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, welcome back. Hey, I hope you’re enjoying this podcast, I hope you’re enjoying this interview series. I’m just having a great time putting together this for you and you know if you just get a couple of ideas, a couple of things to take away to add to your business life. As a CEO, as an investor, as a leader, you know, as a father or a mother, as a husband or a wife, I hope this is impacting your life is really why I’m doing this is it allows me to kind of vent and talk and just kind of get my ideas out. And, you know, hopefully when my kids are older, they’ll listen to this stuff and it’ll impact my kid’s lives.
And I hope I could just, you know, share this with you and impact your life in a way that you think, you know I’m more productive. I’m a better entrepreneur. I’m a better investor because of the Accelerated Investor Podcast. And so I really appreciate you being here. And we’re in the middle of our series talking about the 9 things, enormously productive people, the 9 things they refused to do.

 And number three is that they refuse to let negativity drag them down and they refuse to associate with negative people. And so as I looked around and I kind of put this together and was getting my thoughts together, you know, I thought about, you know, some of the really high level real estate investors that I know, I thought about some amazing ECOMM business owners that I know, I thought about guys and some of the mastermind groups that I’ve been a part of and some of the guys that I’ve had the chance to interview for this Accelerated Investor Podcast.

And I don’t know a single one of them, I don’t know a single one of them that’s negative, but I also know that every single one of them experience’s negativity from the outside world. So there’s not really a person, a man, a woman, a business owner that I’ve met that’s successful, that has a six figure income, a seven income or eight figure income that at their core that their negative at their core that they complain at their core, that there, you know, letting challenges get in their way. They refuse to let negativity drag them down. They refuse to associate with negative people.

Now I’m going to tell you in my own life and a number of other entrepreneurs that I’ve observed and I’ve, and I’ve worked with or you know, have gotten coached by or I’ve coached personally, you know, they have, they even have a joke around their own family. Like everyone seems to always have that one family member that’s really negative, that one family member, that man, no matter what you say, no matter how you say it, no matter how great things are, no matter how sunny the sun is, no matter how warm and beautiful and profitable your world is, they always see things in a negative way.
And, you know, I’ve, I’ve said this to my wife and I’ve talked to my own family about it, my own staff. And you know, if you’ve got that one person in your life that’s been a part of your life, maybe if it’s a family member, maybe it’s a friend that you’ve had for ever and you think like, oh my God, Josh, I just, I can’t cut them off, I can’t stop talking to them. Then you have to encapsulate them into a very limited, very limited, limited, limited amount of space in your life.

You know, for family members maybe that’s, you know, that’s what Christmas and Easter is for it, is just seeing them at Christmas and Easter, you know, that’s part of the deal, you know, that gets the time that you’re going to have to spend with them. But the more you can avoid and eliminate negativity or avoid and eliminate negative people, that is going to allow you to have so much more of an abundance mentality. So much more of an opportunity to think about positivity, positivity, positivity, and let that momentum build. You see I think about my own entrepreneurial journey over the last 20 years. You know, I’ve had several things that have gone right and I’ve had several businesses, several relationships that are just an absolute dumpster fire that just didn’t work out at all.
You know, I once years ago I had a very successful real estate coaching and event business and publishing business called Strategic Real Estate Coach. And still have that today and it’s an amazing business. But for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to start a second publishing and coaching business called Net Income Real Estate. I had a friend of mine, his name is Mike McDougal and I’m still friends with Mike today. And Mike and I were, you know, doing a lot of marketing together. We’re making a lot of money generating a lot of leads in our business for coaching. And Mike had an idea that he wanted to create a publishing business and I don’t have any idea why I agreed to this, but I did. And we almost created a competing business. We were publishing other real estate speakers and trainers and we were trying to get them off the ground and teach. And it was a good idea, but it was an absolute dumpster fire.

I just all of a sudden had competing for my time, competing for our money, competing for energy and momentum and our staff is confused. And you know, that negativity that came from that could have easily just cracked or broken the business. But I quickly realized the mistake that I made and I closed that other company down. I basically sold it at, you know, at a 95% discount just to get rid of it. And realized that I just didn’t want to have that. So that was basically a negative experience. You know, my buddy Mike MacDougal is not negative at all and you know, starting the business you always think it’s going to be great. It’s going to be awesome. We’re going to start a new company, but man, it could have turned into an enormously negative situation. And instead of letting the negativity drag me down, I simply solve the problem by selling the business, okay.

