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 in 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, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and you’re investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.

So, hey guys, Josh Cantwell back again. Welcome back to Accelerated Investor. I’m really excited to be with you and we are continuing our series talking about the characteristics of enormously productive people and some of the things that they refuse to do that make them extremely productive. And again, I’ve had the very fortunate opportunity to not only coach successful entrepreneurs, coach successful real estate investors, as well as be coached by enormously productive people and just, you know, be a fly on the wall and listen and observe people in mastermind groups and at live events. And I’ve been able to, you know, be around amazing people like Jack Canfield and Barbara Corcoran and Kevin O’Leary, Kevin Harrington. I’ve shared the stage with all of these amazing people at my events. And you know, I’ve been able to observe all these different groups and notice some of the things that they do, some of the characteristics that they have that make them enormously productive.

And so the second characteristic that I’ve witnessed in these entrepreneurs and visionaries and leaders is that they refuse to become distracted. They refuse to let themselves. They refuse to let their personal lives. They refuse to let their businesses become distracted by outside forces. Now certainly I’m very guilty in my business life over the last 20 years or so, you know, I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. I’ve never had a boss and it’s one of the things I pride myself on is that I’ve actually never had a boss that I reported to, I never worked in a corporate environment. And I’ve only worked for commission I’ve only worked for profits I’ve only worked for, you know, net income in all my different companies in the last 20 or so years. And so I’ve had to force myself to be extremely focused. Because I never had a boss telling me what to do and never had a boss telling me, hey Josh, you got to do this, this, this, and this every single day.

And there was a blessing and a curse to that. But the truth is that super, enormously productive people refuse to become distracted. And so they focus on the few things, the one or two things that can make them and their companies and their businesses extremely productive. And so they’re constantly doing self-analysis. They’re constantly doing self-reflection to say, am I focusing? Am I executing on the things that are most important? Am I focused on the 20% you know, there’s a ton of amazing, amazing books out there and one of my favorites is the book Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy and Brian Talks about in his book the fact that really productive people eat that frog. They look at all the things that they have to do, all the things that they could be doing, you know, the very low productivity actions, the very medium productivity actions and the super high productivity actions.

And they look at all that list and they just refuse to say, look, I have to do everything. I don’t have to do everything. It’s okay if there are things that I need to do that don’t get done. It’s okay if there are things that I need to do that I can just pass off to somebody else, it’s okay if I hire some people or delegate or just flat out don’t do some things because enormously productive people, they look at what’s the 20% what’s the 10% what’s the 15% what’s the 20% in our business, in our company, in my personal life, in my business life, in my own personal brand, what’s the small percentage of the things that I need to do over and over and over and over so that we can be super successful?

It’s the 80% it’s the other stuff. It’s the muck. It’s the stuff that’s out there that’s the stuff that’s distracting. That’s either not important at all or it could be important to other people. It could be important to other people around you, maybe your staff, maybe your spouse, maybe your kids, maybe other business owners. Because when you’re really, really successful, you’re going to have opportunity constantly coming at you and you’ll recognize this as you become a bigger investor, a more successful entrepreneur, that people are going to want more and more of your time and as you have more and more time and you have more demands on your time, it’s much easier to become distracted. And so enormously productive people, they recognize that they’re going to have these distractions. They recognize that these things can come up and they also recognize that they’re going to ignore them.

There’re just some people that are not going to get a call back. There’s some people that are not going to get the feedback that they want. And in order to make that happen that you personally are going to have to focus on the small things. So whether it’s co-writing copy, whether it’s putting together a marketing funnel, whether it’s making offers on real estate deals or apartments, whether it’s raising money, whether it’s hiring your staff, whatever you do, that’s really, really important you need to make sure that you do that all the time.

I had a friend of mine told me years ago that in order to be productive, you need to focus on doing what only you can do. You know, that’s how you can make a lot of money is by being really niche focused on what you are most capable of doing that other people can’t do. So if you’re really great at, you know managing social media or content creation, you’re really amazing at video marketing, you’re really amazing at writing copy. You’re really amazing at managing people then you should do only that and let other people focus on everything else, right?

For me as a CEO, my primary job is to organize everybody else. My primary job is to organize other people so they can be successful. So I find myself asking my staff all the time, what do you need to be successful, right? And that’s my way of asking them, what’s the 20% for you that’s going to get you 80% of your results? What do you need to be successful so that you can stop being distracted, right? So when I talk to my personal executive coordinator, what does she need to be successful? Keep her focused. When I talked to my chief operating officer, Jason, Jason, what do you need to be successful? What do you need to stay focused?

And there’s a lot of stuff that we just can’t get to. If you’re trying to get to everything, you’re being distracted and you’re not going to be able to get everything done. So again, the second characteristic that I’ve witnessed and really, really, really productive salespeople and entrepreneurs and business owners is that they refuse to become distracted, they’re laser focused. One of the actual techniques that I’m going to kind of leave you with this, one of the techniques that I use is on Sunday nights I what’s called post and prioritize.

And what that means is I take everything that’s on my mind and we use a software program called Base Camp, and I basically throw up into Base Camp. I take everything that I need to do and I plow that into Base Camp. So that’s everything that’s going on in the business that’s on my mind. Then I simply take out a notebook, I’ve got this red notebook, it’s all beat up, and I just simply take everything out of the software that I’m responsible for, that I perceive to be very, very, very important. And I take that, I write it on a notebook.

So this becomes my weekly to do list, okay. This often bleeds into two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, because I can’t possibly get everything done in a day or I can’t possibly get everything done in a week. And so this is everything that I need to get in the next week or two or three, just the main big projects that I want to work on. And then finally what I have is I have a second notebook. It’s actually this little black notebook right here that I use. And I take this little notebook, if you’re seeing me on video right now, I take this little black notebook and I write down three things that I want to get done the next day. So I do this on Sunday for Monday, I do it on Monday night for Tuesday, Tuesday night for Wednesday, etc.

And that allows me, when I walk into the office, it allows me to be laser focused for the first half of the day from 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 in the morning until about noon to, for me to just focus on those couple of things. So I’m not distracted. And then in the afternoon is often what I’ll start taking phone calls, meetings, emails, those kinds of things. And so I’m laser focused in the morning. Imagine if you know this, there’s about 250 work days in a year. Imagine if out of those 250 work days, you got three amazingly productive things done in the morning before noon, you’d have 750 things that you would have completed in your business your life, 750 things you have gotten done before noon every day. You’d be so much more productive.

And so if that little hack, if that little thing, that little habit helps you, I hope it does use that in your own life and your own business. And so I appreciate you being here thanks so much for joining me today. The second enormously important thing that very productive people refuse to do, which is to really refuse to become distracted, they focus on the 20%. And so if you enjoyed this episode, I hope you did, definitely join us on nine next characteristics of enormously productive people, which is that they refuse to let negativity drag them down.

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 some five-star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the 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.