next point is it's got to be ultra specific. I'm going to, you know, if it's fitness, I'm going to work out at least three, three times a week for at least 60 minutes.

One of those workouts will be outside, I'm going to gain this much weight by the end of March, I'm gonna lose this much weight by the end of March, I'm going to start, you know, and by the end of the year I'm going to look or feel or weigh or measure this amount and and then you can break that up. You say, okay, if I need to lose or gain £10 for me, it's gaining. I've always had a problem gaining weight. A lot of people can't relate with that, but a lot of people can. Um so for me it was always man, how much weight can I gain? If I wanted to gain £30, you need to break that up. That's really hard to do. Yeah, it needs, at the same time it needs to be attainable right? You can't, I don't feel like you ought to go in and say, okay, I'm gonna lose £100 this year, you know, maybe it's 20 this year and 20 the next year or something like that. It also needs to be attainable. So you feel like you, you know, you were successful but our subconscious is going to make us right and it's going to make us comfortable. So if you put, I want to work out more, you're gonna sit your lazy tail end on the couch and watch netflix and say, man, I worked out sunday I did work out more, I I achieved my goal, right?

Your subconscious wants to be right, you're gonna justify what you did. So just write a harder, more specific goal, so you can't negotiate your way out of him, in my opinion, that's a really good point. And we're gonna talk about that is as you go to write these goals uh in in various areas of your life, or even when you go to idealize your perfect life or ideal life, you're gonna have some self conscious sabotage going on. And it's this weird thing that happens that that says, you know, it's deep within you, and there's a self limiting beliefs. And so when you go to to write that big, audacious goal, it's gonna be like, yeah, that that may be too big, you know, and then you're also gonna say, well, I don't, for some reason, there's gonna be the self conscious block against writing it down because once you write it down, it's kind of like, well I committed to that and I don't, I don't know if I want to sign up for the work that's gonna go in. Uh and so maybe you guys can spot these uh, these sabotages when you're going through the exercise, everything is going to try to keep you from deciding on your purpose and for writing these goals down and committing to them because then you're on the hook and it sucks when we fail.

It sucks when we set a goal and then we don't do it and then we're like, man, I failed, again, you know, I told all these people I was going to get in shape this year, I didn't, I didn't do it. And so then, and so that's what we do more to avoid pain than we do to gain pleasure. We've talked about that. And so guys, we want to encourage you guys girls, we wanna encourage you, you've got to battle, you gotta battle that self conscious sabotage and you have to allow yourself to commit. You know, it's okay if you fail and I want you guys to hear that, it's okay if you fail right? The goals down, not writing them down is real failure. That's gonna hurt. That's gonna end up impacting your life long term, right? But allowing yourself to write them and saying effort, I don't care if I fail, I'll write it down again next month and I'll do something to get me closer and I don't care if I fail this year, I'll write it again next year. You have to keep getting after it, right? You're a pit bull, nothing's gonna stop. You don't give up on them. All right? Where we at? Well, so let me give you an example of of, You know, I said, I'm not very good about writing them down and and setting personal goals.

I did write one down quite a few years ago and and that was that I wanted passive income and another part of the goal was I wanted to replace my salary, so I had a specific amount. But what I didn't know what I didn't know was that it was only $20,000 a year. So it's pretty easy. Um but know what I didn't write down was how I was gonna do it because I really had no idea. And so um but once I wrote a lot, a lot of people can relate with that. Yeah you have a goal but maybe you don't know how to do it but I'll tell you what happened was because I set the goal because I wrote it down because it was very specific opportunities started to come uh my way now if I hadn't had that goal I hadn't written it down, I wasn't concentrating on it, these opportunities might have just gone on by and I didn't even realize they were an opportunity. So you know the first opportunity really was Joel coming along and and talking about real estate, give Joel more credit. Yeah. Sorry? Um And so that really got me thinking I was like well maybe this is maybe this is an opportunity and so I I invested with Joel and it it kind of worked and so I did more but on top of that other business opportunities came my way as well because I was still thinking about more passive income and again I was having lunch with this guy and I remember thinking if I didn't set this goal if I hadn't set this goal a few years ago, this, this lunch right now wouldn't have ended up with another business opportunity that I'm now invested in, I would have just talked to him, I said, oh yeah, well maybe you can do this or that, but it because it was my goal, it, we started talking, we actually started a business together.