You might have a business going on right now. You know, I listened to an amazing interview years ago and I listened to it over and over and over and over and over again. And it was an interview with a guy named Dr. Ned Hallowell. He’s considered by many people to be one of the foremost experts in ADD and ADHD he’s actually a psychologist. He practices out of New York. And I just listen to this one interview and this goes back 10 years. I still listen to this interview today and his books and his trainings, you know, he talks about lilies and leeches and I just thought it was so powerful. I thought I’d share it with you that, you know, he talks about lilies and leeches and leeches being the things in your world that drag you down, leeches being the things that take and sap energy from you.
And there’s, you know, different things we sign up for. I remember my father years ago, you know, I went to a Catholic high school, private Catholic high school called Petawawa Franciscan. And after I graduated, my dad was a successful business owner. He owned an employee benefits business. He had about 40, 50 employees doing millions of dollars a year in revenue. My Dad had a great lifestyle, bought a new condo in Hilton Head, bought a third car, you know, bought a thunderbird and it was just amazing. And I remember my, my dad volunteered to be on the board at Petawawa Franciscan high school.

And he, after about a year of being on the board, he’s, you know, he quit. He basically resigned and he just said, Josh, look I love Petawawa and I love the high school, but it’s just very bureaucratic it’s very institutional. So nothing’s getting done. It was a leech, it was a leech on his time. And so he decided to take that even though it wasn’t really a negative experience, it wasn’t really providing him any positivity either. And so he decided to just get rid of it, cut it off, stop doing it, right. And so I’m sure you’ve signed up for things that you don’t enjoy. I’m sure you have relationships with friends or family that you don’t enjoy. You have maybe a business that you started that you don’t enjoy.

And so the pain of having that is probably not only taking time, taking energy, taking money away from you and your family, but it’s also taking away from your opportunity to build a new business, to have a new career, to have a new sales opportunity, build a new marketing funnel, invest in a new property. It’s taking the momentum, it’s taking your mind, share your, your, the time that you have in your mind is so limited. The amount of time that you can focus on things is so limited. You’ve got to be able to take that negativity and just get rid of it.

So trust me now from experiences that I’ve had sell that business that is not working for you. Cut off that negative relationship. Get rid of it, get rid of the leeches now. Because the most successful people that I’ve been around, the most productive people I’ve been around, they just don’t associate with negativity. They don’t let negativity seep into their mind. And even when their in a negative experience, their in the middle of the muck, their in the middle of the dumpster fire, they think about how do I get out of it? They don’t think about why is this happening to me. They think like what lesson can I take from this and how can I get away from this negative experience as fast as possible?
Because there’s always more upside. So don’t let that negativity bleed out. Don’t let it kind of wind down. Don’t let it slowly bleed out. Just chop it off get rid of it. You’ve got a negative friend, you’ve got, you know, negative people. I mean, my wife, you know, she’s got several people in her life that she’s been around for 20, 25 years and she’s got some people now that she just doesn’t associate with anymore. It’s not like she’s cut them off or ignores them all together, but she doesn’t go out of her way to like set up, you know a time to go out for dinner and drinks anymore with them. She just has slowly allowed that to just move away from her not spend time with them so she can focus on the positive friends the positive experiences that allows.

You guys were only on this earth for a limited amount of time. You might as well have fun you might as well enjoy it. So chop off and get rid of that negativity as fast as possible and you will be more productive. So hope you enjoyed this tiny little glimpse into, you know, the third characteristic of productive people. Again, the first one was that they refused to pursue perfection. The second was they refuse to become distracted. And then the third is they absolutely do not associate with negativity.

And so I hope you enjoy those and if you just catch this episode and you missed the first two, go back and listen to the first two and then we’re going to jump to the fourth characteristic, which is that enormously productive people are absolute decision makers. They refuse to allow others to make decisions for them. They take in good information, but they make the decision and they own it. So we’re going to talk about that next. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, go ahead and jump into the next episode. If you missed the first couple you should go back and listen to those. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode on refusing to let negativity drag you 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.