Welcome to the Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell. If you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity, and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country, he’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss and his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen and learn and accelerate your business, your life, and you’re investing with the Accelerated Investor Podcast.

Hey guys, welcome back to the Accelerated Investor Podcast. This is Josh Cantwell. I’m really excited to be back with all of you and you know, I’m just wanting to talk you a little bit today about productivity. You know, as I look at my own business and look at some of the amazing, amazing entrepreneurs and coaching students and real estate investors that I’ve had such an amazing pleasure to be around over the last 14 15 years as an entrepreneur. I’ve really been able to observe and see and watch amazing high performers and the things that they’ve done well, the things that they’ve failed at, the things that they tried that worked, that didn’t. And the truth is building a business of any kind is not easy. Building a business is tough, it can be very difficult at times and other times when you have the right staff, the right people, things can seem like they’re really, really, really cooking and going really well. Things are really easy.

The truth is is that doesn’t always last. The good times don’t always last and the tough times don’t always last and neither one of them lasts forever. And so as a CEO, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, my job and your job is to stay level headed and stay, you know even keeled and make really good decisions even when there’s clouds. Even when bad things are happening, even when there’s lots and lots of challenges. And I know that you know, all of my coaching students and guys that I’ve been around and mastermind groups and really high seven and eight figure entrepreneurs, I’ve recognized that there’s a lot of different similar characteristics that these men and women have that make them successful. And I’ll also put this into kind of a nine part series, nine different observations, nine different things that I’ve observed that enormously productive people, I’ve noticed nine things that they absolutely refuse to do.

And those people that are very, very productive if they refuse to do these things. So I’m going to go ahead and describe one of them and give you some comments and ideas and hopefully you can take this back into your own life, your own business, your own sales job, whatever you do, and have this impact you in a positive way. And what I’ve noticed is that not all successful people do the same thing. They’re not always super productive for the same reasons, but there are nine things that they refuse to do. And so the first one that I’ve observed in dozens, if not hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs successful people, is that they refuse to pursue perfection. They refuse to just be absolutely perfect in everything they do.

You see, as I built my companies and built my businesses and observed other entrepreneurs, there’s usually one or two products and services. There’s usually one or two offerings that carry that business and often times that comes up and they try a new product or they try a new funnel or they try a new marketing campaign or a new way to invest in real estate and it’s something that starts to work in their business and it’s not even something in many cases that they tried to do at the beginning it was just an idea it was just a thought it was just something that they thought this would be cool to try. Whether they’re investing in real estate. It was a new way to invest in real estate, maybe apartments or whether it was a new way to find motivated seller leads or if it was a new way to build a funnel for a physical product or an ecommerce business. It often is not something where, you know, 80% 90% of the time a funnel comes up, it gets up and it’s perfect out of the gate.

Normally what we see is an initiative or an offer that’s kind of taken out to the market. It’s good, it’s good enough, we see that it has legs, we see that it’s something that we can add upon, but we don’t pursue perfection out of the gate, okay. The market is going to tell us what the market wants. The market is going to tell us what the price of the offer should be. If they love the product or they love the service or they love your offer on a real estate transaction or you’re raising private capital, the response that you get from your audience, the response that you get from your customer is something that’s going to tell you what they want. So very, very productive people that I’ve been around, they don’t pursue perfection. They refuse to pursue perfection because they know that good is good enough.

They need to get something off the ground that’s good and then see if the market tells them that it has legs, you know, and then they optimize it. Then they say, this is a funnel that’s going to work, or this is an investing strategy that’s going to work. I need to put more dollars, more people, more effort, more of my time into this offering or into this business or into this marketing campaign. And then we’re going to optimize it. We’re going to optimize, we’re going to add upsells. We’re going to add a downsale. We’re going to, you know change slightly the way we communicate with the customer or the audience. We’re going to optimize it and make it better.

But if you think that you’re going to get a business off the ground or raise capital or a new marketing funnel or an ecommerce business, get it off the ground and it’s going to just be a grand slam home run on day one, it’s going to be perfect and you’re going to be just sitting on a gold mine. That is the exact opposite of what most successful people experience. What most successful people experience is they try 10 things, one or two of them works well, it’s good, it’s good enough, and then they optimize it from there.