So I think the goal setting, I guess I'm just trying to give an example of how it really worked for me. So I was just gonna say, I, I love that, but let's let's massage this into real estate a little bit more and, and just the fact of people wanting to get involved in real estate. I think a lot of people listen to the podcast saying I wanted to get into investing commercial real estate, how to, I do that. And I think for for me when we started criterion, it was let's get a deal, you know, so we immediately started meeting with investors who would be interested in commercial real estate. We immediately started calling banks, Hey, if I found a deal, would you give me money just doing, doing the work, putting myself in the situation, finding the growth inhibitors or finding the problems, I think a lot of the times we look up at this mount Everest of our goal and think how are we going to do it? So we don't even start when in reality, if you just started walking forward, you'll probably figure it out, you'll probably figure out what the obstacles are and you can figure out how to get over them when, when you get there. So I think just getting in the room right, like signing up for the the email list, I I literally have like 100 deals for sale, get emailed to my box, everything, I'm sure you guys do the exact same way.

Get those emails sent into your box, look at them, send it to a bank, talk to an investor and then like you said, these opportunities will start presenting itself and it's only a matter of time before it comes to fruition and then your next goals, man, if I could do two of these this year, oh my gosh, it would be amazing. And then before you know it you're you're setting these ridiculously high goals because it's a snowball effect. It compounds like anything, not not only the returns but your, your effort and your energy and you start to surround yourself with people doing similar things and the opportunities become more and more and more well, once you start achieving some goals, the confidence that you can achieve new goals just grows exponentially so good point brian, you know, just as we talked about, we can have a self conscious, sabotage our self conscious, can also be a helper and a promoter of our goals because once you write them down, you may not even know exactly how you're going to achieve it. But your subconscious goes to work, Your mind goes to work.

It's a weird thing. But like you say, you start seeing opportunities because you wrote this goal down your your brain knows okay, I want to be looking for this, I want this, and so now that you've allowed yourself to say, I want this, it's a goal of mine, I'm gonna make it happen. You'll be surprised how you'll, the ways in which you can achieve that goal will start to materialize. You know, the more you focus on it, the faster the resources will come into your life and you'll be able to move, move towards progress on that goal sample just to envision in your head is everyone's bought a car, right? You go car shopping, you start looking at cars, you narrow it down. A few models, you start seeing those things on the highway and around town all the time. You start looking at ford F one fifties and then you're like, man, there's a lot, there's a lot of ford F one fifties. Any model of car, you know, like a five series BMW, if you start looking at five series BMWs, you're gonna see half a dozen a day that you wouldn't have even seen the same thing with house searching. If you and your partner are going house searching, you're looking at buying your first house, you're gonna drive through a neighborhood and just be like, oh, that's cute.

Oh, I love the way that's laid out, oh I love this kitchen, you're just gonna be thinking about it, you're just going to be in that realm. I had this conversation with my wife the other day about furniture. I'm like, babe, like I bought this house six months ago, we need some furniture. It's it's time we have to buy a dining room table, the room can't sit empty forever. And last night she was literally just scrolling and scrolling scrolling and she has no idea because she's worried about the decor of the room. Like babe, all of that comes after you pick out the table. Like you gotta start somewhere, you just, at the end of the day, you just gotta buy a table at the end of the day, you just have to jump in the wall and and and start, okay, so we've got them writing these goals down and we've tried to convince them that they're gonna ignore failure and self sabotage. They're gonna allow their self conscious uh to work for them. But the reality is, is it's gonna take a lot of hard work, you're gonna have to work your ass off. And and so, but here's the thing, here's the great thing about working your ass off towards a purpose or a vision is that job you don't like that's work, uh you know, doing stuff around the house might be work for you.

But once you find your vision and once you have a purpose and you can see every action you're taking is gonna move you toward that thing at which you've set your sights on. That's less work than than these other things. And so you will enjoy the journey more if you'll get your goals down because then every action you take that that you may in your mind at the beginning think is miserable. Now you can see as this is a means to obtain what I want in this life. It's kind of like working out. I mean working out for at least muscle definition, you have to go through some pain at the end of those sets, maybe another set. But for me I don't, I don't really care about that part because I know that pain equals, you know, progress towards my goal or my ideal, you know, physique or staying in shape or whatever it is, No pain, no gain, you know, Brandon hadn't done a lot of that, Maybe we'll get him into it. I'm getting, I'm getting some gray hair man, I'm going through mental pain. So uh you know, we want to encourage you to enjoy the journey, but in reality you will enjoy some of these activities for me when I first started and I got a hold of what was now my life purpose was to retire early, retire at 35 or whatever it was.

Be able to quit the day job and have time freedom. I just kept visualizing not having to go to the office visualizing vacation until I hate it. These were the things that got me so excited. So when I was driving neighborhoods looking for houses, when I was combing the, the ads in the newspaper looking for deals like for me, I was excited. I couldn't wait to get into my car and listen to more education on real estate and finance and you know, personal financial statements and re reading business plans. Like for me, I was so excited to do that. But most people are like, oh I that sucks, I wanna listen to music for me. No, there was nothing else I would have rather done. I was so excited at lunch hour. I was so excited for long drives because man, I was learning and you know, you can think about this is that you can't achieve more than you are today. You can't have more than you are today without some increase in your knowledge and experience, otherwise you would have already obtained it. Uh and so then you'll get excited about getting experience. You'll get excited about knowledge, reading education because you know those things you're gonna resolve and you furthering towards your goals.

So I had the last point that I think is really important and I think it's it kind of relates to telling people your goals and not being afraid to to talk about them. I would highly recommend and encourage that you surround yourself with a circle of influence of some people. I'm not saying all of them, I'm just saying if you're around like 79 people, just a couple, you know, like 123 that have achieved some of your goals. Go talk to them about it. Say, hey, I've got this goal to lose weight or start working out. I see your buff like what, what's, what's the gig? How do you wake up at five? I hate my life before 10 a.m. How do you do it? Or you know what, what protein are you on man or something? Or maybe it's, you know, like the pursuit of happiness uh movie. He sees this guy driving this ridiculous car and he goes up to him and he's like bro, what do you do? And he goes up and applies to the job. You need to do that, but do it to somebody who's achieved that or is working towards the common goal, right? Like don't go tell your loser friend who doesn't do anything that you want to go do something crazy because you know what he's gonna say, that's crazy.

You shouldn't do it. Go tell somebody who's gonna say that's awesome. Yeah, I've done that. Oh, I can connect you with the person, right? Like we, we have goals of stuff that we've never done. So we are trying to surround ourselves with people who have done that. We broke into retail development by surrounding ourselves with partners that have done tons of retail development that brought comfort to us and our investors. So don't be afraid to surround yourself with a group of people who accomplish those goals and talk to them about it. Get encouragement, get motivation. Uh, ask them for help. You know, the you're not the first person to set that goal. That's great advice. I want to tell you 11 last thing, because I know one of the big struggles for people is that they don't have time. And and so I just wanna encourage you as we sign off today, we've talked about setting that vision and getting excited about it and all the things that we've discussed today, but at the end of the day, you're gonna say, I don't have time. And the thing is, you absolutely have time for the things that are most important for you. And if you'll examine your day and you'll just set a goal, I always use this to underachieve, you know, what, what could you set aside in a perfect world today without changing your lifestyle, not reducing your netflix binges and time with kids and games and whatever you're doing.

You know, could you give half an hour, you know, could you give an hour? Uh, you can change your life with one hour a day? And the thing is you most likely have three hours a day, easily three hours a day to be reading to be meeting with people to be uh you know, educating yourself on whatever it is, it's gonna help you achieve those goals. That was my big thing is, that's what, that's what I spent. My evenings were not spent at bars when I was in my twenties, You know, or doing any of that stuff. It was just reading books at night and writing notes and getting excited about what this life held for me because before I do nothing about that and I was gonna work till I was 65 and it was a little bit depressing until now I had a goal, I had a vision, I could retire early and I was gonna get it no matter what it took. And so then I was excited every night reading those books, you know, talking to people setting up meetings and uh and I want to encourage you guys to do that to you have enough time. Uh Let's do it anyway, push through february, push through february, You got this, you got this, we'll catch you guys next week on how to invest in commercial real estate