And so from a personal perspective, I think as entrepreneurs, as CEO’s, as leaders, we need to stop beating ourselves up when things go wrong, we need to tell ourselves, look, we know that things are going to go wrong. We know that we’re going to try things that are mistakes. We’re going to try things that we think the market wants that don’t work. And I tell myself now often I tell my staff, my team look 8 times out of 10, we’re going to try something and it’s not going to work, but we’ve got to follow the metrics. We’ve got to see what the market’s telling us. We’ve got to get feedback. We’ve got to track everything to know like what did work, what are the pieces of this, this opportunity, this offer, this funnel. What are the pieces of this that we can keep, that we can use in a future offering? Or what can we optimize in this that we can make it better? Make Sense?

So successful, enormously successful people refused to pursue perfection. They don’t beat themselves up over mistakes. So if you’re beating yourself up right now because you tried to be a real estate investor, you tried a bunch of different yellow letters or marketing campaigns or cold calling you’ve made offers that didn’t get accepted. Stop beating yourself up, pay attention to what worked. Pay attention to what you think you can take away from that.

Pay attention to what the positives are and tell yourself, being an entrepreneur is not easy, if I can take 10% or 20% of what I did and that’s a positive, focus on that. Focus on the takeaway and say, look, the other 80% that didn’t work, you know that’s okay. That was a learning lesson I learned from that, I didn’t lose from that. I learned from it and I can take that information, use it in the next campaign, use it in the next investment, use it in the next business, and so you know, enormously successful people refuse to pursue perfection. Don’t beat yourself up stop beating yourself up over the mistakes that you made just to learn from those mistakes. Know that nobody’s perfect all right. There’s not some person out there in the world who’s perfect that gets everything right who’s staring at you and saying, oh my God, that person’s a total failure their doing everything wrong.

See, that’s like the, the mindset that oftentimes we have as entrepreneurs is that we look at all the mistakes that we’ve made. We’ve tried to pursue perfection, get everything just right, just perfect and it hasn’t worked. And we think at least sometimes I do. I look at my employees, my team, my staff, my friends, my family. And I think that their all staring at me and saying like, God, why Josh is such an idiot, Josh is such a dumb ass, why did he get this wrong again? And the truth is they’re not saying that at all. Well, some of them might be, but they’re not saying that at all. They’re saying, look, if you could just get a couple of things right and optimize that and then make it better, make it better, make it better. You can have an enormously successful business that’s built on the backs of 90% failure. You know, one of my favorite movies is about Steve Jobs and if you look at all the mistakes he made in starting Apple building Apple, you know, getting basically kicked out of his own company starting Next, starting these other software and computer businesses that failed at the end of the day, they all let him back to coming back to Apple.

They all led them to coming back to his original company and coming back into that business and essentially rescuing Apple from near bankruptcy. So you can take all of the things that he tried in the past and say, well, those were all failures. He got kicked out of his own business. He tried these other software programs, he built computers that didn’t even work. And you can say those are all failures, failures, failures. Or you could say, what most people say about Steve Jobs today is he’s an absolute genius because he got it right. Well, what did he get right? He got certainly the IMAC, right? He got the iPhone right. He got podcasting, right. He got iTunes, right. He got a number of things right. But essentially what he got right was the IMAC when he launched the new IMAC with the colored backs to them and these beautiful new computers. And it was the fastest selling computer ever.

You know, he wasn’t pursuing perfection. He was pursuing a product and a service that his audience, his market wanted. And then when he hit it, when he struck gold and he knew that he had something that was big, then he focused on that optimize it, optimize it, optimize it, optimize it. So stop beating yourself up over this mistakes that you made. Stop telling yourself you have to be perfect. Stop telling yourself that things just need to be just right. Good is good enough, start with that. Find something that’s working. Find that investing strategy that works or a business that works. Listen to what the market is telling you, and then optimize from there, right?

So the first characteristic of enormously productive people, the first thing that they refuse to do is pursue perfection. Thanks for listening to this podcast on the nine things that enormously productive people refuse to do. Characteristic number one is they refuse to pursue perfection. Thanks so much for being here and I’ll be right back with characteristic number two, they refuse to become distracted. Take a listen to that episode next.

You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and The Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there give us a five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his company’s Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.